My favorite is when someone responds with this but any cursory search to “educate yourself” delivers information that overwhelmingly opposes what they were saying.

“Educate yourself (using only fringe websites that I agree with).”

the quality was better

This very much depends on when you’re taking about. Over the air television when I was young was absolutely not better quality than any streaming service now. 480i delivered by an analog interference-prone signal definitely does not compare favourably to streaming.

Doing less work has been the primary motivating factor behind basically all of human progress. The problem is that the savings is lining shareholder pockets instead of reducing employee workload.

I don’t even understand the appeal for either of the involved parties. I don’t want things in or around my asshole, nor do I want any involvement with those of others. For reasons that completely elude me there seems to have been a cultural shift during my life from butt stuff being deviant behavior and fodder for jokes to almost a default expectation.

I don’t actually believe that it is a common expectation in real life dating between actual non-terminally-online people, but it certainly seems to be portrayed as such.

I’m not sure where I argued to the contrary. The ships in Trek with self-destruct capabilities are all military (or pseudo-military) vessels that are explained as literally having a procedure such as you describe.

In the preferred configuration, the starship undergoes rapid vaporization from thermal and mechanical shock caused by a deliberate release of warp engine reactants. Remote computer system decryption algorithms generate one final set of cascade failure commands, and all engine safety interlocks are compromised. Matter from the primary deuterium tankage and the total supply of antimatter from the storage pods on Deck 42 are expelled simultaneously, producing an energy release on the order of 10^15 megajoules.

If the command links to the engine systems are severed, the secondary destruct system is automatically selected. Ordnance packages are located at key locations around the vehicle, including the antimatter storage pods. These are detonated in concert with intentional overloads of all fusion reaction chambers. The release yield of the secondary system is calculated to be 10^9 megajoules. The secondary destruct system becomes the primary system for the Saucer Module in Separated Flight Mode.

short of nuclear

In Star Trek at least, where this trope is probably the most firmly established, the self destruct involves antimatter annihilation, which is arguably in excess of nuclear.

Most of your suggestions require working engines. Shaking the ship apart might make the ship itself unusable but doesn’t do anything about on board equipment or intel. A “scuttling” equivalent needs to work when the ship is mostly, or even completely, non-functional, and needs to either destroy everything aboard or make it not worth the effort of recovery.

The value proposition of satellite radio is so incredibly bad for the overwhelming majority of people I don’t understand how they’re still in business.

Also the quality is awful. If I wanted audible compression artifacts I could dust off my late 90s mp3 collection.

The actual amount of centrifugal force is also tiny. Sure, it’s a relatively fast linear speed compared to something like a merry-go-round, but a merry-go-round’s angular velocity is much higher, and that’s the one you use when calculating the force trying to fling you off.

Also, centripetal force is the inward force observed by an external non-rotating reference frame which deflects motion into a curve. You’ve conflated it with centrifugal force, which is the outward “fictitious” force experienced in a rotating reference frame.

Plenty (maybe even most) of 1st level manages will see and understand, but are still unable or unwilling to push back on unrealistic expectations coming from outside

My manager directly told me after a “meets expectations” annual review that he had originally put “exceeds expectations” but was overridden by someone above him and told he could not give me that evaluation. I then got a less-than-inflation “raise”.

I have adjusted my efforts accordingly.

Has been for years.

Even more ridiculous since a 1.4x performance increase is already incredible news for anyone who makes regular of this.

If someone found a software optimization that improved, say, blender performance by 1.4x people would be shouting praises from the rooftops.

It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever “done correctly” means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.

It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn’t need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it’s not 4:14 in Norwich while it’s 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn’t mean you’re changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.

Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.

I don’t see how dealing with that is any worse than dealing with time zones.

Downside of UTC everywhere: you might have to set your alarm for a different time when you travel.

Upsides: Never need to account for timezones in communication. Never need to change a clock, ever.

They make sense because the numbers won’t be arbitrary.

But they are. There’s no changing that. They’re arbitrary now. They’d be arbitrary if we had UTC everywhere. We’re not out here using sundials to set our clocks, 12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.

Or we’ll realize that the specific numbers are arbitrary and use UTC everywhere.

Fridges actually do rest. They cycle on and off as needed to maintain their desired temperature and on average only spend about 30% to 40% of their time “on”.

Also, this is tangential to the rest of our conversation, but I appreciate the dedication to the comment chain required to actually set up something with similar composition to the red man image and take a picture of it. Even has some black in the image in roughly the same size and area as his sweater. :D

For what it’s worth I agree that AI images will generally have “tells” that give away their nature. It’s just they aren’t quite so straightforward as being able to check that average values are within a range. It would be nice if it were that easy though.

While I do dabble with AI image generation I’m not a lunatic who calls themself an “artist” for doing so, nor do I think being a “prompt engineer” is any kind of expression of creativity or skill. I think the people who do are completely self-deluded.

Odd. I tag your red at 78%. And for what it’s worth this RGB to HSV converter agrees with that number taking your colour hex as C92D20. I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an explanation as to why it might be different.

edit: Ah, I think it’s HSV vs HSL, which I’m just now learning are different things. :D

I’m not sure what you mean by the saturation being around 50% across the board. If I peek the HSB of all of the averages only that first teal-ish one appears to be around the mid point for saturation.