The company I currently work at is relocating its HQ to Atlanta GA due to similar incentives. I’m slightly curious just how many millions of dollars in incentives they’re receiving to relocate ~30 employees and hire another 30-60 local employees, because apparently Atlanta outbit Dallas TX on the questionable business incentives

Most hospitals have a charity fund. It is based on my income. If I am broke and make crap wages, my share might be reduced to 0 usd.

Currently working through this with the local hospital and about $8k of various visits over the last 4 years of so while we had some mix of no insurance, garbage insurance and Medicaid (federally funded low income insurance) and it’s literally all being wiped away. The lady who processes the applications explained to me that it’s on a sliding scale, so if you make $1 over the threshhold for 100% waiver, it might be a 95% waiver. Notably some of the debt turned out to be a billing error where they should have billed Medicaid in the first place, but that was one of the smaller bills in the pile of debt

Ah the company that convinced people that adding DRM to coffee was okay because they made it “easier” to make coffee (meanwhile I’ve faught far more with every kurig I’ve encountered than any $5 drip coffee machine I’ve ever encountered)

Good luck ignoring bullshit signs when going through airport security and customs. Let us know how that goes for you

If the store is technically on a highway that can mean it is both unsafe and illegal to walk/bike there (depending on local laws of course)

The fact that stores and schools and other critical public spaces can be located on highways is certainly something that should be talked about more

From my experience this varies wildly regionally. My family in LA will put on shoes as part of getting dressed in the morning, but in Wisconsin you take your shoes off at the door since theres a good chance they’re wet or even muddy depending on the season

Just wait until you start seeing the new combination flags where it’s divided diagnoally and displays two flags communicating opposing and incompatible values. So far I’ve seen American/Israeli, American/Trump and American/Confederate Battle flags. The irony clearly goes so far over their heads, not to mention how these flags technically violate the official rules for flag display

I do think it’s telling that I haven’t seen any American/LGBTQ flags for who the designers of these flags cater to

Are northerners born in fridges?

You might be underestimating how extreme the weather gets in the American North. During the summer it’ll be over 100F heat index for 3-4 months, but then in the winter the wind chill will fall as low as -45 (take your pick on units because that’s a point of parity for Celsius and Fahrenheit) personally I’m uncomfortable once it gets over 70F but even when the temperature plunges into the deep negatives, you just bundle up and limit your time outside and it’s not too bad. It doesn’t feel much colder at -20 than it does at -5, but 90 and 110 degree heat indexes definitely feel significantly different. Climate change destabilizing the polar vortex is clearly making the extreme cold practically an annual occurrence now.

On the subject of Texas, if you were visiting a region with high humidity that may well be why the AC was running so hard. I’m not sure if the mold risk is universal or far lower for a stone structures but high humidity can ruin structures and make you very sick by incubating mold. Also modern structures are designed to be heavily insulated to the point where artificial ventilation is needed to replace stale CO2 rich air, which also means the interior needs to be regulated since it won’t just breath with the outside to correct like older structures, so trapped moisture will remain trapped and fester

Unusually authentic Mexican food. Up here 90% of Mexican places are run by white dudes who make semi-authentic “fusion” dishes that are mainly just spicy. Cross the border and less than 15 minutes in, there is one family-run chain (Rancho Chico, Rancho Grande) with super-cheap 100% authentic foods run and staffed solely by Mexicans. And like, holy shit, that’s good food.

A friend’s boyfriend is a Mexican citizen working on immigrating and he explained it to me once that for non-citizens it’s far easier to start a business than to get a job, so many immigrants end up starting shops or restaurants related to their culture as they slowly work their way through the immigration process. This has led to absolutely amazing Mexican and Latin American cuisine in every corner of the country as well as lots of brilliant ethnic stores specializing in hard to get items for people from that culture. I live in a small town of about 12k and have 1 Mexican store, 1 Mexican ice cream shop and 3 Mexican restaurants! In rural Wisconsin!

Apparently the billboard for Spatial City is real and still standing

Edit: quick Google says my memory of someone’s random factoid from a decade ago is wrong

Seems like legally requiring hybrid work benefits would get us significantly closer to those goals

Makes me want to find an excuse to use the term autoeroticdefenestration: to be sexually aroused by throwing yourself out of windows

I very recently learned that Amour is not universal and I just grew up playing a singular RPG that was developed by a group of British brothers so that forever shaped my expectations for how Armour should be spelled

Ah so that’s why in the Tropico games your assistant was Penultimo! He’s the second to the ultimate leader, El Presidente!

Really the only city building series that correctly identifies who directs the construction and destruction of every visible peice of infrastructure or building. And who randomly arrests or frees people for any reason they like :)

I only know the term from Disc World, is that a real world term or just one of the many whimsical terms Pratchett coined in the books

Short answer: they already are

Slightly longer answer: GPT models like ChatGPT are part of an experiment in “if we train the AI model on shedloads of data does it make a more powerful AI model?” and after OpenAI made such big waves every company is copying them including trying to train models similar to ChatGPT rather than trying to innovate and do more

Even longer answer: There’s tons of different AI models out there for doing tons of different things. Just look at the over 1 million models on Hugging Face (a company which operates as a repository for AI models among other services) and look at all of the different types of models you can filter for on the left.

Training an image generation model on research papers probably would make it a lot worse at generating pictures of cats, but training a model that you want to either generate or process research papers on existing research papers would probably make a very high quality model for either goal.

More to your point, there’s some neat very targeted models with smaller training sets out there like Microsoft’s PHI-3 model which is primarily trained on textbooks

As for saving the world, I’m curious what you mean by that exactly? These generative text models are great at generating text similar to their training data, and summarization models are great at summarizing text. But ultimately AI isn’t going to save the world. Once the current hype cycle dies down AI will be a better known and more widely used technology, but ultimately its just a tool in the toolbox.

I quit coffee earlier this year and traded coffee for water. I now drink about 2 gallons of water a day and my teeth have never looked better

Excel is the backbone of so many businesses though!

The amount of times you hear “OMG why did Microsoft change XYZ” across IT departments everywhere…

I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don’t know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it’s always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on