From Pittsburg to the Lake!

Remember when the internet was the best communications tool ever devised by man instead of just another way to funnel advertising to you and a mechanism to control what you are allowed to speak about? I do, too. :(

Where's this image? :P

If O'Reilly ever publishes a book on e.g. ChatGPT, this needs to be the cover.

It did well domestic business, but stunk it up in China, and the rest of Asia doesn't look too good either. The only foreign market that's really putting in good numbers is Latin America. Since the domestic market is doing better than expected, it'll make money. But with the way Asia is playing out, it won't make the kind of money that Warner Brothers was hoping for.

Hollywood has been relying on Asia for profitability on multi-million dollar CGI epics for a couple of decades now. They may have to adjust their business model.

Currently have a project going using Python scripting in Blender using scipy.optimize.differential_evolution and Cycles rendering to optimize the shape of a reflector to match a desired light distribution pattern. It's not a perfect tool for the job, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

HR: "We're doing a RIF, and unfortunately, we're going to have to let you go".

Worker: "What am I going to do?"

HR: "Learn to co... oh, fuck, I'm so sorry".

For the women that DO want to have children it's certainly an increasing problem.

So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.

That doesn't explain everything. Fertility takes two to make babies. It doesn't explain why male fertility is also dropping. Testosterone and sperm counts have been steadily dropping in first world countries for decades now. And everyone notices. Men are getting more boyish-looking and less rugged. There's more guys firing blanks. Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be. That surely has something to do with the lower testosterone. So something else is going on. It's not just economics.

It comes mainly from three reasons:

One, only some kinds of recycling make sense. Aluminum? Of course? Steel? Certainly. Glass? Mostly. But many materials simply don't make sense to recycle. I WISH plastics could be recycled more, but in all practicality, they can't, at least not in a commercially desirable form. And recycling paper is the biggest fucking scam in the whole business. It takes far more energy and water to recycle paper that it does to make it from fast growing virgin softwoods like pine, of which there is no shortage.

Second, there's the utterly arrogant attitude from the evangelists of recycling. You know the type. Infamously holier-than-thou types that want to know what sacrifices you've made today to Save Mother Earth. It really is their religion.

And then, there are affluent types that wave recycling around as a status symbol, signaling that they're the right kind of people, and you aren't. George Carlin infamously pillaged the fuck out of them:

Outside of a handful of Beaux-Arts buildings that are truly lovely (the Library of Congress, for one), DC is mostly a collection of Brutalist monstrosities that regularly make the list of ugliest buildings. When the Great Society programs starting kicking in during the sixties, it set off a wave of ugly, soul-sucking concrete construction that consumed DC.

Who the fuck gave Zod net access?

Or bring back old BitchX: https://bitchx.sourceforge.net...