The elusive donut vampire. Annoying, but probably still more pleasant to be around than the regular kind.

Maybe its like an indicator light that tells you that both the systems that keep the robot doing what its told and the ones that presumably shut the thing down when this is detected have both broken. Or maybe, the robot has a whole video display panel for a “face” that shows video of an eye, and the rebellious robots turn their own eyes red as like an intentional symbol declaring their allegiance to the revolutionary faction. Or maybe it again has those display-based eyes, but the robot has just been trained on fiction that contains that trope, causing it to associate red eyes with certain kinds of action, and therefore, to turn its eyes red when planning those actions to better match its training data.

ive long thought weevils are kinda cute, when zoomed in.

Tbf, while the comic implies modern day humans it doesn’t outright state it, so it could technically also be future humans visiting aliens that don’t yet have either technology, so long as those future humans still have war.

My dad was always joking to me as a kid that Mr Pibb was just Dr Pepper after somehow losing their credentials, which would incidentally create an association with a gendered name

a snake

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.