More weed use among teens → more hot dogs sold in the U.S.

Just for fun, this was Opus’s attempt at translation with the prompt: “I saw this in a commercial for tea. Please translate: 「美味ちい」Keep an eye out for wordplay or cultural difference that would matter in the translation.”

This is clever Japanese wordplay! 「美味ちい」 is a pun that combines:

• 美味しい (oishii) = “delicious”
• 茶 (cha) = “tea”

They’ve replaced the し (shi) in “oishii” with ち (chi), creating a portmanteau that sounds like “oichii.” This blends “delicious” with a phonetic hint at “tea” (since ち/chi is close to ちゃ/cha).

Translation: “Deli-tea-ous” or “Tea-licious”

In English, we’d need a similar pun to capture the playful spirit. The commercial is essentially making a tea-specific version of the word “delicious” - it’s a fun bit of marketing language that suggests the tea is so good it deserves its own special adjective!

I don’t speak Japanese, but based on the difference between your explanation and its, it’s gotten it subtly wrong while still arriving at a good translation. Interestingly, Anthropic’s newer (but smaller) model, Sonnet 4.5, doesn’t catch on at all without following up with something to the effect of, “What is tea in Japanese?” LLMs showed pretty amazing multilingual capabilities before they even started intentionally training them with more languages. That said, you definitively still need someone who speaks both languages to check/guide em. As it is their way to bullshit.

Been in video production for 30 years. We cannot rely on spotting problems to identify AI video. Selective attention alone means we miss major details in traditional video. Streaming services are testing AI upscaling, adding AI artifacts to pre-AI media. I regularly see comments pointing out artifacts from other sources (interlacing, morph cuts, moire, stabilization, compression, data moshing, etc) as evidence that the video is AI generated.

I’ve heard people say that using AI image generators is a technical skill. It’s not. It’s about as hard as using Google.

Ever watch other people search? It’s definitely a skill.

I get that too. But many people who are going to do harm won’t care what you do to ingratiate yourself. They’re more likely to see it as a sign of weakness that makes an easier target. We can’t service our way to safety. And on an even more fundamental level, the never-ending grasping for security through impression management is a way to distract us from the fear of death. “Memento mori,” (in part) is meant to short circuit this drive, which can turn malignantly toward sacrificing humanity and freedom for comforting illusions of immortality and invincibility. We cannot travel the path of the lich, carving up and hiding our souls.

Probably not, but this is what I try to remember. People pleasing is a weird kind of arrogance. It feels like a selfless sacrifice, but it’s fundamentally an attempt at control. We cannot control the internal state of others. People are not going to always be pleased, nor should they be. And on the other side, those that encourage people pleasing behavior are (perhaps unintentionally) trying to control or exploit others.

That’s not what’s meant by “ears over shoulders,” rather they’re over when standing. So in-line with shoulders when laying down, not what’s pictured here. But whether or not you want the neck in flexion depends on whether or not there’s been an injury. The kinetic chain isn’t simple.

Curiosity is as important as raw intelligence, and curiosity can be encouraged. Mostly it’s discouraged.

2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report

Is that what happened? I was kinda amazed by the amount of ads in there now. Snopes article aside, the stats in that image are misleading. Surprisingly many people die in car fires, and EV’s have a much lower rate of that. Of course, the cyber truck is still a dumpster fire.

But if a company isn’t profitable, they stop being a company.

Is this still true? /points to tech companies

Snopes

Don’t tell me what I can’t do!

Well said. I’ll just add: Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism

Reminds me of In Shadow.

Relatedly, Fiddle And The Drum has been stuck in my head for a few weeks.

In 2021, Phương, his mother and his brother received prison terms for “anti-state propaganda” Wikipedia

Funny, that was the first thing I thought of. Then the Tom Petty music video where Alice is a cake.