Cybertruck not actually a truck. Musk directs Tesla to rename flagship vehicle “Cyber-not-a-truck.” News at 9:00.

What’s worse is when that asshole tickles my sinus nerves just a little, never actually letting me sneeze, but still being an annoying piece of shit.

Right?!

I’ve dabbled in learning Japanese enough to know that learning a second language as an adult has a way of driving home to you how little I really understand about my own native language. And learning what little I have of a second language definitely has taught me more about English.

Well, the whole saga is longer. We got a bathroom redone and the sink never worked right. It dripped. I took the faucet apart several times trying to fix the drip, but eventually concluded the faucet itself was just cheap crap and couldn’t be repaired.

So I bought a nicer one and replaced the faucet entirely. I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of replacing it ahead of time. Usually the drain and faucet “match”. (As in, the finish of them matches and if the finish on the drain is a different style/color/etc than the faucet, it’ll stand out.) And so they come as a set. But in this case, the drain that was part of the old/cheap faucet a) worked fine and b) was so similar in color/finish/style that you couldn’t tell it didn’t come with the new faucet. So I didn’t end up having to replace the drain, which made the whole process considerably easier.

Oh, I did need to slightly modify the drain closure plunger to fit the old faucet’s drain… lever… thing. Heh…

There was definitely a moment once I’d assembled the whole thing and was turning on the valves under the sink that I was a little worried it’d all explode and soak the whole bathroom. Lol. But everything’s been fine for months now!

As for how long it took, probably three sessions of a couple of hours each to finally convince myself the old faucet was too defective to try to salvage. And then another thirty minutes to find a new faucet on Amazon and another three or so hours to replace faucet. And about the only roadblocks were the time I spent trying to fix the old faucet and the time I spent procrastinating before undertaking the actual replacement. Heh.

Coming out the other side of that experience, I do feel like I understand the sentiment better now that “if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” And I think it largely applies even if you don’t have any particular amount of expertise. Someone who doesn’t have to live with the results may not really care about something like a dripping faucet. If they can check the “replaced the faucet” box, they can say “job’s done”, charge the customer, and be on their merry way. (And I’m not saying I blame them, really.)

(Of course, that only goes so far. I wouldn’t think you ought to DIY things that might be dangerous, for instance.)

I think if someone referred to “the Travises shared given name” without adding the extra “es”, my brain would get stuck on that for a bit. I don’t know that that would be the case for most people or not. But if someone were talking to me about the name shared by multiple people named “Travis”, my brain would churn less, get " stuck" for a shorter time, and be less likely to have to catch back up to the conversation if the extra “es” was included.

Without the extra “es”, it feels like it could get a little “garden-path-y.” Like:

• “The Travis…”
• “The Travis” sounds like a pretty pretentious way to be referred to.
• “…es”
• Possessive. 'k. What does he have?
• “shared given name…”
• Oh, so “The Travis” was magnanimous enough to offer his name for consideration when it came time to decide the name of… maybe one of his relatives’ newborns…?

Right? Not to say I wouldn’t expect to catch on in a couple more words there. And also more realistically, my brain wouldn’t be stuck on this interpretation in the conversation, but more “suspending judgement” and holding both possibilities for interpretations in mind until something resolved the question. But speaking just for myself, I think my brain would have to go through all those machinations if the extra “es” wasn’t there. And that requires more wetware cycles than if the extra “es” wad there. If it was, it’d be unambiguous immediately after the second “es” that “Travis” was both plural and possessive.

(To be fair, after the second “es” another possibility would be that we were talking about multiple groups of people named “Travis”. Chapters of a club only open to people named “Travis” for instance. Kindof like the word “peoples” which is similarly “double-pluralized”. But it seems to me unlikely my brain would jump to that possibility the way it might jump to a possessive form of the title “The Travis.”)

Also, it’s very possible my brain works differently than most. I think I have a pretty “stilted” manner of speech. People occasionally poke gentle fun at me about it. (All in good fun, mind you.) And it’s possible my brain doesn’t process speech quite like most people’s do.

Probably rudimentary plumbing repair? (More specifically, replacing a bathroom sink faucet.) Via Youtube.

There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

“We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!

Brag about being an Arch user (BTW.)

Depending where you are moving to, snow may not be the only sort of inclement winter weather you may have to deal with. For instance, ice may build up on trees, power lines, and/or roads.

If on roads, don’t drive unless you absolutely have to, and if you do, be way more careful than you think you need to be. Look up safety tips for driving in icy conditions before you have to put them into practice.

If you have any trees that might fall on anything of value, kindof watch their condition. If any are splitting down the middle, hire someone to treat them before the winter season to avoid major problems like this.

Or it’s possible you’ll live somewhere ice buildup is unlikely to be an issue. Maybe look into the history of the area or talk to someone who has been there a long time to find out what conditions might be an issue.

Also, the ability to work remotely is kinda nice, I guess. It’s a double-edged sword, though. If you can work remotely, you never get days off due to weather. But if you can’t, you may be pressured to drive into the office when it’s very dangerous.

I mentioned this to my mother just a minute ago. I said I’ve never seen anyone use “are” instead of “our” and she was like “oh god that drives me nuts; I see that all the time!”

Until it makes shit up that the original work never said.

I wonder if when he says “necessary” he’s referring to some longtermism weird BS.

I mean, he’s definitely referring to some weird BS. But I wonder whether specifically it’s longtermism BS.

I don’t know what TTT is, but that reminds me of this story that I just posted in response to another comment.

This reminds me of a game of Bang where I was the manipulative player. It’s a hidden role game, except that the sheriff role is not hidden. The deputy, renegades, outlaws, etc were all hidden roles. The sheriff and deputy win if the outlaws all lose (get shot enough times to be out of the game). The outlaws win if the deputy and sheriff both lose. (I don’t remember specifically the rules of the renegades.) Depending how may players you have, you’ll have different numbers of outlaws and renegades, but there’s always one sheriff and one deputy. But everybody knows how many of each there are even if they don’t know who is what role.

I was an outlaw this game. And I basically just kept telling the sheriff that I was the deputy. One by one, all the other players fell, each at my insistence they’d said something suspicious and had to be an outlaw. (Basically, convincing the sheriff to start shooting a particular player is a death sentence for that player.) When only three players (the sheriff, me (an outlaw), and the deputy) remained I just kept telling the sheriff I was the deputy and trading shots with the real deputy. Eventually, the sheriff sided with me and started shooting the deputy, thinking (at my insistence) he was an outlaw.

When someone dies, they’re allowed to show their role card, so the jig was up when he died. Then it was just a grueling game of the sheriff and I trading shots until one of us was unlucky enough times to take the hit that our health went to zero. I eventually won, but it took forever.

After the deputy died, he admitted that he had suspected something had gone wrong in the shuffling/dealing of role cards and somehow we’d ended up with two deputies. I was apparently that convincing.

That was the day I learned of my talent for manipulation.

I default to ibuprofen. Feels a little more effective to me than acetaminaphen. I’ve never taken aspirin for pain.

And that document was written by a time-traveling Anita Sarkeesian.

The DMCA is such bullshit. I mean, U.S. (and other WIPO countries) copyright law is bullshit in general, but it got 100 times worse when they passed the DMCA.

LLMs in medicine. What could go wrong?

Metro Station - Shake It

Of all the Justice League members you could choose to have the powers of, you chose Aquaman?