I’m glad it’s not just me being unable to get ai to produce decent fins/tails.

It’s so bad at them!

Awww this makes me miss Waffle House. Vaguely.

All of my experiences with Waffle House have been either drunk or nostalgia (literally only two options, as I haven’t been at one in 10+ yrs but experienced my first under 25 years ago), and both are passable. At least your drunk meal doesn’t cost much. And if you are sober you don’t expect much.

But when you go sober, for nostalgia, in a region you don’t normally frequent, they get actively upset at large (pay for the job, not based on check) tips. Left $10 on a $10 tab somewhere in Kansas, because fuck those people work hard, and they made absolutely certain I meant to leave that in cash. They seemed actively uncomfortable with it.

Such a weird dynamic for a country that allows/requires tipping. But they are so used to poverty wage that anything that isn’t is unbelievable. Man that’s so sad.

That was sort of my thought too, but nowhere in nature would our brains be exposed to vibration over long periods of time, and I know that concussions that don’t meet the clinical definition lead to brain damage.

I couldn’t really find much on the impacts on the brain of vibration specifically, but I have seen experiments where vibration was added to a semi-solid, and it liquified because the weak “cell wall” analogues dissolved. I know that’s a totally different mechanism, but it got me curious :)

Much cuter and smaller than Pygmy elephants, buuuuuuut

They are so cute!

Reminds me of armored gorilla from one punch man.

They were going to charge more anyway just because.

The prototypes (Or what commoners would use) may not have been metal, since metalwork was probably rather pricy, (carved wood or unfired clay perhaps) and decayed over time. Only the “winning” design was made metal, until replaced. :)

Idk, really just spitballing, like I said I don’t think that’s actually what it’s for. I find it more likely to be an apprentice test object, kept as a status symbol. But we’ll probably never actually know.

This little blurb from the article is why I think it’s a training object

Parker says the piece was cast in “sticky,” leaden metal—making it difficult to mold—and was fragile in texture.

“A huge amount of time, energy and skill was taken to create our dodecahedron, so it was not used for mundane purposes,” writes the group, adding: “They are not of a standard size, so will not be measuring devices. They don’t show signs of wear, so they are not a tool.”

Sure, maybe the only thing preventing any innovation was access to a new material, tho I strongly doubt that for the same reasons many paleontologists doubt it - namely that they frequently weren’t even used, the stone flakes chipped off them were used instead, and that near the end of the period they can be found, there were actually some impactful changes to the design, before revolutionary new materials were found. But likewise in Roman times they were limited (both the skill to make it and decent enough quality material to actually work with)

Only a few people in an area would be metal workers skilled enough to do something like this (and who knows, maybe the dumb thing is an apprentice training item, not actually serving any purpose), and they likely wouldn’t be the ones using it if it is for knitting. So perhaps until the design evolved into something so different we don’t recognize them as iterations, the same one was just used because the people doing the metal work weren’t the people using the tool, and didn’t want to have to design a workflow for something new for marginal increases in usefulness. Perhaps it appearing out of nowhere was also an innovation, lasted until the replacement of an entirely different design caught on or something, and abruptly died out because it wasn’t very good.

Frankly I don’t have a dog in this one, and I don’t think it’s actually a knitting implement, I’m just saying a long time period without design change doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

In fairness, acheulean stone tool design didn’t really innovate between the earliest recorded find (~2 million years ago) and the latest (~160,000 years ago), which is a lot longer than the Romans existed. And they were much more basic tools, ripe for innovation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheulean

That kind of shit is what happens when you don’t wear over-ear protection, like a dumbass.

Affiliate link programs, too.

You assume they are only collecting usage data with their apps, which is typically not the case. Some of them request every permission on your phone just to collect as much as they can.

I’ve watched all the series and had no idea.

Thanks for explaining!

Ha! This is my new way of looking at my smart devices. I’ll sell you off if you don’t do what I want, and buy something that does. Very much a threat.

I recently factory reset all my Roku TVs, and didn’t connect them to the internet… and they work much better now.

Roku broke big time when I insisted on privacy. blocked the entire Roku domain, it broke the apps on a 1-month schedule like clockwork to get the network release for reinstall which allowed for phone home. lol no. I trashed it. They are dumb TVs now.

I enjoy that it reminds me of a Star Trek console.

Probably by design but all the same.

Looooooooong toes O.O

This would be a great prank/flashmob, have people dress up like this, ideally with very stiff “clothing” that doesn’t show the movement, and just sit super still.

Monoculture=bad isn’t really new. It’s been obvious for a long time.

There are some semi-wetlands around the college I attended. They are “untouched study areas” after being leveled for one reason or another. Some of them they planted with a variety of native flora, some of it was left to do its own thing, some of it was left but managed.

The intentionally seeded areas with a diversity of species recovered the most fully (to date - 40+ year project) and the fastest. They spread into the rest and helped reclaim it as well, quite quickly. However, all of the land went through several stages where it looked like it was failing, and it’s actually really important to just let that happen, it’s part of the cycle that doesn’t get to happen in managed forest land.

Your straw man argument is boring.

I’m not saying any of what you are arguing against, so I’m done interacting with you. You clearly aren’t conversing in good faith.

Have a nice day.