I moved to Florida specifically so that I could live at the beach. Go to Hawaii.

Dec/Jan is the Florida high season, so everything is crowded and accommodations will be pricey. If your vacation truly is in Jan though, Hawaii will actually be quiet (end of December is super crowded tho).

If you do go to Florida, look at Naples up to Tampa on the gulf coast, or key west. The people are much nicer than Floridians on the east coast

Skittles and starburst above sour patch kids is just madness.

he aged

Not that I know of, I’ve only seen it in book form. But there are some people who quasi-animate it on Youtube while “reviewing” it.

There are a number of graphic novels that continue the story, so you can kinda watch the gaang grow up. The first series, I believe, is called The Search, and it’s about finding Zuko’s mom. There are also a ton of spinoff novels about the other avatars if you want more lore.

From TFA:

Showing sympathetic figures with differing beliefs, discussed over a drink. Highlighting a shared identity. Correcting misperceptions about opposing partisans’ views on democracy. Those are a few of the most effective strategies for reducing political polarization in the U.S., identified by a “megastudy” that surveyed more than 32,000 Democrats and Republicans to test 25 ideas crowdsourced from social scientists and other experts around the world.

The duck’s name was also the inspiration for the blaster’s iconic sound

I don’t want to be forever young, but I’d love to feel like I’m in my 20s until I’m 100.

I came across this, which shows the actual trend line for hurricanes and tropical storms, including those that did not make landfall - https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-tropical-storm-records/

I was under the impression that the number of hurricanes that made landfall had been increasing in recent decades, but the bottom chart suggests it’s about constant. Maybe it’s just the total number of storms then?

I don’t get this meme. I don’t see Saddam and it doesn’t look like loss?

Air. Can’t go more than a minute or two without it, and there’s enough to share!

THE COMMON COLD

(well… just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)

I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

Shocked that Florida made it to double digits.

(sent, with love, from Florida)

Is that pedal set up up to drive the machine, or is it just for looks?

The argument was that before we drilled holes into them, those stone formations had held similarly sized pockets of natural gas for eons, so just refilling them with CO2 would be fine. It sounds not completely stupid on first thought.

On second thought it sounds completely stupid tho.

I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.

wasn’t there some research recently that said that like 20% of what your brain does was actually controlled by your gut microbiota?

The critical thing to remember about LLMs is that they are probabilistic in nature. They don’t know facts, they don’t reason, they don’t evaluate. All they do is take your input string, split that string into tokens that are about 3-4 characters long, and then go back into their vast, vast, pretrained database and say “I have this series of tokens. In the past when similar sets of tokens were given, what were the tokens that were most likely to be associated with them?” It will then construct the output string one token at-a-time (more sophisticated models can do multiple tokens at once so that words, phrases and sentences might hang together better) until the output is complete (the probability of the next token being relevant drops below some threshold value) or your output limit is reached.