I use ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines, particularly for programming concepts or technical documentation. The way I figure, since these AI companies are scraping the internet to train these models, it’s incredibly likely that they’ve picked up some bit of information that Google and DDG won’t surface because SEO.

I’m getting strong Hide the Pain Harold vibes.…

You know, I don’t actually know. Have been conditioned to avoid using them that I don’t even think about them.

Oh, I acknowledge that.

However, there are two things I get hung up on. One, can’t pay by check—Costco doesn’t accept checks. And, two, the traditional no-limits cards are generally Amex, which they don’t accept—only Visa.

So, yes, while nothing else you said was wrong per se, I’m still left to ponder just how the transaction would go down.

I know everyone’s general focus is on the cost of the thing and how ridiculous it seems, completely ignoring that it’s a Scotch that was aged longer than the overwhelming majority of us—me included—have been alive, and that there are some people for whom that taste is very much worth it.

Me, I’ve wrangled with exactly how you’re meant to pay for the thing and walk out the door with it. Am I bringing $27K—plus tax—worth of cash—three straps of hundos?—to Costco and having the cashier count it? Do I get pulled into the manager’s office instead? Or, do I put this on my Costco Citi Visa? Will they decline it, even if I have the credit limit? Can I sub in another Visa, since that’s all they take? Do I get walked out the door, or do I get a receipt for the checker to sharpie a line through?

It’s one of those movies that I put on for giggles one boring evening many moons ago, and spent the whole time going “what the fuck?”

Gets my vote.

Funny enough, came to say the Garrett P.I. series.

Fascinating. I guess I’d be curious to know which brands those are.

And, for what it’s worth, I think I’d take mustard or cardboard over coconut oil. 😅

I’ll just take something that modestly melts and doesn’t taste so much of coconut oil. Since becoming near-instantly lactose intolerant in 2019, this has been my been my biggest gripe, as almost every vegan cheese maker uses the stuff and I think it makes the cheese taste awful.

For what it’s worth, they’ve had a “Neuro Fuzzy” rice cooker (https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/nszcc) for years—ours is at least 10 years old at this point. And, I would bet this is a trivial extension of that—using some decision tables supplemented with heat feedback—with only the addition of a user feedback mechanism, rather than any, true “AI”.

MCU should probably get its own graph, which starts as a line going straight up.

…surprise, the Amish build a prison camp around you during the night

Just a modest shed, really…

What a horrible day to have eyes…

Just…

Don’t.

This year’s? We can’t even make it through this sprint’s roadmap without a deviation.

Bonus points if it’s C-suite crashing the sprint.

My first temptation was to say that it might be an age thing, but then I know many people my age who still don’t care about plants.

For me, it’s like a switch flipped one day. When I was younger, I just didn’t really care, and the few times I was given a plant, it did not end well. Figured that I just had a brown thumb.

But, maybe 10-some-odd years ago, I got a peace lily, and, by then, something had changed. I wanted to see this plant thrive, and it brought me just a little bit of satisfaction to see it doing well. It doesn’t hurt that peace lilies will tell you when they need watered, and, as such are pretty easy to keep.

I’m still not the best plant dad, but I’d since gone on to buy about a dozen more and appreciate the bit of greenery around the house.

I’ll pick the Stegosaurus… but only because the Triceratops is conspicuously absent from this chart.

(Secret fighter menu?)

I think you’ve already gotten some good answers here regarding the function itself:

It sits and waits for the user to input something and hit Enter, and returns the value the user entered, which is then assigned to your nam variable. (See the documentation for the function.

I might also offer the advice of confirming your understanding of the flow of a program. That is, understand that, in the general sense, the computer must resolve the right-hand side of the equals sign to a value before it can assign it to the left.

For example, if the right-hand side is a literal value, it’s already resolved. For example, a line like name = “Joe” is easy—assign the string literal “Joe” to the variable name, when the line is run.

If the right hand side is a mathematical equation, it must be resolved to a value when the line is run. For example, for a line like value = 2+2, the 2+2 must be resolved to 4 before it can be assigned to the variable.

Then, for something like name = input(“Who are you?”), in order to resolve the right-hand side, the computer must first run the function before it can assign a value to the variable name.

It can, of course, get more complicated, where you can call multiple functions on a line, and the results of one feed into the next, and so on. But, that can be an exercise for the near future.

Unflavored soju is my defense against drinking too much soju. I’ll have one bottle of that and be like “yep, I’m good”.

Meanwhile, everyone else is near the bottom of their second bottle of flavored soju and eyeing a third…

I’ll have to buy the White Album again…