ilya187

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• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Pigeon: Google Translate works remarkably well for languages with lots of example translations available, even totally dissimilar ones like Chinese into English, but it rapidly gets worse with more obscure ones; for example some of the things it does with...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  From the article you linked: That’s because most branches of the military now explicitly prohibit service as an alternative to criminal conviction. "Most"? US has only 6 branches, I wonder which ones DO allow it. I suspect only USMC....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  How is Forge of Empires on advertising and general intrusiveness? On the mobile app, pretty annoying. Browser version, not at all....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Howard -- If you like city-building games with modest amount of (turn-based) fighting and no micromanagement, I very much enjoy "Forge of the Empires". It is browser based, so no installation necessary. Also available on mobile devices, but I prefer...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Not only cruelty is the point, they can pretend to be looking out for the poor people's health. The bill limits SNAP to the same foods purchasable with WIC: https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt476/files/documents/2021-11/wic-approved-foods.pdf Which was designed under assumption that pregnant women and nursing...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Oddly he was also pro-Israeli and anti-Semitic Fairly common in your father's generation. People like him did not actually want Jews dead, just out of sight, and saw giving Jews their own country in some godforsaken desert as a good...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  My wife and I are no strangers to threesomes, both MFM and FMF, we are just too old (and work too much), to have the energy necessary to find compatible individuals. I make no claims about how other couples...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Incidentally, I am rather disappointed that whoever wrote this piece, did not think about sexbots owned by couples. They will allow a couple to explore threesomes without the logistical headaches of actually having a threesome. My wife and I are...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  My favourite short piece about sexbots. Number III is unrealistic. Nobody will refer to their Companion as "it". People already anthropomorphize their robots; everyone I know who owns a Roomba (including me and my wife) refers to them as "she"....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  We're nearly a year into an angry totalitarian Russian invasion of a western(ish) nation and the invasion stalled out badly before it got more than 200km in, and they still haven't gone nuclear. Or chemical. This was the scenario I...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Months later, after she was hired, he told her she was hired because she was the only candidate who didn't run out of the room screaming at that. LOL! In May 1994 I interviewed for a company which was installing...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Some good news for a change: https://gizmodo.com/long-covid-symptoms-fade-within-a-year-study-1849976483...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I am however anticipating both funny and grim stories about ethically challenged scientists raising kids that are a either experimental failures.. or much, much smarter than them. "Starfire" by Charles Sheffield. To call the scientist in question "ethically challenged" is...
• Commented on WTF
  Looks like what Pigeon and I imagined was actually more or less what Gibson intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382590 "It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening...
• Commented on WTF
  And what color is television tuned to a dead channel? That's a very generation-locked question. Quite a bit narrower than a "generation". When I read "Neuromancer" I had no idea the sky in the opening scene was supposed to be...
• Commented on WTF
  To be honest, I completely forgot about Athena. OTOH, nobody aboard a generation ship could be considered "passengers". Among other reasons, passengers are random collection of humans; everyone who leaves Earth on a generation ship will go through a rigorous...
• Commented on WTF
  Did I say anything about AI? I was talking about information-based economy, which is what we have now. Also about the fact that every crewman on a naval ship (with which Heinlein was familiar, being a naval officer) must know...
• Commented on WTF
  On a completely unrelated topic... Is it just me, or did Heinlein usually (always?) vastly overestimated how many uneducated workers the future will need? The backstory of "Orphans in the Sky" is that only a small portion of the people...
• Commented on WTF
  Funny thing, a billionaire; either, he got there through his accumen, in which case he falsifies the economic calculation problem; or he hasn't any special prowess, which quite demysitifies the concept... How exactly does becoming a billionaire through acumen falsify...
• Commented on WTF
  Ironically, if instead of confronting her you went to HR yourself and said she is infringing on your beliefs, that would probably have stopped her....
• Commented on WTF
  By the same argument I am not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. Every instant I die am reborn. I would not go quite that far, but yes, I believe that consciousness is a process, and this process...
• Commented on WTF
  is the flame of the seventh candle the same flame as that of the first? No. Moreover, the flame of the SECOND candle is not the same as that of the first. And even more moreover, the flame of the...
• Commented on WTF
  The deterioration of fuel was the core of John Barnes' excellent Directive 51 trilogy. Highly distilled nightmare fuel, and personally recommended, FWIW. You made me curious, but after reading several reviews on Amazon, I will give Directive 51 a pass....
• Commented on WTF
  Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone who writes apocalyptic fiction just skips over the fact that petrol and diesel both go off? It's not just you. I don't recall the said fact being mentioned, let alone...
• Commented on WTF
  Not on this thread, I take it...
• Commented on WTF
  safe place to sleep and promise of their daughters not being raped... In emotionally charged statements, why is it always daughters who are threatened with rape? Won't anyone think of the mothers? Or wives in general? That's a bit of...
• Commented on WTF
  Let me guess: next on your target list of childhood icons for evisceration is Smurfland... I am confused. What childhood icon did Charlie eviscerate?...
• Commented on WTF
  To give that a modern perspective, the Europe-wide death toll was comparable to what Greece or Poland experienced under the Third Reich, Europe as a whole had an experience not unlike Cambodia's Year Zero genocide Did you mean to say...
• Commented on WTF
  If we're doing one-way forward time travel, I give you...The Schadenfreude Express. Is this an extant book, or something you just made up?...
• Commented on WTF
  Very "Hardy Boys" or "Famous Five" level of not-quite-superheros. I suppose MacGuyver and Indiana Jones are the TV equivalents - people who never panic and always have a sensible response to unimaginable situations... The supply chain wasn't so much any...