BillyClark

That is fascinating. Thank you for the response. Interestingly, your description of autism and implicit learning does not resonate with me, at all. In fact, I strangely feel like I have a subconscious side of my brain that is far smarter than the conscious side of my brain, if that makes sense. And as a result, I have a very strong intuition about what other people are thinking, for example.

If anything from your description, I felt more resonance with your description of NPD, but that’s probably only because I’m relatively narcissistic in the normal sense. I don’t think there is likely to be any disorder from that or any trauma that could cause it. Maybe it’s because I can flip a switch where I become much more manipulative. Or maybe I’m just empathizing with you. I did have an ex who broke up with me after she purposely wound me up and then said that she thought I was going to hurt her. So maybe that’s it.

I have basically zero academic understanding of psychology, so I can’t really participate in this analysis. But I appreciate you have spoken about it in a way that I could understand, and I’m pleased that you’ve decided to use your experience to help people. I wish you the best of luck.

I would like to apologize for my joke, to you whether you were offended or not, and to anybody else who might have been offended. I was thinking of the punchline to a joke, and I didn’t consider that I might have been offensive in my setup.

I saw your reply yesterday and wanted to marinate on it before responding.

My basic conclusion is that I was thinking of people who are psychopaths, not autistic people, but that even then, I should not be this offensive to people who are psychopaths. I am told that there are perfectly decent people out there who suffer from psychopathy, but they make it work.

I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect that I am on the autism spectrum. (Maybe just dipping my toe in at this point, maybe a little more, maybe a lot more.) And probably as a result of that, I generally avoid autism knowledge like a plague. I hate the feeling like I could learn something and second-guess myself or feel like I’m powerless to resist.

So, maybe you can confirm what I’m about to say, but I don’t think autistic people basically lack empathy, so much as they have a hard time identifying with a neurotypical person. I certainly don’t lack empathy. If anything, I think I feel more empathy than most other people. But, I suspect that an autistic person might feel more empathy for animals than humans, for example, but they don’t feel zero empathy unless they are also psychopaths. Is this an incorrect understanding?

Either way, I think I will try to avoid being offensive to psychopaths in the future.

You think he put that jack under the tire, but that doesn’t make any sense. The tire isn’t even flat.

It’s obvious what happened. The truant officer was driving down the street and accidentally ran over a jack. What we’re seeing here is the truant officer trying to remove the jack that has gotten stuck in the tire tread.

I know some people think that self-checkout is making the customer do the cashier work for free, but honestly, having experienced it both ways, I’d much rather do it myself. It’s not like I am doing anything else at the time, and shopping already involves something very similar, regardless.

I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves and pushed the cart around, then if some stores started making people push their carts around themselves, you’d hear the same complaints.

But I am already picking up each item, one by one, when I put them into the cart. To me, it’s really not that different to pick up the items one by one, scan them, and put them into the bag.

Note that below, I am saying that Dave is using the informal logical fallacy argument from authority. He thinks that a “succesful” musician isn’t a political expert, and therefore, their opinion may be ignored. Meanwhile Tom Morello is saying the opposite, that it doesn’t matter.

One basic problem with argument from authority, where the person making the argument is not the authority themselves, is that they are saying that they themselves cannot make the argument. So, how can they know whether to trust the authority that they trust?

It’s not a bad default position to defer to an authority on a subject that you know little about, but that is not an argument that you should use to counter other people who have an argument.

Yeah, Andrew Tate has personally ruined who knows how many lives. His rhetoric has likely ruined several orders of magnitude more lives. Anybody should naturally feel that Tate’s life cannot be worth more than all of those lives that he’s ruined.

Because we are modern people, our first instinct is, well, just imprison him for the rest of his life and then we can forget about him. Problem solved.

But the problem is not solved because we can all see, in real time, that justice doesn’t seem to be happening here.

It’s when justice is denied that people start to think of extrajudicial solutions. This is the danger of having dysfunctional governments that don’t serve the best interests of their citizens.

One of these phones looks like it can determine your glasses prescription.

I agree with you, but I am surprised that you could tell that he has sleep apnea.

If you have no empathy, you’ll never really be a human, and the best you can ever hope for is to become a historically unpopular world leader.

I don’t use Google, but in the other search engines I use, I occasionally use the AI thingy. Not for the AI overviews, but because usually, the AI shows better links than the normal search engine does.

I mentioned the stack of 3 books at the top exactly to rebut that statement.

I don’t care at all about that because something else is far more offensive about this piece of furniture.

If you look at the top above the plant, there is a stack of three books. THERE IS ENOUGH DEPTH TO PUT BOOKS THERE WITH THEIR SPINES FACING OUT, YET ON THE RIGHT, THEY’VE TAKEN AWAY ALL OF THAT DEPTH SO THAT THE SHELF WILL ONLY HOLD A SINGLE HARDCOVER BOOK, COVER FORWARD.

This furniture screams, “I want you to think I like books, but truthfully, I don’t even know how to read. Hardcover books are more expensive, so I’m fooling you even harder.”

It’s furniture for braggart morons. Let people brag all they want. Let them be morons all they want. But don’t make specialty furniture for braggart morons.

Donald Trump thinks of time in terms of Taco Tuesdays.

That wouldn’t be unprecedented behavior in the battery industry. The mark ups on batteries can be huge and if they fail, unless the battery explodes, most people will just buy a new one. It’s difficult for one customer to see the difference between a defective battery and a battery that failed sooner than expected. It is the kind of industry that attracts con artists.

I’m pretty sure that this is the exact reason why they either take you to a little private room or they don’t allow two people to open safe deposit boxes at the same time.

There are different types of face recognition in smartphones today. One kind is the biometric recognition used for unlocking phones, and can tell people apart. The second is just the recognition that a face exists in a certain location, often used by filters. It seems like they wanted to mix these two kinds, but one is very simplistic and the other is very difficult.

Distinguishing among different people is a much harder problem, and can have a bunch of false positives. The facial recognition systems used by police seem to make the news frequently saying that they mistook one person for another. Those systems will have more processing power than a pair of smart glasses.

That’s assuming that they’re doing the processing locally. If they’re uploading data to AI datacenters for processing, then it’s really hard to justify calling them “smart glasses”. In the computer field, it used to be common for them to use terminals that sent all processing to a large server, and the terminal itself did no processing. They were called “dumb terminals.” It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.

But anyways, if the processing is done locally, the error rate is going to be high. The glasses would tell you that Steve is over there, but it’s actually Doug. And worst of all, the mistakes it would make, just like the police’s facial recognition system, will inevitably come off as extremely racist.

So, it doesn’t surprise me that they cancelled the feature that would make all of their users be called racists. I’m not sure why they’d be mad about it. It seems like a doomed feature to me.

One other problem with naming Nirvana songs is that their titles are often not words from the chorus like most mainstream songs.

I think most people who know Nirvana could name Smells like teen spirit even though it’s not in the lyrics. I suspect people could name Come as you are, since it’s the first lyric of the song.

But after that, I guess it might be Heart shaped box?

With Nirvana, when you really want to hear that one song and you go look it up, you always think, okay, what’s the song name? “Yeah!”? That can’t be right. And then you have to go through some process to pry it out of your memory until you remember it’s Lithium.

yes

My printer doesn’t use ink cartridges, but it came with more ink than it needed to completely fill it up. I got it from Costco.

This comic makes more sense to me than what actually goes on in a cocoon.