I’m friends with two siblings who frequently refer to any/all of their friends as ‘habibi’ and it makes me feel warm fuzzies every time.

Sociopathy is the inability to feel empathy. This is not inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad when people use that to harm others.

A common trait for sociopaths is seeking success, which is defined differently in different cultures. In the US, success is usually defined by fame, money, or power, so we see a lot of sociopaths in government, C-suites, and Hollywood. However, in India, success is more defined around family involvement, and so sociopaths there are often seen establishing those strong family ties and working to fit in.

Some studies suggest that 4% of the population have the brain profile of sociopathy. That doesn’t mean 1/25 people is evil. But when someone who is sociopathic uses that lack of empathy to harm people, that’s when they become a danger and should be called out for it.

Source: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D (and my memory thereof)

Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

THIS! My cardiologist has instructed me to eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. He literally encouraged me to eat things like chips, pretzels, pickles, salted nuts, and ramen to get more.

I supplement with electrolyte mixes with 1g sodium. They cost over $1 each and I am supposed to drink 2-3 a day. I still don’t get enough salt to feel my best.

It’s fucking obnoxious to have health conditions that mean I need a thing that so much of the world tells me is bad, and everyone else is trying to get rid of.

That’s when it becomes Rita as opposed to “heat Katrina”.

For folks who don’t remember/know about Rita because they didn’t live through it, less than a month after Katrina a record-breaking cat 5 hurricane was heading for Texas. Everyone still had Katrina on their minds and panicked. Millions of people (literally estimated as 2.5–3.7 million) evacuated, or tried.

The highways out of Houston came to a total standstill. About 100 people died before the storm even hit land because of the evacuation. And then the hurricane itself was nbd; the evacuation was literally the worst part.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

Maybe it’s just the low quality image, but that looked to me like the part of the ear protection that goes over the head (is there a name for that? It’s not a strap, but that’s the closest I could think of), like it was just pulled down over her forehead instead of sitting on top of her head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

I saw the guy get attention because he doesn’t use a bunch of fancy gear. Looks like the woman doesn’t either, yet this is the first time I learned meme man was even on a team.

She has bigger ear protection and it looks like she’s pulled it in a way that shields her eyes from the light. Still not all the high tech fancy gear they were competing against. So leaving her out of every post made about him not using a ton of gear definitely sounds like what this meme is saying.

You make a good point, and yet I wouldn’t be shocked if many people were still rabid fans even if he sold it at their expense. There’s a lot of weird idolization around him, and seems like the kind of thing many of his fans would laud as his great business acumen, ignoring the negative impacts it had on them.

Remorse: “I am sorry for what I did and the impact it had on the victim. I made stupid choices that hurt another person, and while I can never take that back, I will seek to do better so no one needs to suffer from my actions again.”

Not sorry you did it, just sorry you got caught: “I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

“Put in a headlock and thrown to the ground” doesn’t just sound like playful wrestling to me.

Honestly I see this post as a strong example of why generational labels are relevant. OP, the man OP’s talking about, and his mother are all from different generations, and they have wildly different perspectives of wealth because of that. We’ve grown up differently and have different expectations of life because of it creating generalities within generational groups.

Now, those generational differences have been politicized and spun to create divides between the generations, and I think that’s what you’re referring to here as “fake.” The whole boomer vs millennial “conflict” is totally manufactured, and the way OP and the man they reference interacts is a great example of why that kind of division between generations is stupid and harmful.

There are assholes everywhere; every generation, gender, race, country, etc. However, most people are not assholes, and assuming a person will be one because of the group they fall into? Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that will make you the asshole.

There are some demographics where its usage is extremely common. I’ve come across multiple people who are on FaceTime calls while in public. Just walking around on video and speaker, talking to someone else. I can’t conceive of using it this way, but in some social circles it’s totally normalized.

This page has some interesting quotes. Reading through, it sounds like while it’s hovering at or below the top 5 most common video chat tools. There’s a lot of bias towards quotes about 2020 usage so that’s obviously skewed, but that year at least it there were 9-25% of various demographics cited using FaceTime daily.

I use FaceTime 2-3 times a year to talk to my nephew, and maybe 3-5 times a year to screen share or show my mum things. But I do use Teams video calls literally 5 days a week (I try to avoid the video part when I can, but there are a few in leadership who really push for it. My company is never doing RTO, so I’ll accept a bit of video calling for the sake of permanent WFH!).

I think replacing the physical home button with a haptic button on the iPhone 7 also helped them improve their IP rating (i.e., water resistance). I could be misremembering that, though, and I have no idea if it’s relevant in this case.

And if you stay that many versions behind, you carry a gold mine of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Your phone might work, but it’s far from a safe or good idea.

902 security vulnerabilities published for Android 9, 179 of which are “critical” (9+) vulnerability scores.

Including “This could lead to remote escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.”

Yeah, no thanks.