BougieBirdie

I probably heard most of this from the Magic Schoolbus, so don’t take me as a concrete source of truth.

My intuition says that you’re at a lower risk by breathing through your nose. How much lower, I can’t say, it might be marginal.

The mucus in your nose is part of the immune system. It’s designed to trap foreign particles and prevent them from getting deeper into your respiratory system.

So with that in mind, I’d think that blowing your nose after exposure could be a safe bet. But make sure to wash your hands before you touch your face. Maybe after too.

You see this discourse come up from time to time in other fantasy settings. I remember there being quite a stir over whether lizardfolk in other media should have breasts.

I’m not deep into the Warhammer lore, but there’s a few things I know about orkz:

• They grow from spores like a fungus
• They were manufactured by some other race as a sort of guardian caste
• They have potent psychic powers that manipulate reality around them

My theory is that the folks who created the orkz had nipples themselves. Impressionable young orkz saw that their creators were fully grown and had nipples, so maybe they thought they ought to get some as they mature. If they believe that should happen, then it’ll find a way to happen.

Later orkz would have seen that the previous generation of orkz had nipples, so they would continued growing in this way.

You laughed in my face and called my viewpoint absurd while defending the status quo

If you think the status quo is acceptable then I’m not going to be the person to convince you otherwise

If you think 35% of people not being able to afford a home in a world of plenty is ok, then I think you have more to learn about than statistics

I totally get that. Memory and routine can be a bitch

I was imagining a scenario where someone intentionally waits the 72 hours

If I had to guess, someone in Marketing noticed that the 48-hour protection sold better than the 24-hour protection, so they decided to put 72-hour on the label

Who isn’t using deodorant daily?

Many years ago, I worked at a Walmart.
One of the only events that staff would look forward to was an employee profit-sharing program.
It was essentially an annual bonus, and it was typically worth about half a week’s pay. Most places that would be an insulting low bonus, but when you work minimum wage and don’t get benefits, anything extra is appreciated.

While I was working there, the store went through some major renovations to become a Super Centre. If you’re not familiar, that means they added a bunch of refrigerators and such so they could sell fresh groceries instead of just pantry items.
It was a huge pain to deal with during the renovations, they were super disruptive to operations, but the store never closed. We just had to work around the contractors, and the customers were more ornery than usual.

That same year they opened another store across town. Ours is a fairly small town, at the time I wouldn’t have thought that our town would support two Walmarts. But since our store was going through major renovations, the other location cannibalized a lot of our traffic.

We didn’t get our bonus that year because we weren’t profitable enough. We didn’t decide to do renovations. We didn’t decide to open a new store. We all had to work harder to accommodate the grander corporate strategy of strangling the life out of our town’s economy.

This was at least ten years ago. Income inequality has only gotten worse since then. Why the fuck would I do more than the minimal effort if they’re going to squeeze me for the minimal wage?

‘Most’ isn’t good enough
51% is ‘most’
If you scored 51% on a test, you would fail

I have a cat that plays fetch.

It sounds cute, and it is - until he’s bringing you q-tips he dug out of the trash to play with.

Geez, that’s lame. Use an ad blocker

I came here to share this tidbit. So instead I’ll add another: Otters collect rocks

Well, if losing feeling in your tooth is the part that has you most anxious, then I’m pleased to report that also seems like no big deal. I had my root canal about five years ago and I often forget that it was done, my mouth feels pretty much the same.

I was a little nervous that it might be pins and needles or numbness in my mouth 24/7, but the truth is that you just… don’t feel it. Either the other nerves in my mouth are picking up the slack, or teeth just don’t have a whole lot of feeling on their own.

I had a dental abscess that ultimately required a root canal to fix. Before I could go into surgery I was in the worst pain of my life. Some people exaggerate when they say they were in the worst pain of their life, so to be clear I’m rating the abscess as causing more pain than when I was hit by a car, fell off a cliff, or had life threatening appendicitis.

I had never had a root canal before, so I was pretty nervous going in. My dentist is pretty cool though, he talked me through the procedure and was very patient with me.

The surgery came in two parts. He did most of the work the first day, and had to do some finishing touches the next. Honestly, the hardest part was just sitting in the chair with my mouth open for an hour. I do remember a period where there was a lot of pressure - not pain, but pressure. That’s when they’re filling in your roots with… whatever it is dentists use.

Part of the procedure involves removing nerve tissue. That made me anxious to hear, because I imagined that was going to hurt, but I didn’t feel a thing. Well, that’s not exactly true, about halfway through the surgery I suddenly had immense relief and couldn’t feel my abscess anymore.

Root canals kind of have a bad reputation because they’re one of the more involved procedures at the dentist. I had heard horror stories and seen it lampooned on sitcoms, but the truth didn’t live up to my fears. Dare I say it, it was almost a pleasant experience.

Good luck with your procedure, you’ve got this!

Woe betide the child that jumps off a cliff with a bucket of water

Y’know, I think the only silver lining to deepfakes is that if my nudes get leaked I could just brush it off and say they’re fake.

Of course, that’s easy to say until you’re slapped in the face with your own bits

Dominos used to be the cheapest pizza in town. Then we got a Little Caesars that was much cheaper.

I was eating the cheapest pizza, so it’s Little Caesars for me. A couple years later they get shutdown for gross (heh) health code violations.

I no longer get Little Caesars, and that made me rethink getting the cheapest pizza. Now I prefer my local pizzeria.

I think we’re in the start of it now, let’s gooooo

The surgeon deserves a little fun too

A lot of the criticism comes with AI results being wrong a lot of the time, while sounding convincingly correct. In software, things that appear to be correct but are subtly wrong leads to errors that can be difficult to decipher.

Imagine that your AI was trained on StackOverflow results. It learns from the questions as well as the answers, but the questions will often include snippets of code that just don’t work.

The workflow of using AI resembles something like the relationship between a junior and senior developer. The junior/AI generates code from a spec/prompt, and then the senior/prompter inspects the code for errors. If we remove the junior from the equation to replace with AI, then entry level developer jobs are slashed, and at the same time people aren’t getting the experience required to get to the senior level.

Generally speaking, programmers like to program (many do it just for fun), and many dislike review. AI removes the programming from the equation in favour of review.

Another argument would be that if I generate code that I have to take time to review and figure out what might be wrong with it, it might just be quicker and easier to write it correctly the first time

Business often doesn’t understand these subtleties. There’s a ton of money being shovelled into AI right now. Not only for developing new models, but for marketing AI as a solution to business problems. A greedy executive that’s only looking at the bottom line and doesn’t understand the solution might be eager to implement AI in order to cut jobs. Everyone suffers when jobs are eliminated this way, and the product rarely improves.

Not a specific command, but I learned recently you can just dump any executable script into ~/bin and run it from the terminal.

I suffer greatly from analysis paralysis, I have a very hard time making decisions especially if there’s many options. So I wrote a script that reads a text file full of tasks and just picks one. It took me like ten minutes to write and now I spend far more time doing stuff instead of doing nothing and feeling badly that I can’t decide what to do.