I haven’t been to Burger King in years, but I have been feeling the call of the void the past few times I’ve been traveling and needed a place to stop and grab some food.

I stopped eating at “BK” for the better part of a decade after I got terribly sick from eating one of their “Rodeo Burgers”. It was basically the low-end burger option, except they replaced the onion with onion rings and used ketchup-based barbecue for the sauce.

The onion rings must’ve been the previous day’s unsold rejects or something. I remember having the worst heartburn I’ve ever experienced in my life and then feeling so terribly sick for the next 2 days.

I’m 99% sure I have had BK since then, but it was breakfast-only.

Back in the day, it was the only fast food option for onion rings where I was growing up. They sucked compared to the real thing, but despite that they had their appeal. Now my stomach turns just thinking about them.

The sound from my portable bluetooth speaker. But that’s mostly because it’s a shitty speaker and you can barely hear it when it’s sitting 3 feet away let alone when there’s at minimum an ocean between you and it.

In this thread: I’m mostly finding people I feel I need to add to my “no longer like them” list for irreconcilable differences.

I’m having a hard time deciding what qualifies as “HATED” or highly disliked.

A lot of people hated Edge of Tomorrow because Tom Cruise. But I am actually quite fond of the movie.

A lot of people hate Apocolypto, and it’s objectively a terrible movie from a historical as well as moral/ethical perspective, I don’t disagree there. But at the end of the day it is entertaining if you can turn your brain off.

This bitch Patrick McHenry done got bitten by a rabid McFox.

Build them as connectable hexagons. Learn from the insects, they’ve had a half billion years to figure out what shit works and what shit don’t.

I think it’s possible, but it needs to strike lightning to be at the right place and the right time in a proverbial sense, for it to be successful longer term. Everybody’s trying to meet a metric in this world where clicks and views and conversions are easy to measure but something like quality is difficult to define at its best and impossibly subjective at its worst.

I’m not saying it’s completely 100% not possible and has never happened in the history of human technology, but the situation is not as ubiquitous as most people seem to think it is.

Don’t get me wrong, collecting and inferring personal information is happening on an epic and ubiquitous scale these days, but for the most part, it’s not the microphones on your devices that are doing the data collection.

Pretty much all my older relatives are completely convinced their phones are listening to their day to day conversations and serving up ads based on those conversations. One of them came to visit me for a week over the summer. One night we had been talking about having asparagus for dinner, and as evidence that their phone was listening to us, the next day they showed me that their news feed was filled with asparagus recipes. Another night, we were talking about one of their medical conditions and the drugs they were taking, and the next day they showed me that they got notifications about a prescription drug for that condition. On another day, we had been talking about a specific actor’s filmography and all their movies that we liked, the next day their streaming video app was suggesting a bunch of content from that actor.

I can understand why this seemed pretty convincing that our phones were listening to us, but consider the simpler explanation.

I live in a rural area where there’s not good cellular reception, so for the most part, our phones are connected via wifi to the same internet connection. Essentially, every device on the property has the same external IP address. So, when I looked up asparagus recipes on my laptop later that night because I wanted to surprise my relative with that specific dish, and when I Googled the prescription medication the relative was taking to see what the side effects where, and when I looked up that actor on IMBD to see what all movies they’d been in, that pretty much gave all the advertisers all the information they needed to start targeting ads and recommendations to folks sharing the same IP address.

Occam’s Razor being what it is, I assume that’s how things went down versus all our conversations being constantly recorded and uploaded to the net to be interpreted and used for the purposes of serving ads.

Even before current LLM-style AI systems became mainstream, a noticeable portion of the most popular submissions on that and similar/related subs seemed to be “fake” to me. So, I’m not so sure AI alone changed that dynamic that much. One thing that seems to have changed, though, is that people are now more willing to believe a fake post is fake. There was a time when someone would question the authenticity of a submission, and there was a greater than 85% chance someone would call them out by saying “nothing ever happens” or linking to a sub of similar name.

On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people genuinely believe they have are much better at detecting AI generated text than they are. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had people reply to me by saying things like “Nice Chat-GPT you got there” or something along those lines. I mean, the typos alone should be a clue.

I used to live across the street from a park that I jokingly named “The Island of Misfit Squirrels”.

Most of the trail was through wooded areas, so lots of trees and therefore lots of grey squirrels. However, I’d never seen such a dense and high concentration of mutant, diseased, or disabled squirrels. There were squirrels without tails, squirrels with hairless tails, 3 legged squirrels, squirrels missing eyes, albino squirrels, squirrels with curly hair, squirrels with bald heads, squirrels with weird tumors growing out of their backs, squirrels with … well you get the picture. And these were not rare sightings. Pretty much any trip to the park was a guarantee you’d see a misfit squirrel of some sort.

One of the squirrels with a missing eye had become very brave (or very stupid) and wasn’t as afraid of humans as it should be. If you weren’t on it’s good side where it could see you, you could easily get close enough to pet it before it would scamper off. I watched some people throw down some kind of food for it, but they came in from the wrong side and it did not see what they’d left. Another squirrel scampered over and was scarfing down the food before the one-eyed squirrel noticed. Seemed like the moment it realized there was food and it started moving, a hawk just came out of nowhere and snatched it up. Some lady coming the opposite way down the trail also saw this happening and let out a screech like she was being branded by a hot iron, it was so loud and so sudden that it spooked the hawk and it dropped the squirrel. After it landed, it hopped back up almost immediately and ran off to climb a tree up in the woods.

The exact beginning, and therefor the end, of a year are arbitrary. The only thing that’s important is the distance (or time) between the two points.

If I were going to use a dye on my skin for something like this, I would first test it out on a small patch of skin some place where nobody’s ever going to see it, like on my penis.