This scam has been around since long before AI voice was a thing. You say something scary enough, and people will subconsciously attribute anything off about the voice to a bad connection and the severe stress the person is presumably under and genuinely think the voice sounds exactly like their loved one. AI voice makes it easier to fool more people, but I bet most of these types of scammers are not putting in the time to research every target to build a voice profile and instead focus on calling as many people as possible. Of course, these days anyone taken by this scam will assume it must have been AI voice, because otherwise how did they sound so convincing.

The owner shut down his McDonald’s for the afternoon for this. Trump declined to wash his hands, dropped a batch of fries, and “served” a few “customers” through the drive through window. So yeah, basically a photo shoot.

Well, TIL. Thanks for the correction.

Yes, figs are visited by wasps in the region figs are native to, but only in the same way that flowers are visited by bees. This picture is very much not what that would look like. This is, I’m certain, literally just a wasp nest.

Edit: I stand corrected, fig wasps are born and typically die in their figs. Fortunately, that still looks nothing like this picture because they are super tiny.

Those scenes are just there to establish that he’s capable, intelligent and talented in the ways the agency needs, so it’s plausible they would recruit him. Never-mind that they also establish the way he looks at the world and approaches problems which is then forgotten immediately.

Yeah, I’m sure it’s some sort of expensive hobby he’s addicted to, and perpetual project motorcycle would be my first guess.

You’re thinking of Scandinavian regional delicacies and certain seasonal special dishes, none of which I’ve ever had the misfortune of smelling, and serving those to prisoners does sound pretty inhumane. All Scandinavian food outside of those that I’ve tried or heard of tasted or sounded delicious.

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.

That is interesting. I imagined it more like an abstract physics problem than an actual scene. My ball was about 6 inches diameter, made of a nonspecific hard but not very dense material similar to, but not necessarily solid plastic, of no specific color. It was in the center of a table roughly 3 x 6 feet in surface at normal sitting table height, and was also of no specific color or material. The person was just the vague notion of a person applying a push slightly off from across the short axis of the table. The ball bounced slightly on the generic idea of a floor as it rolled away. My mind quickly supplied the additional details when requested, but not until then. (Yellow ball, wood table, etc). If I’d been asked in a way that didn’t feel like a physics problem, but instead asked me to imagine a scene, I would already have had many of those details in my mental view.

This is already unironically what they already hear when someone disagrees with them.

My sister works in real estate, and she was asked by a Realtor she works with what the law was on disclosure for a house the seller said was haunted. In most US states, it’s legally required to disclose any material fact about known issues with the property, though how it’s worded and what that includes varies from state to state. She had to look it up, and in North Carolina, haunted is not a required disclosure, though it is in some states. I joked that haunting should count as an “immaterial” fact.

She was laughing about the whole thing until she went by the house herself to make sure everything was ready for the photographer. She heard a noise in the basement and checked. There was an old black man dusting the shelves. She mentioned she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. He was very polite and explained that he took care of the house, and not to worry, he’d stay out of the way. She went upstairs to let in the photographer. When she went back in the basement there was no sign of the man, even though the only way out was past her. She looked around the whole house for him before she locked up but he was gone. She asked the seller about it, who casually explained that that was just old Terrence, who had taken care of the property for her grandmother, and had died many years ago. Since then, he just sort of appeared around the house occasionally, “tidying up.” (I’m writing this from memory, so some details are probably wrong, especially the name, but it’s the gist of story as she told it.)

They did not mention any of this to the buyer, and don’t know if they ever experienced anything as they never contacted them about it.

WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don’t think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.

The whole point of making a costly sequel is it can’t be a total disaster. If nothing else, “Joker: Folie à Deux” proved that is not the case.

Well, if studios can accept that sequels and remakes actually aren’t immune from being flops, maybe they will be more open to considering new ideas? I won’t get my hopes up, but it’s a nice thought.

an ice cream barge

For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy “ice cream” from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.

Right, see, those are relevant because they show the value of that inspiration. Inspiration that could have brought many more valuable changes to her life if she still had it, but sadly the park service stole that inspiration from her, along with many potential benefits it could have brought her if they’d just let her remain blissfully ignorant of the true identity of the inspiring bigfoot she thought she saw.

I had a housemate who fried sausage patties and eggs in my cast iron skillet every morning for a couple of years. Gave it a good wipe and that’s it. I’d cook other things in it sometimes and wash it up if needed. The seasoning on that thing developed into a deep black that was so smooth you see your reflection in it and you could fry an egg without oil and it came off clean with just a nudge from the spatula. It was beautiful.

We went our separate ways and it quickly degraded back to a more normal “good enough” level of seasoning. It was great, but I’m not frying up a fancy breakfast every morning for it.

Nothing you couldn’t recover from unless he managed to crack it. I’d wipe it down, and hit it with brake parts cleaner. If I was still nervous about contamination, I’d put it in an oven with the self cleaning function and run it. That should burn it back down to bare metal. Then, s good scrub with dish soap to remove any residue and a good seasoning, and you’re back in business. I don’t know if I’d personally skip the heat clean step or not, but I’d definitely put it back in usage.

The analysis I read from a lawyer explained how Wisconsin’s state laws on self defense are weirdly complex, and due to the exact order of events, under those laws, his intent technically didn’t matter, and that’s why it was inadmissible evidence. In most states it would be admissable, and he would be guilty. He even listed the laws out and while I don’t recall any of the details now, it did seem perfectly logical to my layman’s understanding. So it’s not that the judge was biased, it’s just that Rittenhouse, through dumb luck, happened to fall through a legal loophole. Wisconsin needs to fix it’s laws, because it’s abundantly clear he wanted to kill those people and morally speaking, I consider him to be an unrepentant murderer.

It’s not an official requirement anywhere I’ve heard of, but I do recall cases where people have noticed police departments declining to hire applicants who scored too high on their aptitude test. I think someone even sued over it, but the court found that being too smart was not a protected class, so the department was within their rights to do that. Or something like that, it’s been a while since that story broke.

Yes, hallucination is the now standard term for this, but it’s a complete misnomer. A hallucination is when something that does not actually exist is perceived as if it were real. LLMs do not perceive, and therefor can’t hallucinate. I know, the word is stuck now and fighting against it is like trying to bail out the tide, but it really annoys me and I refuse to use it. The phenomenon would better be described as a confabulation.