We had one of these when I briefly worked at a grocery store. Manager told me that it would detect spills and make a sound to alert staff, to reduce the odds of someone slipping and suing. never saw it do this before a customer would report a spill anyway though. Union did put up a bunch of flyers in the break room warning that if told to do some kind of training lesson related the robot, to refuse and call them to report it, never did see that come up or learn what the deal there was either.

So, the term predates Meta the company, it more or less means the web, but interacted with through virtual avatars, generally with the implication that its in vr as well. So, imagine for example that you want to do online shopping, and instead of going to whatever retailers website, you play a vr video game, walk into a “shopping mall” in the game world, and do the online shopping in a way that superficially resembles in person shopping. Or, say you’re talking to friends like one might with discord or similar, instead of using that flat screen app, you’d meet them in that same vr game and talk there, with the added bonus of being able to see their avatar and maybe get a limited amount of body language as well.

Its often come to just refer to Meta’s attempt to build the concept at this point, which as been unpopular for any number of reasons (for one, despite sounding more high tech and “cool”, it can take more time and be less convenient to move around a simulated space than just opening a flat webpage or app would be, and for another, there exist other platforms for the socialization aspect of this, like VRChat, and Meta’s version didn’t have the same degree of customization or that place’s network of existing users, so the people actually in the market for this kind of thing didn’t have a reason to switch).

It should be noted that “independent” isn’t a monolithic position, so it’s probably not possible to create a single party that satisfies them; you’ll have people that find the democrats far too conservative to associate with, people that find the republicans too far left, people that do like one party’s policies but object to the idea of formally identifying with a political party, and people that just ignore politics.

Setting that aside though, while there are technically enough independents to win, it’s a classic collective action problem: if large but not big enough number of independents break off of whichever party they tend to vote for in absence of something more preferable to them, then they end up with the less preferred party to them, which means that creating a third party is worse unless you can get massive buy-in within a single election cycle. This isnt impossible in theory, as you’ve pointed out, but in practice these kind of problems rarely ever are solved this way, because people just don’t tend to all suddenly agree on one course of action like that, and the knowledge that a failed attempt is worse than no attempt is available to everyone.

It’s happened before in US politics a couple times even, but it hasn’t ever fixed the underlying design issue that leads to two parties, the new one just takes over as one of the major two when one of the older ones gets so unpopular as to collapse entirely, and the same forces that lead to the previous party drifting away from the wishes of the majority of the country work upon the new one.

You know, I kinda wonder what niche subcultures from way back when looked like. Sure, they thrive with the internet, but they cant be an entirely new thing surely?

They do have the island of Lesbos I suppose, that has to count for something

As someone from the southern US who moved to New England, can confirm, the tea up here is very hit or miss unless one makes it oneself. I once got some “sweet tea” at a restaurant that tasted spicy instead of sweet somehow, no idea how one messes it up such as to get that to happen. Half the time its been so sour it tastes like they just dumped tea bags in lemonade.

Thought the guy was working for the Romans maybe?

I do watch and enjoy them, it’s just, the reason they’re enjoyable isn’t really the plot. In my view, they’re basically tech-demos for how much you can push cgi tech, with a relatively simple and chiche story to tie it together. They’re very pretty, and enjoyable for that reason, but once the movie is over there’s little to bring them up because they don’t inspire the same interest in the characters or plot or worldbuilding that a lot of other popular media franchises do.

And then of course, given that the coyote is a cartoon character as well, it’ll take them a decade of trying and comically failing to execute him.

Pineapple waits until you actually try to eat it

Ironically, in elementary school I’d constantly be distracted by reading and rereading posters like that around the classroom instead of actually paying attention

Fashionable

The riddle doesn’t say that the Shakira that possess the lying hips must lie herself, so you could just ask her and hope she’s nice enough to be honest about it

I am well aware of those types, they’re the type of person that comes into futurist communities and start frustrating arguments by unironically claiming that chatgpt is already ASI, or crap like that, in my experience.

Space exploration, development, and eventual human settlement has such a high potential future utility that it effectively becomes a moral imperative, therefore, we should give NASA (or a different space agency for those in other countries) many times more funding and resources than they currently have available

For that matter, does it really matter what group he was a part of? Theres a tendency to try to declare anyone that has done anything objectionable as being part of a group one doesnt like, or at the very least not part of one’s ingroup, but that’s a bit pointless.

If a group it large enough its more or less statistically certain that it will contain whatever sort of horrible people you can think of, and this includes things like the group of people with roughly the same political alignment as you. Whatever you support or believe in, if it isnt incredibly niche and rare, there are going to be murders, rapists, bigots, and whoever else is terrible out there who agree with you.

It doesnt make sense to fret over that, or to take the existence of one such guy as an argument that a position must be wrong somehow. If a position inherently requires such things, like the position of someone advocating genocide, or if it inherently increases the risks that excess deaths will happen, like with an anti-vaxxer, one can point those things out and say that the position leads to harmful societal outcomes. But the ideology of an individual murderer is almost irrelevant to if the rest of the holders of that position have a point or not.

If anything, I might expect that if life expectancy increased enough, that in itself might create some pause for authoritarian leaders. Consider that it is rather rare for the dictator type to peacefully retire, they usually either die of some age/disease related cause, or they get overthrown in some way (rebellions, coups etc.) Its probably not possible to entirely eliminate the risk that such a thing will happen, so long as you actually require people to do things somewhere in your system. As such, there should be a theoretical amount of time before which it becomes statistically likely that a leader will be overthrown, and when overthrown, theres a high risk of death, or at least a lot of unpleasantness (imprisonment, exile with loss of quality of life).

What happens if you manage to extend lifespans enough that the average lifespan, especially for someone with excellent health monitoring like a world leader, significantly exceeds the span of time in which it can be expected an overthrow will occur? At that point, anyone that becomes a dictator is essentially signing up for a violent end and a life shorter than it could be if they didnt earn the ire of a country’s population (one that either will have more time to build up resentments if they have access to the tech too, or who will each feel personally doomed to an early death and therefore resentful if they dont).

I dont expect that this kind of thinking would mean no more authoritarians, I suspect greed for power is a bit too strong an impulse for them all to limit themselves in their own long term interest, but it might prevent some of them, and it isnt like not having longer lifespans prevents a new generation of evil world leaders from simply taking the place of the old.

The avatars of Cthulhu or something apparently if the mere sight of their adult form is enough to drive a person to murderous incontinent madness.

Oh I wasn’t trying to say you were disrespecting anyone, I was just idly commenting on how it’s the kind of situation that, since it relates to things other people can be touchy about and because I don’t know how to feel about it, my brain unhelpfuly comes up with plausible (to me) arguments for how all possible feelings I might get disrespect someone, therefore adding to my confusion. That was more thinking out loud on my part as it were.

I remember seeing memes like this a bunch back when I used reddit, and being a bit confused about what to make of them, because on the one hand the showcased feelings are usually quite relatable to me, but on the other I feel pretty confident that I didn’t suffer abuse as a kid and if anything had a pretty good childhood compared to most people I know.

I’ve just ended up with a sort of “constantly worry about everything while not seeing to know how to function in situations that I feel I should know how handle” out of a combination of anxiety disorders and ASD instead, among others. I’m never sure if I should feel lucky to not go through that kind of childhood trauma or unlucky that my brain apparently has ended up functioning in such a manner regardless. Somehow I can think of a way that either one of those feelings could be disrespectful to someone that did go through it all and that just makes my confusion worse.