xkcd-sucks

Marketing, if you don't know the answer it's always marketing

When your OKRs for the past year include "internal adoption of ai tools"

> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.

Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.

It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.

> Wait what? I never heard about this in nearly two decades of working. Is this jurisdiction specific or a general case?

It was a surprise to me too!!! I heard this from my employment attorney in Massachusetts USA.

There is a school of thought that all psychiatric crap can be expressed in terms of disordered synaptic plasticity ... Dementia it falls apart; psychosis it forms and prunes "wrongly", etc.

Unfortunately this view is a little ahead of technical capability to observe and intervene at that level so it's more of a clarifying viewpoint than a predictive tool

Theres a nice and comprehnsive treatment of this topic in https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...

> [A] series ... looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives.

I think the point is people embody or create anxiety, whether or not it is a choice. As an emotion the anxiety is inseparable from the person, a dead person cannot be anxious etc.

No - Performance reviews are important legally, it's the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc.

Also - If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter

> 'Anxious' is more common now

Or 'having anxiety', which diminishes the subject's agency even more

Basically these are the effects of a job in software management, minus the plants

Cheap fun, if you acquired a box of Arduinos from a defunct makerspace or startup in the mid 2010s

Based on the manufacturer's history, nothing good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSK_plc#2010_Pandemrix_connect...

New England is seismically active :) If you're not aware of it, the tremors can feel like a large passing truck or something like that

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.31872...

Sometimes you have to make the Pan hot enough so all the food goes "Tssss!" immediately and loudly when it goes in, and doesn't boil in its own moisture. Doing this appropriately is one thing that separates okay cooks from terrible cooks

My hot take hopeful guess is that heat shock causes upregulation of protein degradation / chaperone activity, thereby disrupting protein aggregation involved in AD, PD, et all. One can hope

It is not technically a television, but a good short throw projector has suited my household's needs perfectly; i.e. gaming and streaming from devices

If "superintelligence" is such a big deal, how is it that e.g. MENSA members haven't taken over the world yet? Is there evidence of the assumed "superintelligence/dominance" equivalence in existing human population data?

It's like kind of challenging to prove this kind of negative, and the supposed proof here comprises no more than pedigreed words on a page, but here consider the section "What constitutes a good model for AD?": https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-01...

Oh also there is the trick where the startup gets sold a little under its strike price and the execs each get signing bonuses > book value of company as sold

All of whom want to trade on expectations of future labor cost reductions which haven't actually happened yet, so take with a grain of salt

There's a lot of researchers in a lot of roles and it turns out finding targets is just one of those roles, the rest focus on optimizing therapies against those targets and they like having well defined targets to work on.

I'm thinking sit down waited upon dinner for two, "second/third tier cities" in Northeast USA mostly - In 2025 you might see $30/head "restaurant week prix fixe" but those places are usually closer to $50/head if there's anything additional to an entree

And yes, we have kind of a restaurant death spiral because it is expensive to eat out.

It's plausible they started with a typical software consultancy and its crappy in house app builder scripts, and reformed it as an AI thing in order to inflate its value?

For many of us in the USA $100 is the price of a meal for 2, no alcohol, at a good but not expensive "fine dining" type restaurant. The e-reader seems like a total steal in that context. (which of course doesn't mean that the pricing of things isn't psychotic)

From my somewhat limited understanding it could mean Anthropic could sue you or try to include you as a defendant because they meaningfully relied on your misrepresentation and were damaged by it, and the XML / framing it as a "jailbreak" shows clear intent to deceive, etc?

Same thing with nips (1oz liquor bottles) which you see everywhere on roadsides in some parts of the US - The product basically exists to make open containers immediately disposable

Tobacco actually has some value: It produces a craving, which can be satisfied temporarily. Being able to fulfill some kind of desire, even a contrived one, is the value. Or rather, the addiction of smoking created a desire that can definitely be satisfied.

Unfortunate name collision with FASTA the bioinformatic sequence file format

> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.

A good metaphor here is apoptosis / programmed cell death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis)