They did; the Z at the end denotes UTC.

I got tired of it in 2013. While it does work in some places (Android does it reasonably well), I haven’t yet seen a good flat design on the desktop.

Windows 8 and 10 looked garish and hard to read, especially since everything is a rectangle with a one-pixel outline. Is it a button? Is it a text field? Maybe a thick progress bar? Who knows, they all look extremely similar.

While Apple did overdo it in the later big-cat OS X releases, I’ll take a felt-textured widget panel and a calendar bound in leather over an endless sea of hairline rectangles.

Yes, I’ve literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.

We’ve been productively using AI for decades now – just not the AI you think of when you hear the term. Fuzzy logic, expert systems, basic automatic translation… Those are all things that were researched as artificial intelligence. We’ve been using neural nets (aka the current hotness) to recognize hand-written zip codes since the 90s.

Of course that’s an expert definition of artificial intelligence. You might expect something different. But saying that AI isn’t AI unless it’s sentient is like saying that space travel doesn’t count if it doesn’t go faster than light. It’d be cool if we had that but the steps we’re actually taking are significant.

Even if the current wave of AI is massively overhyped, as usual.

Someone ziptied the ring to a 10 mm wrench socket. Wrench sockets have a reputation for inexplicably getting lost, never to be found again.

Oh, I assumed this was during an interview already. If a company sent me that shit prior to an interview I’d tell the headhunter to try again with a better company.

Gender?

Present.

Sex at birth?

No, my first time was well over a decade later.

Are you trans?

Transtabular, from your position.

Are you gay? Bi?

I prefer professionalism to gaiety during interviews. This meeting isn’t over yet.

Ever been depressed?

Not in the button sense, no.

Abuse alcohol? Drugs?

Neither physically nor emotionally. No, thank you, not now.

Ever been arrested?

Have you been?

Ever been in the military?

Even if I was, you’re not getting veteran’s benefits through me.

Well what about your spouse?

Even if they were, you’re not getting veteran’s benefits through them.

Ever work for the government?

Why, are you paying public service rates?

That degree you mentioned, we can’t ask your age but uh, when did you earn that bad boy, huh?

I think it was sometime around when I graduated from college.

There is decent UHT milk but it’s by no means the majority of the market.

And this is the point where I’d step in as a creator and announce that Paul the Protagonist wasn’t in a coma, all of the audience were, and that we’ve hallucinated the entire show.

Just to fuck with people a bit.

I’m still using it. Now, some activity would be very much appreciated. Or, if there is no new development, the source code. But it’s still the app I prefer to use.

You can turn messages into threads so you get something that looks kinda sorta vaguely similar to posts if you squint.

It’s the cover of Action Comics #454. The Silver Age was full of stupid plots like this.

What if the ants are coworkers?

QUERQUE!

LLMs are an instance of AI. There are many. Typically, the newest promising one is what the media will refer to as “AI” because the media don’t do subtlety.

There was a time when expert systems were the one thing the media considered to be AI (and were overhyped to the point of articles wondering if they’d make jobs like general practitioners obsolete). Now it’s generational neural nets. In twenty years it’ll be something else.

A second computer with a password manager, duh. Of course to unlock that you need a third computer…

Ah, good to know. Thanks.

Mind you, recommending a PCIe 4.0 SSD is the one part that makes sense. Right now very few people will gain noticeable benefits from a PCIe 5.0 SSD, AFAIK. The rest though… yikes.

Good idea. Losing them in there would be a hassle.

Pool toy transformation is a whole thing. I don’t quite see the appeal either, although I can see it as a hybrid between latex kink (via the shiny and smooth “skin”) and doll kink (which in turn is related to D/s). It seems to be mostly a furry thing.