Really haven’t heard it used in these contexts before! Thank you!

On the plus side, it’ll be a while before my brain rewires the context associated with the word, so now I’ll amuse myself imagining every political figure addressed as such wearing Pope hats and stuff.

(yep, still me, this is my second account, trouble getting into the other one, for some reason)

Yep, genuinely only ever heard it when talking in a monarchic context, about kings/queens, Lords/Ladies and such, and in a Church context - as mentioned, when referring to the Pope, and Archbishops and such (remembered this latter part only now that I thought about it again).

Funny, “Excellency” is what feels over the top to me, but may be due to the contexts in which I’ve heard it used - circumstances which have much more pomp and pageantry associated with them.

Anyway, thank you! Learn something new every day!

(yep, still me, this is my second account, trouble getting into the other one, for some reason)

Generally, yes, even during winter for the most part.

I do agree with you that politics have become mostly circus without much bread, but I’d say we should never give up on our gift of making light of the hardships.

I mean, dunk as it may be, it’s a good one. I’d even go as far as calling it a sick burn and a smart jab!

Edit: plus populism is the playing field now, memes and smartass quips are how you win the base over. I’m not saying I agree with this particular way of going about things, but reality is undeniable nonetheless. We’d be wise to master the tools.

Oh, I 100% understand that. Wanted to try handling a tarantula in a German pet shop, nearly fainted (knees got weak the instant I registered her on my skin, and I could tell she was not in any way aggressive…).

On the other hand, I’ve had one of those massive cockroaches sniffing around on my face, and not even a twitch. I seldom understand my brain.

Oh, wow! I’d probably just die if I ever saw a wolf spider in my tub! Like, complete simultaneous organ failure, the energy which is me would just eject from my body.

Lucky for me, I live in Temperate-Continental, so my biggest threat is seeing a Long-Legs dangling down to check up on me while I’m showering!

And I’m serious about this. Maybe it was just me imagining things, but I swear they started inspecting me every now and again. Like, I’d be at my desk playing, and I’d see one rapelling from the ceiling, like 20-30 cm away from me. Seldom has any descended onto the actual desk, though, they’d just hang for a bit, then climb back up. It was strangely comforting, though, it makes them feel a lot more alive and present than the mind would tend to think about an eight-legged thing right out of my nightmares. They really have become my roommates.

She’s the perfect political distraction, a loud moron who spouts some of the vilest and downright stupidest things a human being will ever hear. She deserves to be kept out of politics because she is a moron, her political leanings needn’t even be included in considering her capabilities. Either way, it is a sad time in our history, the proliferation of Right-Wing ideas (and I’m talking about the hateful shit) in general should never have happened again.

Even though I still have arachnophobia, I’ve intentionally lived with spiders for over a decade and I’ve not had issues with mosquitoes even if I left all of my windows open. And my roommates are thriving!

They’re very chill roommates, too! After about 1-2 months of adjusting to living together in my old apartment, they stopped spinning webs in the areas which I used frequently and focused on the zones which I left out for them - ceiling corners, gaps between walls and furniture, etc. I did occasionally clean up their old webs every now and again (while taking great care not to bother the spiders themselves) because they also gathered a lot of dust. But they’d replace the old webbing in a matter of days.

And they never developed overpopulation issues, even though I did see them producing egg sacks regularly. I was expecting to drown in spiders by the end of the first year of trying this arrangement, but I never counted more than 15-20 spiders apartment-wide.

Bhah! Good.

You’ve highlighted exactly why I also fundamentally disagree with the current trend of all things AI being for-profit. This should be 100% non-profit and driven purely by scientific goals, in which case using copyrighted data wouldn’t even be an issue in the first place… It’d be like literally giving someone access to a public library.

Edit: but to focus on this specific instance, where we have to deal with the here-and-now, I could see them receiving, say, 60-75% of what they have now, hassle-free. At the very least, and uniformly distributed. Again, AI development isn’t what irks most people, it’s calling plagiarism generators and search engine fuck-ups AI and selling them back to the people who generated the databases - or, worse, working toward replacing those people entirely with LLMs! - they used for those abhorrences.

Train the AI to be factually correct instead and sell it as an easy-to-use knowledge base? Aces! Train the AI to write better code and sell it as an on-board stackoverflow Jr.? Amazing! Even having it as a mini-assistant on your phone so that you have someone to pester you to get the damned laundry out of the washing machine before it starts to stink is a neat thing, but that would require less advertising and shoving down our throats, and more accepting the fact that you can still do that with five taps and a couple of alarm entries.

Edit 2: oh, and another thing which would require a buttload of humility, but would alleviate a lot of tension would be getting it to cite and link to its sources every time! Have it be transformative enough to give you the gist without shifting into plagiarism, then send you to the source for the details!

Sad to see you leave (not really, tho’), love to watch you go!

Edit: I bet if any AI developing company would stop acting and being so damned shady and would just ASK FOR PERMISSION, they’d receive a huge amount of data from all over. There are a lot of people who would like to see AGI become a real thing, but not if it’s being developed by greedy and unscrupulous shitheads. As it stands now, I think the only ones who are actually doing it for the R&D and not as eye-candy to glitz away people’s money for aesthetically believable nonsense are a handful of start-up-likes with (not in a condescending way) kids who’ve yet to have their dreams and idealism trampled.

I honestly don’t understand how these publishers don’t understand that foregoing their tumorous launchers and trackers would lead to a ridiculous amount of good publicity and a much-needed uptick in everyone’s perception of them…

Thank you! This is pure gold!

I had no idea, yet I was correct: this IS hilarious!

As Europeans, we have a duty to learn the Canadian national anthem and sing it to the heavens! Let our collective voice move the continents themselves!

;)

Would be hilarious if they recalled them and superglued buttons over the touchscreen interface.

Why fix the actual socio-economic and political issues which lead to school shootings when you can pull a Big Brother with barely functional AI models!

I’m just hittin’em right outta the park, should’ve worked in Marketing!

YES!!! DO IT!!!

“Go steal data on Mars” went straight into my soul archive!