BUTTERFLY

BUTTERFLY

BUTTerfly

BUTT_erfly

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In my early school years, we only had round tipped plastic safety scissors that could barely cut tissue paper. As a kid, I was terrified at the degree of responsibility and potential to take another kid’s life those scissors represented.

The adults in charge when I was a kid had us convinced that if we ran with scissors in our hands we were going to kill the other children in the vicinity by accident in the most horrifically bloody and violent manner. They even showed us video re-enactments of children getting stabbed in the heart, neck, and eye complete with fake blood gushing out and Bugs Bunny worthy death performances.

A lot of us thought this was some super common way that kids were dying by the millions all across the world.

I have known a ton of people like this. The hardest part of dealing with it is that sometimes they are right. It’s typically a case where they came to the correct conclusion but arrived there by faulty logic and/or false information.

All they will ever recognize is that the were right, doesn’t matter why or how. They never actually learned any lesson, they’ll ignore the myriad other cases where they were absolutely wrong, while they continue to use the same baseless methodology to form future opinions and conclusions.

As a sophisticated man of discriminating taste and impeccable manners, I eat these crazy tall burgers with a knife and fork. Just kidding, I use a knife and fork because they are too tall for my mouth and too messy for my beard.

Caring is sharing and sharing is the root of all love so let’s gather round and give each other hugs and tell each other how nice our hair smells except for the ones of us who are bald your bald skin smells like sun block and sweat.

I guess I’m feeling greenhouse because I’m full of hot air, I can’t spell worth a crap, and I’ve got plans.

Looking at the pixels and layers upon layers of compression artifacts in this photo, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original was created at least 5 - 10 years ago, meaning it would have accurately included all millennials at the time it was made.

This reminds me of the time when I was a kid and me and several of my family members went racing out into the front yard to watch the plane that was doing all kinds of aerial acrobatics over our neighbors’s field dropping whatever chemical or fertilizer was in their tanks that day so we were all basically coated in it by the time they were done and we went back inside. Except I wasn’t a kid when it happened, I was a fully informed adult who should have known better and then a few days later we found out it was some kind of potentially dangerous fungicide. But on the plus side I now have 3 penises.

Some people have all the luck. I have to pay for this type of interview, and this dude is presumably getting it for free.

I should’ve read the comments before I commented with my comment which was basically what you said but less eloquently.

Oh yeah I hate trying to spell this word, too!

Accomamodate is my kryptonite.

I need to bookmark this for when I have time to read it.

Not going to lie, there’s something persuasive, almost like the call of the void, with this for me. There are days when I wish I could just get lost in AI fueled fantasy worlds. I’m not even sure how that would work or what it would look like. I feel like it’s akin to going to church as a kid, when all the other children my age were supposedly talking to Jesus and feeling his presence, but no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t experience any of that. Made me feel like I’m either deficient or they’re delusional. And sometimes, I honestly fully believe it would be better if I could live in some kind of delusion like that where I feel special as though I have a direct line to the divine. If an AI were trying to convince me of some spiritual awakening, I honestly believe I’d just continue seeing through it, knowing that this is just a computer running algorithms and nothing deeper to it than that.

Debbie Downer: These monitor lizards are sizing each other up and are in the midst of their intraspecific threat display. Since neither lizard is particularly larger than the other, a potentially deadly altercation between these individuals could result in life long injuries or even death for the one that loses.

This makes sense and would explain the mainline windows versioning and probably the xbox versioning too!

Microsoft to AI: List all the integers from one to eleven.

AI: 3. 95. 98. 2000. XP. Vista. 7. 8. 10. 11.

So much of social media (and online in general) is just ads in disguise and people shilling products, intentionally or otherwise, and it ultimately spills over into real life conversations. So I agree with you completely.

You might have given a thumbs up to your aunt Gina’s photo of her and her friends at the office party celebrating her promotion. Ad networks see it as you interacting with a photo that contains a bottle of Schmudd soda, even if that’s a detail you didn’t even notice.

You have dinner with your dad that night and the topic of Schmudd comes up due to the latest forced controversy (ermagerd the trans) so naturally when you start seeing Schmudd commercials the next day, you might assume your phone was listening to that conversation. But actually the reason you’re seeing the ads is because of the thumbs up to aunt Gina’s post.

And yes, the tracking and analytics tools find those types of patterns and relationships, and so much more. And they’ve been able to do that for over a decade. No telling how good it’s gotten since I was last working adjacent to that field.

On the other hand, it’s amazingly easy for advertisers to figure out what topics / products you’re talking about without the need for constantly recording via your microphone. In most instances, it doesn’t even really make sense to constantly record audio via the mic to monitor folks, other means are much more cost efficient while being just as effective. That’s not to say that some app isn’t or hasn’t done it, just that historically speaking, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as a lot of people seem to think or imply.

Sometimes with these things, you have to apply Occam’s Razor.

I stayed with some family during the holidays a few years ago and they are conspiracy theory fanatics unfortunately. The type that swear their phones are listening to everything they say. They get ads for things they’ve only ever talked about in person. That sort of thing.

As proof, they pointed out how the prior night the topic of old timey candy from our childhoods came up and all of a sudden they were getting news stories and facebook ads about those liquid filled wax bottle candies. To them, the only plausible explanation is that our phones were listening to us.

Except, as I pointed out, I specifically looked those wax bottle candies up later that night because I was curious if they were still for sale. They live way out in the country and there’s limited cellular data, so basically everybody there that night was using the same wifi connection. Which means, our internet activity is all linked because to the outside world, we’re all on the same network/IP address. Even more curious, though, nobody got ads for any of the other candy that we talked about and which I didn’t specifically look up. So, if our phones were actually recording us and serving up ads based on the things we talked about, then why didn’t we get ads for Blackjack gum, wax lips, and Brach’s? Only the very specific one I happened to search for.

I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can’t feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.

MY new Tesla? Doubt it. Considering I’m unemployed due to this clown administration and I don’t tend to upgrade much of anything, let alone a vehicle, unless/until the old one no longer functions.

It hasn’t been every company I’ve worked for, but this has been a common theme throughout my life…

The more the executives brag about how good the company is doing and about its financial strength, the more likely it is that a serious downturn is on the horizon.

I just personally experienced it again, too. End of 2024, record number of projects awarded. Billions in new government contracts. Hiring frenzy. February 2025. 90% of those contracts cancelled. Mass layoffs.

Prior job: Record sales each year. Fastest growing business in the region in our niche and for our size. Always supposedly on the verge of buying our own office building, a skyscraper no less. Within a year of me leaving, they ran into trouble (not related to my departure in any way and I had no idea there would be such a significant downturn). No layoffs, but conditions got so bad that people left far faster than they could be replaced, until things stabilized at about 1/3 of the peak number of employees.

So all I’m saying is, if your employer is feeding you the story that they’ve had record profits, prepare yourself for the incoming storm.