palordrolap

Instructions unclear. You have been assigned: ǿ. You now owe a million Danish kroner.

He dies.

That’s an unusual take on it. That would definitely have been recorded somewhere as a miraculous recovery. Usually it’s written that the time travelling assassin fails in such a way that no-one notices, and if they do have some kind of effect, generally ends up being the cause of the history they were taught rather than the changer of it.

If you think about it, that’s following the rule on the footpath that would otherwise be there. That edge would be towards traffic, it’s just reduced to zero width.

There literally-literally is.

And to over-egg that particular pudding point, word doubling might be a common thing in “simpler” languages and, ahem, pooh-poohed in “complex” ones, but that second “literally” restores the original meaning.

For now.

Until some bright spark starts using “literally literally” to mean “figuratively” anyway.

✅ “What did you do that for?”

✅ “Why did you do that?”

🚫 “Why did you do that for?”

…

⁉️ “Wherefore did you that?”

An excellent dude played by George Carlin.

But the internet seems to suggest it’s an AI that first debuted in Amazon’s mobile app. Maybe it’s been released onto the main website or maybe just the main .com or something. (I’m in .co.uk land, and try not to use Amazon unless I absolutely have to.)

From the article I skimmed, there is - or was back in March - no way to save or export conversations had with it, which seems like a red flag to me.

“All you need to do is this thing that I can do and if I can do it, so can anyone else.”

said the paraplegic to the quadriplegic.

Unfortunately there is art to knowing when one should not get in the ditch and try and instead leave it to an expert.

Home electrical is one such murky area, for example. Replacing a bulb? Get in the metaphorical ditch. Installing a fusebox? Call an expert. This much is clear. Replacing a light switch? Ah. Now there’s a problem.

There will be those - I suspect - who believe they are above speaking Russian, because they were “raised speaking the language of the greatest country on Earth”, and they will believe that the Russians will just accept that for the same reasons, because, obviously Russians know that Americans are better than them.

This mindset is very familiar to me. I’m British.

I’d prefer the “ain’t nobody got time for that” woman for Mint (and so speaking about the more hands-on distros), but I can’t say the existing image isn’t accurate.

… not that I can say that it is accurate either. And the demographic in the Threadiverse allegedly has a heavy skew towards that picture, Mint or not, so it might be counterproductive to run a poll here.

They can correlate that information with your other browsing habits and start to form a picture about the sort of person who shares your interests, regardless of how bizarre those might be.

It’s not an exact science because everyone is different, but once they have that picture they can start pushing the buttons of one person like and derive some conclusions about how the rest of that cohort, including you, will react.

They don’t even have to be successful all of the time. Just more than would be expected from random chance.

A stone in the right place can divert the mightiest of rivers.

That won’t provide a future workforce for the rich and/or powerful in an nationalist society though.

Can’t be a shepherd if you don’t have sheep.

This panel has a distinctly UK look about it, and I was already thinking that before I read your confirmation. I think only the UK and Ireland use things that look even remotely like this. The rounded appearance also puts it post-war, pre-1980-something because everything changed to be more flat around that time.

As for its purpose, would a bathroom be at the other side of that wall, by any chance? Or was it at some point in the house’s history? Heated towel rail is a good bet, for example. You don’t want anything vaguely like an outlet in the bathroom (shaver sockets notwithstanding), so wall panels tend to go in a neighbouring hallway or room.

Note that some bathrooms have the light switch on the outside for similar reasons. Others have a pull cord inside the room, which is less able to cause electrocution.

(If you know of a bathroom with a regular light switch inside it, you’ve found a room that was once something other than a bathroom and whoever remodelled didn’t finish the job properly. Or maybe it’s in a very badly built house.)

Best as I can make out, no. Current MRI tech apparently needs temperatures as low as 9 Kelvin and nitrogen freezes solid at 64. Since Kelvin units are an absolute scale, we could say that it needs to be 7 times colder than nitrogen can provide.

What I can’t make out is whether nitrogen is any more dangerous than helium if it gets too warm and explosively decompresses.

Helium does have the advantage that it would escape straight up and through anything even vaguely porous, where nitrogen would just hang around displacing oxygen, causing more of a suffocation risk. How much more, again, I’m not sure.

Not counting novelty balloons, MRI machines are probably the biggest “real world” use. Gotta keep those superconducting magnets superconducting and helium is just the thing. And every time an MRI machine has to be quenched (such as when some idiot leaves something metal too close to it), or decommissioned (which is surprisingly often) all the helium tends to be released because it’s difficult to impossible to collect it.

Not sure if hydrogen could also be used, but in our high-oxygen atmosphere, having that much hydrogen in an enclosed space with spinning, sparking electrical motors is just asking for trouble, especially if the above release protocol has to be used. Fireballs are generally a no-no. Risking one in a hospital is plain insanity.

Most other uses are even more scientific, and helium has a few properties that nothing else has, so without it, the science that would use it either has to go the dangerous hydrogen route, make do with a heavier unreactive gas or just… stop.

I tried that and found myself pondering the cylinder whose height is its diameter. Half way, you might say, between orb and cube, but is neither. The orb would fit inside it and it would fit inside a cube of similar height three different ways.

Authoritarian perspective: “I fail to see the difference between these perspectives.”

The stereotypical pirate “accent” derives from the west country (south west England) accent of one man who played Long John Silver in an adaptation of Treasure Island.

Though regional accents are dying out, you could probably still find a handful of people in the south west who will answer in the affirmative with “(y)arr”.

… which is the second fact, I guess. “Arr” means “yes”.

Well, it could be you, or it could be me, as I’ve hit the same waypoints.

fedia.io wasn’t taking sign-ups at the time I went to kbin.run, but they are right now, so that’s where I’ve ended up this time.

If this one dies too, I guess I’ll take the jinx with me back to Reddit and see what happens there.