This scared me for some reason, I think how fast he walked up and sat down near me.

Editing to add a key detail, he sat down close to me

I don’t directly know OP’s age or the man’s age in this case, but I’m giving OP the benefit of the doubt, and from context I’m inferring that the man was probably older than her given that she refers to him as a “man” and it just sounds like she’s relatively younger (especially if this is sort of one of her first experiences with this sort of thing).

The “sat down close to me” also makes it sound like there was sufficient open seating, and the man specifically chose to sit directly next to and close to this girl. I understand that public spaces often have inadequate seating options and seats that are packed too close together for comfort, and that’s a separate problem, but there’s nothing suggesting that’s what actually happened here, and as I said, I am giving OP the benefit of the doubt.

With those contextual details in place, in my world and perspective, I would suggest that the older man approaching the younger girl to talk should probably approach with some caution, not “fast”, and perhaps even ask permission before sitting and trying to strike up a conversation. I don’t think that’s unreasonable or too much to ask. I’m not saying anyone can’t strike up a conversation with anyone they choose to, of any age, but for the people that choose to do so with strangers, they would benefit from having some social awareness if the situation is anything like what I am picturing (unfortunately realistically) in my head.

I’d say that’s a little bit overly dramatic take on what I was trying to say. I understand where you’re coming from, but I wasn’t calling for anyone to read any minds. But a little bit of sensitivity to the facts and statistics is not an unreasonable ask:

Approximately 4.7 million women in Canada — 30% of all women aged 15 and older — have been sexually assaulted outside of an intimate relationship at least once since age 15. [Source: Statistics Canada, 2019]

That’s almost 1/3 of women, that’s a serious statistic, and it means that, as a man, you have a responsibility to approach unfamiliar women with at least a reasonable measure of respect for their safety and comfort. And it doesn’t even account for any potential bias towards exactly the sort of “attractive” women who tend to get approached by men much more frequently than others because they are in fact attractive: they literally attract these sort of situations and you can’t assume it’s because they choose to.

For someone throwing around accusations of being entitled and self-absorbed, you sound very much like you’re in fact the one saying ‘everyone else should cater to me and they are shitty if they don’t do that’.

Depends on the field and how specialized and regulated it is, but in some cases, the answer’s simply “Youtube”. The trick is, even in fields where it works, you still have to pair it with personal practice and experimentation, it’s not a free ride, you still have to do the work. That’s how your brain actually develops the neural connections into skills, and that’s what makes it so different from mere memorization. Until you actually start to do it, you haven’t really learned anything. People have different learning styles, some people really need the structure of formal college education, and some fields are heavily gatekept (sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not) to require that formalized structure for accreditation, but outside those fields, life’s never been better for people who have the skills for self-directed learning. And if you’re not interested in working in those fields, there’s typically (except in a few specific fields) no law saying you can’t still learn all about them from outside the confines of formally accredited institutions.

It is a shame, but it’s not simply individual personal attitudes that’s causing this. People are afraid of strangers. The problem is, there are too many cases where that’s actually justified now.

The bad people have in fact ruined it for everybody. They have made it legitimately dangerous to have this sort of openness and trust in most slices of society, at least for people who look and behave a certain way, or were born certain ways. The problem is, under the influence of traditional media and social media and government and all the other dysfunctional and corrupt systems in our society, we’ve started tolerating the actually bad and dangerous people in society, instead of punishing them. Often we’re actually celebrating them, and in some cases even electing them President. It makes it almost impossible to sustain a functioning society when bad people are allowed to do bad things with impunity or worse, reward for their behavior. This is what’s causing the breakdown of society. Trust is hard to build and easily broken, and now it’s been broken and it seems like fewer and fewer people are interested in trying to rebuild it.

Why the fuck would women trust anyone in this society when allegedly half of the people in the world’s most economically powerful and culturally influential country voted for a party who is now occasionally saying women shouldn’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies or even have the right to vote. These horrifyingly regressive attitudes are not just extremist throwaway comments because they are being paired with actions in the US and around the world, and they have serious consequences.

And yes, I am allowed to bring politics into this, because society is literally made out of politics. That’s what politics is, it’s the primary ingredient for making civilization function and it defines how it functions. Our aversion to discussing contentious “politics” is what has allowed society to decay to the point it has. This is not about being “woke” this is about being intelligent enough to want to live in a civilized society. Civilization requires not just moral boundaries but also the willingness to treat those who push at or exceed those moral boundaries as an existential threat, because they are. If you want your society to be good, you cannot tolerate evil. The boundaries and definitions are not always clear, but we must grapple with them as they stand, not avoid them. Grappling with these issues is the day-to-day work required to make civilization function. It is not a failing that we will always have these issues and always struggle with these issues, but it is a failing if we stop trying to struggle with them, because then we’re no longer keeping society functioning. Politics is life. Life is politics.

It is totally reasonable to react the way you did. You don’t owe it to other people to be comfortable around them. They should be thinking about what they can do to make you comfortable, ideally before they do it, and this guy clearly wasn’t. If it is because of some disability or something that’s totally plausible too, but that’s his problem and his cross to bear, not yours. You weren’t rude or cruel, but you were uncomfortable, and you’re allowed to be. If he is capable of learning from that, maybe he will, and I think it would be a good lesson for him to learn.

You don’t have to feel bad about it, it makes sense that you regret how the interaction turned out after the fact, but that regret comes from the additional information and processing time you had afterwards to think about it. If you want to reconsider that guy as a possibly decent fellow who deserves another chance in retrospect that’s alright, and maybe if you see him again you can extend a little more tolerance for his behavior if you think it’s safe. But it doesn’t mean you were wrong in the first place. In general, you should trust your instincts and listen to them, they’re just trying to keep you safe, and better safe than sorry. You should not have to be scared of a man sitting down next to you, but the way some men act in the world we live in, you have every right to. It’s sad, but it’s realistic, and you are not responsible for solving this problem on society’s behalf. When we’ve built a society where you can have a man sit next to you and feel safe about it, then that’ll be great. But we’re not there yet.

For what it’s worth, a thrust reverser is also a very inefficient deflector of air. It’s better than nothing, and jet engines produce a lot of thrust, so even inefficiently reversed it still provides a significant amount of reverse thrust which happens to be quite useful for slowing down an aircraft when there’s minimal weight-on-wheels or on slippery runways, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of what the engines produce in normal operation for forward flight.

A fan blasting air at a sail is also quite inefficient, but as other comments note, it does technically work. It just works so poorly for the amount of energy you’re putting into the fan that you’d probably be better off rowing or just using the sail properly.

I’m not really a Marxist, but the guy had a pretty serious and valid point when he draws our attention to who owns and controls the means of production, and it really calls into question why we consider that simple fact of ownership and control to be something that has any economic or social value, much less nearly ALL the economic value those means of production actually produce.

I’d argue capitalism has some virtues, but it’s an economic tool, not an economic law. We’re not supposed to be using it blindly everywhere for everything, we’re supposed to be using it thoughtfully and where suitable and appropriate. There is zero thought about it anymore, and that’s a bad thing. There hasn’t been any real serious thought about it at least in the western world for around 80 years. That’s an awful long time for unchecked capitalism to really warp people’s minds.

It is really, really important for us to start to figure this issue out more carefully, if we think that we now might be literally on the verge of automating most of the workforce and actually potentially achieving the life of idle luxury we always dreamed of (for a variety of very real, very significant reasons we’re actually not nearly as close to that as we’d like to imagine, but if that’s what we’re actually planning and attempting to achieve, we need to start planning for it properly.)

When using local models for coding, it frequently edits the same files repeatedly until it’s satisfied with it. But that’s what the prompts built into the coding harnesses tell it to do, in case its first pass doesn’t compile properly or doesn’t satisfy all the necessary functions.

So to answer your question, it depends on what model you’re using, and what instructions you’ve given it, what goal it’s trying to achieve and what guardrails apply to your harness. If your harness does not allow it to edit comments then it won’t. Otherwise, it certainly has the capability to, and if the goal you’ve given it can be achieved by editing a comment, it certainly might. For the purposes that most bots are used for on social media, it doesn’t need to, and it probably won’t. But if someone wants their bot to act human for whatever reason, then they might have it do that occasionally or maybe frequently.

So, it’s a measurement of Gen Z’s heritable environment?

Google has this really deep-rooted problem where they keep accidentally, through no fault or intention of their own, making things people actually like. It’s very upsetting and from all other indications they are doing everything they can to prevent it from ever happening again, and yet it keeps happening. Nobody can explain why. All they can do is immediately cancel the problematic products and services the moment they realize people actually like them.

Well looking through the list of symptoms, it makes you murderous and violent, you never seem to die a natural death, and all you want to do in life is destroy the brains of the woke.

…I guess they’ve already got it.

It’s true, the movie does address this.

No, but it might make you eat somewhat less of everything else, lowering the total glycemic load of your meal. The index just tells you if that food is high in sugars, that hasn’t changed. If you eat less of it, that will help. The olive oil can make up some of the rest of your calorie needs, so you won’t need as much of the high-GI foods.

I guess. In theory.

They invented the guillotine, they know the drill.

I know the kidnapping is implied in forced regime change in this case, but explicitly calling it kidnapping helps clarify the heinousness of the crime. Probably fair to call it psychological torture, too.

I think the Crips would fuck them up too, honestly. The only times they actually seem to have any sort of success is when they go after vulnerable populations like trans people and children of immigrants and pregnant women. Real big tough guys they are. Very scary and intimidating. Watch how much they puff out their chests about it too.

I have never trusted them, I always considered many of Signal’s decisions highly questionable, and I think they are either pressured into them by the US government, cooperating in what they think are limited and carefully-implemented ways while claiming and perhaps even believing they are fighting the good fight, or maybe they are just a psyop honeypot to begin with. I cannot trust them, and if they truly wanted me to, they would not do so many things that require me to trust them.

Well if America doesn’t, I don’t think we’ll still be calling it “America” anymore in a couple of years.

I agree, the extended walk of shame gives everyone in the country more opportunity to throw rotten produce and other biohazards at them before they are consigned to their ultimate fate in the depths.

I’m going to turn this car around right now!