Forgot to mention though, they *are* very very wordy and talkative and the notion that they have ritualized many parts of their interactions into known formulas rings quite true. For instance, when a meeting starts there may often be 5-15 minutes of pleasantries around how your family is doing, before the formal purpose of the meeting starts. The time required for pleasantries increases noticeably with the number of Farsi speakers around the table.

Ha ha! Where is Garbz to tell you 1 data point an argument does not make.

I know a black person. You get it, I'm sure.

So I've worked with many Persians in IT and in other fields as well. My impression is they are very math smart people, and the "average Persian" that I worked with were very kind caring and decent people, regardless of whether they were Islamic, Bahai, Zoroastrian, or whatever... Religion never worked into our work relationships. I have a high respect for the "average Persian".

The leadership, the ruling class? Completely different story, I've had to work with some of them in other capacities. They are illogical, idiotic, mean spirited and will lie to to your face, break a contract before the ink is dry. Can't trust them as far as you could throw one. They are highly corrupt, ego mad people. Those are the ones who will whip a woman for uncovered hair.

That is from several dozens of data points over 30 years.

Afaict, it's still angry bitter old men posting the old fashioned way.
I have seen obvious AI outputs, usually labeled as such, but otherwise I would like to see examples or evidence of AI posts.

Now get out of my Jello tree!

wondering when the guillotines are going to be dusted off

loss of fundamental skills
without a foundation in fundamental ideas, and some practice, you aren't "smart" enough to vet the outputs.
Kernighan quote comes to mind, I think it's applicable here:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian Wilson Kernighan

Then we end up with a vacuum without anybody with enough knowledge to understand what the robot spit out.

I apparently am the layest of the laymen here.. This may help a bit though. Thank you.
So you can use the image but you can't re-animate it to perform depraved sex acts or even make it blow rainbows out of a unicorn's, umm, orifice... both of which seem likely to happen knowing the internet.
I'll rephrase that. You could use a still image of public domain character X, but you couldn't start selling "Steamboat Willie's Pre-Cooked Wieners" ...oops, it's happening again.
So still images used in your advertisement would be fair use of the character.
but creating a brand around it would not.
That's my takeaway.
I'm still having difficulty fully understanding the differences.
No matter, I'm not going to be doing any of that stuff.

For some reason, and is this just me, but even as a child I thought Mickey Mouse was pretty lame.
Give me the Thunderbirds anytime... IR, International Rescue with puppets and spaceships and machines that drilled into the earth and a secret hideaway that looked like a cross between a Club Med and a James Bond hollow mountain, seemed way more interesting to me than, a mouse with a deformed head, giant feet, and a voice like he's on helium.
<ducks>

I read the article. The gal being interviewed said the job description was vague, then they bait and switched her into content moderation, essentially. Then she said the content veered into violent and sexual in nature, then possibly worse, they were asked to fact check or moderate subject areas they were not knowledgeable in. For instance they were asked to verify medical answers on cancer treatments, astronomy, and other vertical areas of expertise. On top of that they doubled the workload, by lowering time per piece from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.

So, no, they did not know when they were hired. The conclusion was that once profits were threatened, quality measures plummeted.

I getting that public domain doesn't mean very much.
So it's public domain, but Disney is claiming to have continuing rights.
is it PD or is it not PD?
What is it that I'm not understanding here?

buuut... if it's public domain, how does Disney have any claims on it?
I don't get that.

Wow, typing student code sounds masochistic. Also, stupid. Syntax isn't logic. I can't ever recall my code not throwing a syntax error on first compile... and still managed to have a successful career.

I'll push back on that. Using and training your hands is a building block to developing your brain. Historically, mathematics, or at least arithmetic, was done with the hands, fingers, before the ideas were abstracted to tools like the abacus.

In my opinion, saying cursive is irrelevant is like say music, or musical training is irrelevant. You are opening pathways in your brain, creating preconditions for abstract thought and problem solving.

If you think of education strictly in terms of turning out workers as widgets, then sure forget about cursive, art, music, history, ethics, humanities, phys ed. But if you care to open your mind to higher functions, you will want to teach and learn more than typing and Microsoft Word.

... than for permission.

Why are they asking for permission to use something in the public domain?

Haha.. I learned that on my first demo. Client asked what happens if you click that button? After I washed the egg off my face, I cooked all my demos, rehearsed,
did'nt take questions till the end of the demo, and stuck to the script. It's a performance to build client confidence, not a finished product.

Ohhh, I was wondering about that. Other than being incinerated by xray or just mass extinctions, I think that would be so great to see. Are we really gonna xrayed? 40 ly is a long way away.