Ephera

Well, even before those, there were machines which wouldn’t spin the can. It would just conveyor-belt it under the sensor, not find a barcode and then conveyor-belt it back out, until you turned it the right way around…

These machines used to require you to put the barcode into the right position. Maybe they’re still used to those machines and therefore look for the barcode on each container?

Yeah, it’s usually used by somewhat kooky folks, who think gay pride is a political opinion and somehow at odds with their own existence. The kind of people where you’re also really not sure how secure they really are in their straightness and them overcompensating does not help with that at all.

I imagine, it has also manifested in our culture for women to exert an abundance of caution and to try to gauge reactions as long as possible, because playing it entirely open can lead to the man developing feelings, and if you then have to break things off, it can get ugly. Some men, even if it is just a tiny fraction, may then turn to violence and rape. In particular, the men may “blame” you for their feelings and they might feel “”“justified”“” in raping you, because you did tell them that you find them attractive. No, none of this makes sense and I’d need to order another bucket of quotation marks, if I wanted to try to continue making sense of it, which I don’t, so let’s not do that. Yes, the same can happen with the genders reversed, but typically the men are physically stronger, which is why this power dynamic made it into our culture, at least according to my pet theory here.

Yeah, this should be equivalent to interpolation search, which has an average performance of O(log(log(n))). It helps that the months are separately indexed, so instead of a search on 365 input elements, you can do two searches with much lower input size, i.e. 12 and 31. But yeah, you’re still in the larger O(log(log(n))) category with that.

Ooh, in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, when trying to enter the ability menu, it may tell you straight-up: Thanks, game. Rub it in, why don’t you? 🥹

To give a quick highlight, because this case is often politicized and misrepresented: The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck (1912–2004), a 79-year-old woman, purchased hot coffee from a McDonald’s restaurant, accidentally spilled it in her lap, and suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment. […] Liebeck’s attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald’s coffee was defective, and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment. So, the lawsuit never demanded McDonald’s to put a warning that you’re not supposed to spill hot coffee on yourself. It argued that it’s an unnecessary safety hazard, because the coffee was served at hazardous temperatures. No matter how many warnings you put down, it can happen that someone spills coffee on themselves and they shouldn’t need to be hospitalized from that.

I find it annoying, because the hype means that if you’re not building a solution that involves AI in some way, you practically can’t get funding. Many vital projects are being cancelled due to a lack of funding and tons of bullshit projects get spun up, where they just slap AI onto a problem for which the current generation of AI is entirely ill-suited. Basically, if you don’t care for building useful stuff, if you’re an opportunistic scammer, then the hype is fucking excellent. If you do care, then prepare for pain.