I think it’s one of those things where they don’t want you playing a 16 year old elf because reasons.

Just like how you need to use fantasy names rather than normal names like Steve or Tiffany.

I’m talking about physical maturity, not emotional maturity (which is greatly influenced by environment).

Others have doubted the 21 year figure being appropriate for humans but I think the 100 year figure is ridiculous for elves. It’s based on the assumption that age of maturity and total lifespan are always preserved in an exact ratio across different species, when this is demonstrably not the case.

The cancer was just an excuse. The real reason Walter White cooks meth is out of bitterness and resentment towards Gretchen and Elliott and their profiting from his research with Gray Matter, as well as his bitterness with having become a chemistry teacher instead of a wealthy business owner.

That’s going to show up as a big copy-paste followed by a bunch of edits. Or a big full-retype with edit fixing.

The true arbiter is time. If a student you know struggled at writing during in class writing assignments just knocks off the essay in 15 mins of writing whereas the class median time is a couple of hours then it’s pretty obvious who cheated.

Is a student going to go out of their way to slowly retype a ChatGPT essay over the course of a few hours, with not only typo corrections but also full sentence rewriting? At that point I think they’ve proven they can write just by doing that extensive editing. They would probably finish faster by writing it on their own! Unless they’re just using ChatGPT to help them get a framework for the essay and then rewriting it in their own words. If I were a teacher I’d be fine with students doing the latter, though it’s still not ideal, at least it shows a lot of effort.

It’s not that hard. Just scroll through the editing history. You can even look at timestamps to see if the student actually spent any time thinking and editing or just re-typed a ChatGPT result word for word all in one go. Creating a plausible fake editing history isn’t easy.

Yes, although Carney has a free hand to admit that management is incompetent because it’s a management he inherited from Trudeau’s government, not one he hired himself. Carney worked at Goldman Sachs which has an infamous ultra competitive work culture. I could see him being annoyed with any manager as laid back as Trudeau was as PM.

By easy you mean of course conceptually easy. I love land value taxes conceptually but politically they will not be easy to implement. In fact none of the solutions to housing affordability will be easy to implement because homeowners don’t want the value of their property to decrease under any circumstances. That is their nest egg and they guard it with extreme jealousy.

Nothing Russia has done including (or since) the invasion in 2022 was smart. It was all stupid.

Russia’s wasted a million soldiers on grabbing a rather small amount of Ukrainian land. They’ve destroyed their own economy, their trade relationships with most of the world, and their demographic future. Take a million men off the streets of most countries and it’s going to crash your population within a generation or two.

If I buy a whole chicken at the grocery store, I buy it in the meat section. No one would say “you’re buying a whole chicken, therefore you’re not buying meat.”

With lobster you can extract the meat and eat it. You can also boil the empty shell to make a lobster stock as a base for a seafood soup or a pan sauce. Just as with chicken you don’t eat the bones but you can boil them to make stocks for soup or pan sauces. They’re still classified as meat and the products you make from them are considered meat products.

Sure but why does that make crickets “not meat”?

Why not? Shrimps and prawns are meat. Lobsters are meat.

Wet bugs meat, dry bugs not meat?

Not sure how these body washes caught on. I just use a plain old unscented bar of soap!

I like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy version: Earth has been scheduled for demolition by the Vogons in what really amounts to be an interstellar boondoggle!

I’ve seen too many alien-themed horror movies to buy into the “aliens are gonna be Vulcans” trope. I think it’s more likely that we see one of many variations on the “aliens are unknowable horrifying parasites that will consume/transform all life on the planet to suit themselves.”

What is your routine like? Do you go to work? Volunteer? Have hobbies?

I ask this because going through a breakup — any breakup — involves a grieving process. Part of grieving is about moving on. A big part of doing that is finding new things to do, new people to talk to, and new things to talk about.

Counseling is good, but talking to other friends and family about her can make it very difficult. If you meet someone new — doesn’t have to be romantic, can be any gender, can just be a friend — can give you a person to talk to and topics to discuss that involve you and your interests and have nothing to do with her.

When you’re in a relationship for a long time a lot of your thoughts and even the objects around you in life get tangled up in that so that when she’s gone these things still remind you of her. What you need is to be selfish — grieving is a selfish process — because you need to reorient your mindset around yourself and taking care of yourself.

Lastly, I think it’s also helpful to have a third space where you can focus on stuff completely outside yourself and all that. For me it’s been volunteering as a tutor for high school kids. It gives me a time and a space each week to forget about everything and focus on something else. Helping kids and seeing them learn is a nice bonus for that. That may not be your cup of tea though, but something else may be! If you aren’t already into volunteering I’d encourage you to look into some volunteer organizations near you and try to find one that fits your interests.

SEO spam is search engine optimization spam. These are fake sites full of ads that make money when people visit them and click on the ads. The way they get people to visit is via SEO: tricking Google’s search engine to rank the site higher than other sites undeservedly. The way they pull off this trick is manifold (since there’s an arms race of techniques to detect SEO and new SEO that evades detection). Classic techniques include:

• filling the page with irrelevant keywords
• creating networks of sites that link to each other (link farms; this targets the PageRank algorithm which uses sites linking to each other as an honest signal of credibility and relevance)
• showing different content to the search engine’s crawler bots than you do to real users (cloaking)
• stealing content from popular sites (scraping) and using it to bulk up your fake sites (classic targets include Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, and tons of recipe blogs)
• tricking legitimate websites into linking to you (link farms tend to be detected and down-ranked en masse; legitimate sites linking into them help avoid this detection by reputation laundering)
• hacking people’s social media accounts to promote your fake websites
• hosting shady/illegal content such as porn, gambling, or TV and sports streams

• Double Dragon 2 - Final Battle 2
• Final Fantasy III - The Crystal Tower
• The Guardian Legend - Forest Fields (honestly the whole OST is amazing)
• Solstice - Title Theme
• Blaster Master - Area 3
• Mega Man 6 - Wily Fortress (seriously people are sleeping on Mega Man post 2)
• Mega Man 5 - Wily Fortress

Sounds like plants to me. Can’t we just grow plants?

Thank you Froggo. I really needed this one!