Ocean Cleanup always felt scammy to me. Just a feeling. The videos they released of the nets dropping tons of plastic trash onto the deck of a ship just seemed off. All of the plastic looked brand new. And knowing that the "great garbage patch" is really just a bunch of microplastics also screamed fake to me.

The great garbage patch was entirely made up, and it was unfortunate more people didn't call them out on it because it ultimately hurt the reputation of anyone working on ocean cleanup. There are certainly issues with garbage in the ocean but the issue is surrounded by mysticism and imagination making it hard to determine what's real and what isn't.

I got my urology referral last week and had an appointment this morning...

It depends on your region, insurance company, and plan.

This was my experience too. GP referred me to a gastroenterologist and the appointment they offered was so soon it was almost inconvenient.

Lucky you. Maybe they had a last-minute cancellation, or you live in an area in which supply of urologists exceeds demand.

Yeah, I think we have a lack in our area. Years ago when I had a kidney stone, the L3 Trauma Center hospital a few minutes from me had to load me up on dilaudid and ship me from their ER across town via ambulance.

Who's gonna tell the doctors and nurses that they get a 50% pay cut?

Cut their pay by 50% and get rid of malpractice lawsuits. Have some other system that doesn't incentivize lawsuits where doctors are still held accountable but I think that's a deal most doctors would take in a heartbeat.

You think they’re getting so much money from out current system that cutting out insurance companies would result in a 50% reduction in their pay? Have you ever looked up the size of the health insurance sector here?

That's literally the premise of the report. The savings comes from getting Medicare's current rate sheet for every patient in the entire market.

You're being dishonest if you claim otherwise. UK brain surgeons get paid less than a Walmart general manager in the United States, let alone a like for like comparison.

Do they need to get a 50% paycut? Dealing with insurance companies takes a ton of time and resources.

Kimi is basically a Chinese nationalist in every sense. Do I trust it to not insert software backdoors?

So far it's completely refusing to discuss Tiananmen square. And oh boy, try asking it if Xi Jinping looks like winnie the pooh.

"This comparison is unfounded and not appropriate. We should maintain respect for all individuals."

I love these stories. The timeline is precious. And the comments from folks saying "gee, you picked the most complicated business entity, joke's on you!"

Just looking at my own state (Michigan) I can form the most "complicated" entity for $60 filing fee. Using a fill-in-the-blank form online. And have it approved the same day for an additional $50. Get an EIN online from the IRS in 10 minutes. Walk to a bank and open an account in about another hour. Annual renewal fee is $20.

In less than a day and for $110, I have a corporation, EIN (federal tax registration number), and bank account. Open for business. An LLC is the same, just a different form filed with the state.

I can then open credit card accounts online in the business name, register for sales tax online (get the license in about a week), and open a stripe account.

Oh, and a businessowners general liability insurance policy is costing me $205 per year. $1 million in liability coverage.

I asked z.ai what z.ai is, and it said "It seems you might be referring to xAI, as "z.ai" isn't a widely known or major AI company or platform at this time."

XP was peak Windows.

I would almost agree XP with SP2 was decent for its time. SP3 introduced more bugs I'm guessing because that was the end of the line for XP. Stability as of XP made sense as well given Microsoft split the developers into common code, desktop and server. Both desktop and server became more stable around that time, relatively speaking. Both borrowed heavily from the VMS code base.

Windows 7 later on in its patch cycle was more stable in my opinion. Each time a version gets stable they make a new version full of new bloat, bugs, stability issues, crap most people did not want or need. Near the end of that versions life cycle it gets more stable and debloat scripts work better, then the cycle repeats and new junk comes out. Stability seems to leap-frog. Win 7 decent, 8 crap, 10 decent, 11 crap. This was a thing long ago with Unix kernel versions. I probably just jinxed it. 12 will probably summon the anti-christ and four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I think XP to a degree was indeed peak Microsoft...in that while yes, XP felt bloated at first, then they streamlined it, and it got better....plus its look and feel felt like such a departure from previous Windows....or maybe because it was so vibrantly colored that i was hypnotized. But, i did enjoy XP....but then my favorite Windows version was version 7....because it felt to me like a grown up, optimized version of XP...Running Win7 made me feel like XP was the fisher price/toy version of a windows operating system, and Win7 was the adult version...of course, "thanks" to Windows Vista, by the time Win7 came out, i had already started using linux distros as my daily drivers...and never looked back since then. So, i guess i have Windows vista to thank for going all in on linux....and maybe Win11 will be that for others? :-)

No. It was frustrating to use and had to be reinstalled every year. Windows 8.1 was good and so was Windows 10 to a degree.

They never solved that problem in Windows. Every Windows older than a year, even the modern ones, get slower.

I haven't reinstalled Windows in years in my PC. The only place I see this issue is in my work laptop, but that also has multiple anti-virus, endpoint detection and other security things hogging memory in the background in the most inefficient way possible.

Wow. I went to law school and was on the law review. That was our precise job for the papers selected for publication. To verify every single citation.

Thanks for sharing that. Interesting how there was a solution to a problem that didn't really exist yet.. I mean, I'm sure it was there for a reason, but I assume it was more things like wrongful attribution, missing commas etc. rather than outright invented quotes to fit a narrative or do you have more background on that?

...at least the mandatory automated checking processes are probably not far off at least for the more reputable journals, but it still makes you wonder how much you can trust the last two years of LLM-enhanced science that is now being quoted in current publications and if those hallucinations can be "reverted" after having been re-quoted. A bit like Wikipedia can be abused to establish facts.