I want a car with a manual transmission and ideally with rear wheel drive, so I’m looking at the Miata and the BRZ/GR86. Even the new Miatas still have real, physical gauges but the BRZ has an LCD display with the tachometer shown graphically but the speed only ever shown with digits, and that can’t be changed unless you buy the 2020 (or older) model which still has physical gauges.

I used to drive a sedan so I’d prefer a newer BRZ (I’m looking at a 2023 one) because the Miata has so little cargo space (the BRZ at least has back seats that fold down) but I’ve been renting a car with a digital display for a week and I still haven’t gotten used to it so I’m worried that I never will.

I don’t mean that the numbers flash when I’m going over the speed limit - I just mean that the value is constantly changing, the changes are abrupt (a big part of the screen updates), and visually the difference between “55” and “75” is no bigger that the difference between “55” and “57”. Actually monitoring my speed feels like having to look at my phone. This is as opposed to just seeing the speedometer needle out of the corner of my eye and knowing how fast I was going and how fast my speed was changing.

Well, criminals generally don’t like law enforcement officers…

Would you say the same thing if you didn’t know that it was AI? I think it actually looks pretty good overall, although some of the changes (like deciding that this character dyes her hair had has undyed roots) are odd.

Edit: It seems to do a better job with the soccer player.

Edit 2: I wonder if it works better with male faces than with female ones. It’s making the woman’s eyes and lips bigger but not the man’s.

But what about the people with strongly felt but incoherent world-views, like the ones who voted for Sanders before voting for Trump? They need memes too!

Netanyahu’s sons did serve in the Israeli military, although how much danger they were actually in is unknown to me, and Netanyahu himself has extensive combat experience.

It’s not just the tree - it’s the whole scene. (Complete with random pumpkins that you wouldn’t ever include unless you were deliberately copying Minecraft.) As I’ve said, I don’t know if that’s illegal but it’s certainly derivative enough that I have no sympathy for it.

That’s not just similar to Minecraft - it’s nearly identical. I’m not sure that the DMCA notice isn’t justified. I don’t know the law well enough to judge where the line between legal and illegal Minecraft clones is.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/bats

I wish it told me what the title of the deleted video was, so that at least I could know what I was missing.

What’s wrong with that? To me, women of some ethnicities are on average significantly more attractive than women of other ethnicities (and the ethnicity I belong to is not the most attractive one) but I don’t think that has any moral implications - it’s no different from the fact that to me, brunette women are on average significantly more attractive than blonde women.

There’s no obligation to have the “type” that you’re most attracted to be the group that you belong to yourself.

I still can’t get over the fact that there’s just no way to prevent Windows 11 home edition from ever rebooting automatically.

I used to work at a company involved in breast cancer screening, and one of the skills I learned on that job was how to say the word “breast” without ever giggling. It was a small startup so we had some interesting people, including a woman who, when discussing how the machine worked, would just grab one of her own breasts through her shirt and start poking it.

I’m really annoyed by this as well, but why do you jump from that to concluding that the government should ban it? I don’t see any reason why the stores should not in principle be allowed to do it.

Clearly he’s out of practice.

I once had a package marked as having arrived despite never moving past the “shipping label printed” stage. But the company did send me a second one, and then a week later the first one arrived too and they told me to keep it.

Not really archaic - if this was valuable stuff washing up on shore, the law would still be relevant.

Members of the British government have been calling for strong efforts to ensure the shipping company and its insurers will pay the costs of the cleanup. Seatrade, which operates the vessel, said its insurers are fully engaged in the process, and in the meantime, volunteers are scouring the beaches, aiding in the cleanup (and possibly taking a few bananas home as a reward).

Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.

I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!

I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.

But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I’m better than most people at geometry. Strange.

Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.

Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman’s voice, but I can’t hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren’t speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying “Clang!”

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)