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"a couple of men stand on their legs suspended over a lake"

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[source]

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this is one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century and he would probably be the biggest blog on this site if he were still alive

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nothing about this should work, I'm furious and kind of turned on

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Ncuti Gatwa & Hugh Skinner - The Importance of Being Earnest (National Theatre London)

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"a drawing that is sitting in the room on top of a table"

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I saw this on Facebook and had to look it up. It really happened, albeit the details are different. From Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story:

"On the evening of MD-46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two month," said Garriott. "It even had the flight controllers puzzled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Helen, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only accomplice, but his role would be carefully disguised.

It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been recorded before fight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Skylab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their billfolds, awaiting the right moment.

"For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be widely known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two natural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife's recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper."

Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, "I'll have something for you on the next pass, Bob." Crippen replied, "Roger that, Owen." Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:

Skylab (a female voice): "Gad, I don't see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback berween these speakers.... Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (s sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you reading Skylab?"

Capcom: "Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had difficulty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?"

Skylab: "Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven't talked with you for a while. Isn't that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn't had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I'd bring one up. Over"

Capcom: "Roger, Skylab. Someone's gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?"

Skylab: "Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were looking down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh..... See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I'm not supposed to be on the radio."

"Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crippen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center," Garriott said. "What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air-to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen's voice on a 'family conversation' from our home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob's comments in real time, as everyone could hear?

"No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twenty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best 'gotcha' ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!"

Crippen recalled: "That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing.

Everybody in the MOCR, or the control room, was looking like, What the hell is going on?' We did a good job. It was fun. Working those missions got to be tough. We did all kinds of things to try to come up with levity. That was a nice one that the crew got that the ground control didn't know about."

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fuck i just saw that there are some google street view photo spheres in the gaza strip and now im fucked up

cause the satellite view is recent and its a nightmare just shattered gray expanses of rubble and all these deep ruts through the dirt everywhere that looks like some kind of machinery.

but the photo spheres are from before the buildings were destroyed so there are these cute little courtyard gardens with olive trees and pots with herbs painted in colors and nice little apartment buildings with laundry out to dry on the balconies. and when you zoom out to satellite its just completely obliterated wasteland of rubble and debris

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fuck i just saw that there are some google street view photo spheres in the gaza strip and now im fucked up

cause the satellite view is recent and its a nightmare just shattered gray expanses of rubble and all these deep ruts through the dirt everywhere that looks like some kind of machinery.

but the photo spheres are from before the buildings were destroyed so there are these cute little courtyard gardens with olive trees and pots with herbs painted in colors and nice little apartment buildings with laundry out to dry on the balconies. and when you zoom out to satellite its just completely obliterated wasteland of rubble and debris

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in law school, my mom took me to this stress retreat because my family was vaguely aware i was a suicide risk. and they didnt allow phones, so i brought this huge bag of books. and one of the options for "destressing" was this fake cave grotto thing, where they'd decorated a room to make it look exactly like an underground cave and the air was like -10 degrees, but there was a like 4ft deep pool in the middle that was kept super super hot, so you would just switch between the hot and cold. and they would bring you an endless supply of this weird syrupy drink thing that was like super caffeinated and tasted like sugar and mint. and so i spent multiple days sitting half submerged in this fake grotto drinking mystery liquid and reading. and i have to be honest i really did feel less stressed

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Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference […] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.

Sam Altman; suggests that competing AI companies are locked into a standoff where they have to keep investing in better models at the expense of profitability or risk losing the market, although even without that dynamic they would still need to invest to justify their enormous valuations and ambitions.

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"there is a very large bright red sun in the city" "a man walks near the ruins of a building at night"

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A little Avery, as a treat.

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The blade is your implement. You'll need it if you want to do this right.

hit the slay button!!!

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wait hold up the way you mentioned pretty woman seems to imply it s bad-- I only partially remember it from being one of my mother s 2 favourite romcoms, what was wrong with it?

This is from a reply to my review of Rent-a-Girlfriend, it got long, so @m0m026.

Pretty Woman is a romcom about a 22-year-old sex worker who gets picked up by a 40-year-old billionaire. They meet, he needs someone on his arm, they do a Pygmalion and fall in love. One of the things I find most interesting about it is that this was not how it started life.

Instead, it was (to quote Wikipedia) a "dark cautionary tale about class and prostitution". In the original version, she's a drug addict, and the movie ends with Vivian getting dumped in an alley, abandoned by the executive to fend for herself, used and then forgotten. And while I don't think that we can hold early versions of a story against how it is in its final incarnation, I think there are lots of elements of the "cautionary tale" woven into the movie that just don't get delivered on in the end, leaving it off-kilter, tonally awkward, and dare I say ... problematic.

So we've got something like a 20-year age gap, we have an enormous wealth gap, we have a class gap, and the movie is, you know, kind of about some of those things. But when we get to the end, Vivian doesn't want to be a "kept woman", she rejects that, and Edward comes up the fire escape to say that he wants a "real relationship", and they kiss, and ...

I don't know. It's just never going to happen, right? Or maybe it is, maybe it does, maybe you can bridge all these gaps if you just love each other hard enough, maybe this is all going to work out for them. But this is fantasy, and it's the kind of fantasy that makes me cringe a little bit, just because it's such a denial of reality. I like when love conquers all, I'm a romantic at heart, but sometimes I see how much love is conquering and wince a little.

It doesn't help that a lot of the humor is at Vivian's expense, and that the sexual assault is played for heroism but also kind of brushed off.

There's just a lot that I don't like about the fantasy the movie is peddling and the way that it deals with class tensions and ... you know, it could have been a lot worse, there are much worse movies in terms of their politics and implicit message. But I think you're always going to run into problems when you look at a cautionary tale and say "actually, this is going to be a romance".

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Calling it, this is the fucking Information Age Collapse. Bronze Age Collapse 2.0. We have three or so generations of this shit while everything slowly breaks and then in 1k years archaeologists will be unearthing hard drives and cursing us for putting all our information in such shitty, easily degraded media instead of etching it into metal and stone like a sensible civilisation.

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La lune