They have butter for their hot cakes. Sounds like it was adding butter packets to the order.

Yeah, it’s just because I’ve removed pig (and cow) from my diet, for environmental impact and cute cow video reasons. Had some really nice venison stroganoff last night, though. I grew up seeing too many roadkill deer to really feel for Bambi.

MS-DOS 5 or 6. I guess technically I used whatever Apple IIes had, first, but really I just loaded games from disk.

Back when I ate bacon, it was really good added to veggie burgers. I think because veggie burgers lacked fat and salt.

Nowadays bacon makes my insides very upset.

Yep. That’s why I’m here again. My reddit app may work for now, but the writing is on the wall in bigger, bolder letters.

Thanks for the clarification. It’s hard to tell these days and I don’t always have the spoons/mental bandwidth for it.

By “they elected Hamas” you mean maybe 15% of the current population? That’s a broad brush you’re wielding.

(Based on 70% of the population of Gaza being under 30 years old, meaning they’d have been 13 or under in 2006, when the last election was held. And Hamas got ~45% of the popular vote in the 2006 election.)

Congratulations! I’m wicked happy for you, Internet Stranger :) and hope you a smooth recovery.

I blame the mountains, limiting access to the outside world.

That’s my emotional understanding of the current situation. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan whole-heartedly the night it happened, but I was a child then. 9/11 was upsetting and rockets are exciting. Now, with maturity and hindsight, that invasion was a cruel mistake. I believe this current invasion is also a mistake.

Robert Evans wrote a post on it and did multiple podcast episodes.

The TL&DR is that AI-generated children’s books are crap, without a coherent storyline or any literary niceties like “foreshadowing” and “beginning middle and end”. Kids are still learning what stories look like, so if you hand them AI-generated stuff they might know it’s unsatisfying, but they can’t put into words why their books are wrong.

I apologize, I don’t think we’re disagreeing. Fiction can, but often doesn’t, describe something in sufficient detail to be cited as “prior art” during a patent application or dispute. It comes down to how broad the claims are in the patent.

If someone were to try and patent “sliding doors”, a patent examiner could point at Star Trek and say “Sliding doors are already described in published material, your invention is not original”.

If someone were to try and patent “Mechanism X, used for making sliding doors slide”, that might be patentable because Star Trek (and other published material) didn’t describe Mechanism X.

Inventions need to be non-obvious (35 U.S.C. 103: Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter) in order to be patentable. Prior art can be used to show that an invention is obvious. The prior art doesn’t need to rise to the level of detail contained in a patent to be prior art.

I’m not saying that devices described by fiction are patentable based on the description in the fiction. But, those descriptions could be used to prove that the ‘invention’ is too obvious to be patentable. Page 7 of this document from the USPTO going over what ‘prior art’ is suggests that fiction can be used as prior art.

My understanding is that patents are to protect novel new ideas. If something’s already bean described in fiction, what innovation is protected by the patent?

So, I’d think “it’s a tablet” wouldn’t be patentable because that was described in Star Trek. But, "screen technology blah that makes tablets practical "would be patentable.

Neat post on related topic: https://fia.umd.edu/answer-can-science-fiction-stories-be-used-to-demonstrate-prior-art-in-patent-cases/

I’m with you. I didn’t manage to get through the whole thing.

I want it closed, but the dog wants it open and his litter box is in the hallway. So, open it is.

Yeah, longevity and name recognition are why I went with sdf.org. They’ve been running many-user services for decades, even if the Lemmy service is pretty new.

ETA: they’ve been around since BBSes. I’m on a wicked nerdy old-school geek instance, and I love my local communities.

Sync, then something (I don’t remember what) pushed my to Joey)

Oh, it’s better with the powdered milk. Plus if you fill your mug too high with coffee the milk takes up almost no space. The only downside is that if you don’t stir well the powdered milk can clump into these cheese-textured lumps.