I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

I feel SO free right now. :P

It sounds like they wanted to run someone but had trouble recruiting a candidate:

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

And later in the article:

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts.

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said.

I think she has to act through the Board of Police Commissioners, and I’m not sure she can fire them before their terms are up. She could definitely threaten to not re-appoint them, but I don’t know how much leverage that really buys her.

Nah man, the older I get the less I trust adults. They let me be one and I’m the biggest fuckup I’ve ever met!

OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.

At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.

My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”

“Where does the money go?” I asked.

“That’s above my pay grade,” he said.

I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.

The problem with “body type” is that it is actually a gender selector too, but they don’t tell you that. If you’re body type 1 NPCs refer to you as she/her, and if you’re body type 2 NPCs refer to you as he/him. They needed to add a separate pronoun option, but didn’t, so right now the body type option is just the gender option but pretending not to be.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Visit Granddad.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

Smoking proves that you officially Don’t Give a Shit about your long-term health, and Not Giving a Shit is the essence of being cool. I mean, I guess for a long time now “cool” has just meant “good,” but the original “cool” aesthetic was all about acting like you were probably going to die young and looking sexy doing it.

Edit: And smoking definitely contributes to the sexy part. Smoldering embers. Oral fixation. Taking a long drag and letting it out slowly. Maybe it’s not for you, but it sure pushes my buttons, and I know it’s not just me.

It’s bizarre to me that Trump, who talks like he has imperial ambitions, is dismantling the services that run the empire. I can’t tell if he’s senile and being completely puppeteered by Musk, or if he’s lucid but just actually has no idea what any of these agencies do and why it’s in his interest as president to keep them working.

Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doeen’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

“Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.

Recently my friend was trying to get me to apply for a junior dev position. “I don’t have the right skills,” I said. “The biggest project I ever coded was a calculator for my Java final, in college, a decade and a half ago.”

It did not occur to me that showing up without the skills and using a LLM to half ass it was an option!

It’s a US label and the percents are % of recommended daily intake. So that’s 3% of your daily recommended carbohydrate intake, 6% of your daily recommended intake of sugar, and 12% of your daily recommended intake of “added” sugar. The recommendation is something like, no more than half of your carbs should come from sugar, and no more than half of those should be added during manufacturing (i.e. most of your sugar intake should be from fresh fruit, etc.). So the numbers do line up.

Right, but… what does it have to do with Jeeps showing in-car advertisements?

I don’t understand how this is related to the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is when you try to suppress unflattering info about yourself, and in the process you call attention to it, so now everyone knows. But we didn’t learn about this through Jeep trying to suppress the info, we just learned about it from people who saw the ads.