I've decided to worry about more important stuff than what is going on in D.C. The news coming out does concern me, but there is nothing I can do about it. I'm more worried about my job status. When my boss asked me at the end of summer if I wanted to come back to the office or work at home permanently,I asked to keep working from home but wanted to reevaluate the situation after New Years. Of our 16 person office, 4 of us are still working from home because we have young children, older parents, or some other vunerable population living with us. I have an equal amount of pros and cons for returning (not taking into account the pandemic.) I really would like to have my cake and eat it too, like doing part-time at give and part-time in the office, something my boss wouldn't even consider in February, but now might be open to. I just need to think of a strong enough case.

I have a hypothesis, and I'm not too sure if it's backed up by science because one person can't reasonably research everything… but I don't think it's very radical.

Anyway, it's this:
Humans are very fundamentally an extremely social species, so fundamental that it's tied to our emotional and instinctual reactions, and therefore the chemical and hormonal make-up of our minds.

Therefore, things that affect or manipulate our social well-being also affect our emotional well-being.
This is why relationship problems hit people so very hard (much harder than they logically should), but also why interaction on social media can affect mood- invigoration through positive interaction or affirmation, depression when affirmation is expected but not received etc.

I don't think we're offloading our intelligence to the internet, I think we're outsourcing a portion of our emotional well-being to it.

ozoneocean wrote:
Hahaha, in light of what's happened this year I don't thik that can happen XD

Ah, touché, my very clever friend. You are absolutely correct, Sir Ozone. Humanity as a whole still needs practice in putting aside our differences because world-wide negotiations have been messed up beyond repair.

The joys of AI… -_-

I really do think that if there's an end to humanity it will come from some moron's poorly programmed AI. I mean, AI has already killed quite a few people- passagnger aeroplanes with I assisted take off an landing protocols has been responsible for serious accidents, the same with AI on fighter jets. It'ts not through malice it's just because the programming can't account for everything like a human can. AI is realy amazing at doing simple repetative stuff way better and faster than any human, but absolotely ARSE at dealing with anything outside of its programmed paramaters.

Hence the reason why all the youtubers are losing money from ads and having their content demonitised, hence why we have to deal with random ad in the miffle of videos etc.

Where I've come acroppa was being banned from Facebook for 24 hours because it though I posted nudity, which I absoloutely didn't. So I apealed the warning on the images and they were duly overturned. Butttt meanwhile I'm still banned… For…?
Posting stuff that wasn't against community guidelines?
Simply shit AI.

Watching the videos about the future of AI, they're talking about AI programming AI which can only lead to disaster. No computer is any better than its programming and even if self programming and able to learn it can always draw the wrong conclusions based on something left out of the programming.
They're saying that just because AI can beat a human at a board game they're capable of running the planet.
They say that AI may be more capable of discerning the best choice by weighing quintillions of possibilities quickly anticipating any butterfly effect. But what if butterflies never enter into their computations? Can even the best AI ever think outside the box?

Yeup, exactly! They have all the blindnesses and biases of their creators too unfortunately.
Massive companies like Google and Facebook are rushing to embrace them to manage their gigantic userbases, with the idea that it's cheaper than humans and they can also maximise profits by getting these shitty subroutines to mange everything- rather than employing a huge workforce of moderators, which they could very easily afford to do.

They do a reasonably good job at most things and an absolutely terrible job at anything outside of the usual.
The trouble is that AI crap has now been on-sold to the customer service departments of most big companies (telecommunications, power companies, insurance companies, government agencies etc.), so it's not just just social media people being screwed around, it's everyone and for things that are far more important.

You could find your claims being denied or yourself owing thousands in back taxes because some AI screwed up- or even if it was human error you will have a bugger of a time talking to a real human to sort out the issue because they want to keep you talking to the AI to save money.

You thought call centrers based in the Philippines were bad… well they're actually pretty amazingly awesome in reality, especially when you see the alternative.

Hahaha, rant over.
AI sucks.

As part of my job, I call a lot of banks on behalf of customers. One bank has the most obnoxious AI. If you have the wrong account number, the AI at other banks just routes you to a live customer service rep. However, the obnoxious AI says in a very condensing tone, “I'm sorry you're having trouble. Please try your call again,” and it hangs up. The only time I got around it was by using another customers account number and then telling customer service what I needed when I finally got to them.

Yeah, this week, I had a situation where someone asked me to call around to get information on his behalf. He did not want to send an email. Organizations love to bury their numbers so no one will call them, and if you do find a number, you get an automated voicemail that provides an email address LOL. But then if you send an email, it usually goes into the void. And if it is a “contact form” it might as well be a void LOL.

I agree, it's sheer laziness and the bigger the monopolies get, the less important customer service is.

Ha! Exactly!
It took me a year to get my landline phone number back from my old telecom…
In the end the only way to contact the telecom was by talking with a bot on an app that you had to download.
I gave up and contacted the government ombudsman in charge of telecommunications complaints and magically the year long issue was solved in 2 days.

Did some fun cosplay on Saturday!
I think I'd like to try my hand at making some foam armour though now… Some Eldar aspect warrior gear from Warhammer 40k would be good. But that's a lot of new skill to learn :(

Who is ready for 2020 to be over?

MegaRdaniels wrote:
Who is ready for 2020 to be over?

Me!! Also, an ironic GIF :p

My alarm woke me up this morning, which would normally be great because for the past few weeks the cats have been waking me up an hour BEFORE my alarm!
But I was hugely confused and thought it was still the weekend so I spent 10 minutes trying to “fix” the date on my tablet and wondering why it was “wrong”, before the horrible realisation dawned on me that it wasn't. :(

And I've been confused and fuzzy in the head all morning so far! I hope that goes away soon. I'm a man out of time right now.

Ozoneocean wrote:
My alarm woke me up this morning, which would normally be great because for the past few weeks the cats have been waking me up an hour BEFORE my alarm!
But I was hugely confused and thought it was still the weekend so I spent 10 minutes trying to “fix” the date on my tablet and wondering why it was “wrong”, before the horrible realisation dawned on me that it wasn't. :(

And I've been confused and fuzzy in the head all morning so far! I hope that goes away soon. I'm a man out of time right now.

I get that way when I’m really, really tired. It’s like confusion mix with where the F#%£ am I? I don’t know why this happens, I just know it happens when woke up from over sleeping? Or like waking up from a nightmare.

Just finished writing the script for Stringy and Mopy #4. It took a hellova lot of drafts. Lol.

Congrats MegaR!

cdmalcolm1 wrote:
I get that way when I’m really, really tired. It’s like confusion mix with where the F#%£ am I? I don’t know why this happens, I just know it happens when woke up from over sleeping? Or like waking up from a nightmare.

From what I've read these days they think a big part of it is also when you wake up from the wrong part of the sleep cycle: like when you're awoken from the part when you're deep down under rather than the shallow part: it means your mind isn't all in working order, like a computer that's been fully shut down VS one that's just put to sleep. It takes a while to fully boot from that state.

I think sleep cycles are short, like about 20 minutes or so. You just go through continuous periods of that in a night: lighter sleep then down to deep and back again while you're sleeping for 6 or 8 hours or whatever.

That's what I remember from the latest reporting on sleep research. It's interesting!

Also depending on the sleep cycle one is in you can awake with a start and even completely alert and ready to fight.

I've known a few that when I was told to wake him, I was advised to do it from several feet away because he woke up thrashing and was liable to hit someone in the same room.

Watching the Mandalorian finale for season 2, I was enjoying it but thinking of writing a post about how Giancarlo Esposito was being used just for exposition. He's on a couple other shows with amazing writing, and seeing him here exposed the not-as-good writing on Mando.

But then the episode continued and I felt happier than I've been in YEARS as a Star Wars fan.

The season overall has been mostly good - but that finale did so much to lift my spirits as a fan.

Very very happy right now!

Edit: didn't want to spoil anything here, so if you have ever been a Star Wars fan, get off social media quick and go enjoy the season 2 finale of the Mandalorian for a beautifully pure experience!

Think I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm preordained to be an asshole to everyone no matter how or what I try to not be. This is getting exhausting.

Call Me Tom wrote:
Think I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm preordained to be an asshole to everyone no matter how or what I try to not be. This is getting exhausting.

HAHAHA! Not true even in the slightest. I've NEVER notied you to be an arsehole ever on DD and I've talked to you live on the Quackcast and you were super cool! Even cooler than in the forums.

I am in a very bad place right now.

I sincerely hope you'll be in a better frame of mind soon Call Me Tom. And a very merry bit between Christmas and New Year to all Duckers.

1 MORE DAY!!!! JUST ONE MORE FRIGGIN DAY!!!!!!!

LOL!
2021 won't be magically better but at least Tumpetbum will leave office finally and the US won't keep on burrowing into that hole at the same rate anymore.

———-

Does anyone else have this issue where your fingers have their own autocorrect function and type the wrong words when you're not watching?
I don't mean that they do spelling mistakes, I mean that they type different words.

An example from just now
I meant to type:
"2021 won't be magically better“
But it came out first as:
”2021 would be magically better“

And this here!:
”An example from just now“
came out first as:
”An example from just name"

Hahaha! Crazy fingers!!!!

Fingers? It's your subconscious. It has different ideas about what should be written. The conscious mind is still thinking things over and the subconscious is already telling the fingers what to type.

Then there's autocorrect. Got a whole team of writers going now, think I'll nip off for a cup of tea. 🤣

My friend and I were talking about an aging actor on a series we like that's heading into its final season (hopefully) soon. With the delays in producing the show, even moreso this year, we were wondering if he'd make it.

I meant to text “I hope he does” but it came out as “I hope he dies”.

One little letter…xD

My rooster wore out my, imo, very generous levels of patience and forgiveness. One of my hens is missing patches of feathers, and the big guy tried to kick me (he doesn't actually have any spurs yet).

I listed him on Craigslist, and within an hour, someone came and got him. So, now I can enjoy my hens without being challenged. (And the injured one can heal.)

Honestly, it may not be his fault. Pretty sure a pen in the city with three hens and close neighbors' backyard roosters crowing all day is not an ideal situation

Anyway, they guy who got him was pretty excited about it. He used to live in a place that didn't allow roosters and now lives out in the country and wants one again.

If I get more chicks in the future, I'm not doing mail-order again. I'll go to a local farm that can take returns of sexing errors. :P

Ozoneocean wrote:
Does anyone else have this issue where your fingers have their own autocorrect function and type the wrong words when you're not watching?
I don't mean that they do spelling mistakes, I mean that they type different words.

Hey, stop trying to usurp my throne of “Queen of the person who wrote that email and then realized after the fact that it was riddled with spelling errors”! :p

bravo1102 wrote:
Fingers? It's your subconscious. It has different ideas about what should be written. The conscious mind is still thinking things over and the subconscious is already telling the fingers what to type.

I don't think the subconscious works that cleverly.
I think the real reason is more basic:
The brain sends out a message about what it wants to type, one word at a time.
When it gets to the fingers though, the memory instruction on spelling is lazy and only gives the first part of the word because it expects the muscle memory to just fill in the rest without having to spell out every single letter of every word- but if I'm not watching the screen to make corrections (like I should), it comes out with different words that are about the same length but start with the same letter.

-It's just muscle memory and a brain too lazy to send detailed instructions because you've typed these words so much in the past that it already has a huge repertoire.
I mean, there are words that if you asked me about them I just wouldn't know how to spell, but my fingers can spell them out when I type them.

I typed much more accurately when I didn't know how to type well because my brain hadn't done the activity enough yet to get so lazy. XD

Banes wrote:
I meant to text “I hope he does” but it came out as “I hope he dies”.

One little letter…xD

HAHAHA!

L.C.Stein wrote:
Hey, stop trying to usurp my throne of “Queen of the person who wrote that email and then realized after the fact that it was riddled with spelling errors”! :p

LOL I wish it were only spelling errors XD

Didn't you know that the subconscious works via quantum entanglement so its instantaneous and thereby bypassing the nervous system and lazy muscles?

Magical spirits of the ether are also assisting along with unicorns and the all the faerie. Muscle memory indeed. Such a boring world you inhabit. (Auto correct suggested know-it-all just then. Careful the ghosts in the machines are on to you too. ) ;)