Honestly? If it’s what gets people to be fed, I’m okay with doing it because people starving is bad for the economy.
I’d rather we did at least the bare minimum for the right reason, but I’ll accept the wrong reason. At this point, hoping for more than the bare minimum seems unrealistic when we’re most likely to get the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

Short answer: yes.
I’m not anatomically equipped to know from first hand experience so I can only go by what I’ve been told by people who are. Evidently a few showers is enough practice to get to basic, unremarkable discreet standing urination within a short range. Like middle of bathtub to the drain.

I’ve mostly heard of people learning for ease while camping or hiking, but with a little more practice and knowledge that you need a longer fly I can’t imagine it would be anything that would even be noticeable in the restroom.

Assuming you don’t drop your dick on the floor.

It’s really not new age reconning, the old testament literally has angels and other quasi devine entities in it. It’s not that they thought the foreign gods were demons, it’s that they had stories from their own religion that involved other gods.
Previously, it was common for nations and tribes to have their own God that they worshipped.
A segment of the Israelites believed that their national diety was best God, but not only God, because that would be silly. Everyone know El, Ashera, Yahweh and Marduk all exist, but Yahweh is first amongst the pantheon, or that Yahweh was actually the same as the other god but just used a different name for reasons.
When political strife broke out with Babylon that sect gained prominence and shifted towards monotheism as a rejection and denunciation of the Babylonian gods, both as a middle finger to Babylon and as a bolstering of national identity: preserve the culture by saying it’s not just that this is your God, or that’s it’s the best God, but that it’s the only God.
The difficult part is the thousand years of stories and belief making it extremely clear that there are other deities. So those stories warped and recontextualized those gods as evil gods or lesser good gods, errr… Demons and angels. A perfect, all powerful, all knowing god who created everything has special helpers to do things for him and has an adversary who is somehow able to resist him, but is also a companion, or a betrayal. Baal. Or is is baelzebub? Samael? Satan? It’s so tricky to keep track of which came from early Judaism and which is a syncretism from a neighboring religion.

You slightly underestimate how broad the world of the Israelites was. They lived in tribes, but those tribes had a diety different from a neighbor tribe that they still recognized as “them”. Different households would have their own God, and the nation as a whole had a patron God. They lived in areas with enough traffic and people that other gods wasn’t a weird notion. Their interactions with Babylon are a significant recognized historical occurrence, and Babylon had a population of more than 200,000 by modern estimates during the relevant time period.

It’s confusing to say that it’s ignoring the social control aspect of religion to recognize that they weren’t monotheistic at the time the ten commandments became part of the religious canon. It took a thousand years for them to switch from a subset of the Canaanite religion to a distinct monotheistic one.
The purpose wasn’t to stop people from making their own gods, it was to stop people from saying any of them were better than Yahweh. It is not a subtle set of rules.

It’s a coherent argument built on the flawed premise that the interpretation of the text as applied to modern Judaism is the same as it was applied to the proto-judaism of 3500 years ago. We have ample evidence that it would not have, and that time has changed the interpretation and, in some cases, the actual words, like the written form of Yahweh that would be pronounceable in their language being changed to an honorific and subsequently lost to time.

It’s less to stop worshipping fake gods, or asserting they’re monotheistic, it’s a directive to stop saying any God is “better” than Yahweh. At the start, it was a religion based on worship of Yahweh as the foremost diety, and eventually that started to include taking attributes from the other deity’s in the pantheon, and eventually saying they weren’t really gods, but spirits, demons or angels. Lesser devine entities strictly below Yahweh. Add in a couple centuries of linguistic drift and religious practice and you’ve got yahwehs name being replaced with “the LORD” in many places to avoid invoking the special power of names, and his name becoming your word for deity, making translation an absolute mess.
It’s not linguistic trickery to cast the “no other gods before me” as being a polytheistic belief. At the time it was and they only thought one god was worthy of worship.

Joe Biden was FAR from perfect. But I never once woke up terrified of what fresh Hell was coming next.

Think you might be projecting there bud.

That’s fair, and a good example on the first one.

I don’t really care to quibble on the details too much, but I believe a lot of definitions would distinguish the coercive from the forcible.

In either case, it speaks to the cnc phrase being more apt than otherwise.

I can honestly say the Palestinians I know vastly preferred Biden to Trump.

Neither has done anything to stop Israel, but one didn’t make them fear for their safety in the US for speaking out.

Is it really your belief that Biden did nothing to stop Israel therefore he’s defacto worse than trump, who only did nothing to stop Israel?

It depends on which type of ai upscaling is being used.
Some are basically a neural net that understands how pixelation works with light, shadow, and color gradients and can work really well. They leave the original pixels intact, figure out the best guess for the gaps using traditional methods and then correct the guesses using feedback from the neural net.
Others are way closer to “generate me an image that looks exactly the same as this one but had three times the resolution”. It uses a lot more information about how people look (in photos it was trained on) than just how light and structure interact.

The former is closer to how your brain works. Shadow and makeup can be separated because you (in the squishy level, not consciously) know shadows don’t do that, and the light reflection hints at depth and so on.
The latter is more concerned with fixing “errors”, which might involve changing the original image data if it brings the total error down, or it’ll just make up things that aren’t there because it’s plausible.

Inferring detail tends to look nicer, because it’s using information that’s there to fil the gaps. Generating detail is just smearing in shit that fits and tweaking it until it passes a threshold of acceptability.
The first is more likely to be built into a phone camera to offset a smaller lens. The second is showing up a lot more to “make your pictures look better” by tweaking them to look like photos people like.

Yes, have you?

Joe Biden was FAR from perfect. But I never once woke up terrified of what fresh Hell was coming next.

Nope, this one is real, just weird looking people and poorly upscaled.

News article from 2016: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/01/11/obamacare-repeal-republicans-president-obama-veto-health-column/78597014/

Original image:

Reference portion that was particularly mangled:

Mangled, but still recognizable as just … Funny looking people.

Except for this guy:

He doesn’t seem to have been mangled at all. Just looks real weird.

Extremely clever comeback. Have you considered, however, that I am rubber, and you are glue?

Seriously though. Why do you take “there are some bad things trump is doing that Biden didn’t do” to somehow be an endorsement of the bad things that Biden did do?
One bad thing is better than two. That doesn’t somehow mean you like the one.

I truly doubt your reading comprehension if that’s your takeaway.

Keep on that Trump bandwagon, since you’re evidently a fan of genocide as long as it comes with a side of domestic civil liberties violations.

Did I say that? If two people are allowing a bad thing to happen, and one also does another bad thing, it’s weird to act like acknowledging that difference is an endorsement of the bad thing they’re both doing.

Purely practically, a massive restriction of civil liberties, an atmosphere of fear, impending literal domestic starvation, and rebranding dissent and protests as insurrection isn’t worse than genocide. But it sure as hell kills any remote possibility of Americans doing anything to focus on anyone else’s problems while it’s going on.

… Pretty bad, but not masked agents openly arresting people for looking brown bad?

It’s more blunt, but people who have been raped would point out that there’s a big difference between the sexual nature of consensual non consent, and the objectively violent nature of rape.

It’s less that it’s less honest than that it’s more clear about what it is, and what it isn’t. It’s about what people think rape is about, and not what it actually is: angry, hateful and violent.

The echo chamber part is what gets me. I’ve gotten downvoted and had people argue that I must be pro-ai because I disagreed on details of how AI works, the difference between AI and LLMs, or exactly how we address the issues it’s causing.

I think most of our current generative AI isn’t fit for purpose for most of what people are saying it can do.
I think it’s unfortunate that generative AI has entirely coopeted the term AI, which is a much broader field.
I think labeling LLMs as plagiarism machines and trying to stop them under current copyright law is destined to failure because there isn’t enough difference between what’s clearly acceptable and what people are unhappy about. We need a new, deliberately thought out way of addressing “you can download my stuff and mush it about with a computer if that’s what you need to perceive it as a human. If you’re mushing it about to analyze and make a copy cat, then you can’t have it”. The function of copyright is to promote innovation, and while generative AI isn’t violating our rules for copyright, it’s clearly working contrary to the intent of our current system.

Oh, they definitely could, but they didn’t for this study. The way they said they collected information for this one was more focused on “are people changing movement behavior during COVID” so they just looked at start and stop points, distance and dwell time, anonymized to the county level.

Fir anyone else curious: they used anonymous mobile device location data, so the only know distance traveled and time stayed. They don’t know which specific mode of transportation was used.

Twin Towers wholesale outlet: our prices are coming down fast!

Pearl harbor casual clothing.

Jim crows bar and grill.

Credit where credit is due. 🇨🇦