We’re not good with it and we hope it’s not too late to turn it around. And no, I don’t know how so there’s no point asking me.

Right now I’d call my mood more embarrassed than patriotic.

It was the Roman ruler, Biggus Dickus.

Various individuals no doubt figured it out independently and then others in their tribe learned it from them. At first people probably took burning material from forest fires and brush fires that had been caused by lightning.

The exact definition of vibe coding varies with who you talk to. A software dev friend of mine uses ChatGPt every day in his work and claims it saves him a ton of time. He mostly does db work and node apps right now, and I’m pretty sure the way he uses ChatGPT falls under the heading of vibe coding - using AI to generate code and then going through the code and tweaking it, saving the developer a lot of typing and grunt work.

Spike?

In this picture see people wearing just what they need, what their culture and friends say they should wear, and what they think their Invisible Friend whats them to wear.

Mom

Just say anything and add the word “rule” at the end.

edit: Normal English as in “My school rules!” or “Tunnel snakes rule!” doesn’t really count. It should not have an exclamation mark or make sense, as in “Grass is green rule.”

“geriatrics reliving the past glory of the 60’s” ?

I get that saying anything positive about boomers is pretty much against the rules of social media, but for fuck’s sake dude, you’re talking about people who are out there actually trying to do something for the world instead of thumb-typing nihilism into their phones. No respect at all?

Too many people’s idea of activism now is to rant on social media and downvote all the bad thoughts. “I’m raising awareness!”

For one thing, the economic boom of the 1950s was an anomaly, largely driven by years of enforced saving during WWII, at least in America. Many consumer goods here were either rationed or unavailable during the war, but there was full employment for war production and those jobs paid well. So people were making good money and didn’t have a lot to spend it on. So they bought war bonds or just saved up. A few years after the war ended, when industry had shifted back to producing consumer goods, people had a lot of money to spend. Sales fueled more jobs and higher pay, fueling more sales etc. That was the 50s boom in a nutshell.

By 1960 all the savings had been spent and consumption was slacking off. But the business world didn’t want the boom to end, so they started handing out consumer credit like candy. Consumers also didn’t want it to end, so they eagerly bought on credit. Constantly owing money became the norm, and now the average American family carries like $15,000 in credit debt, excluding mortagages.

I think the only way we can achieve a boomer-like lifestyle for everybody will take massive changes in how we run the economy. The current system will just keep shoveling profits into the hands of a very small number of very wealthy people. Automation will keep eliminating more and more jobs - but the theoretical endpoint of that is a stat, where the economy collapses because there are too few people with incomes who can afford to buy anything. Reforming our economy before it gets to that point will be a survival issue, not a political one.

I’m probably remembering it wrong, it was a long time ago. It definitely always either won or tied but could never lose, because it knew the right responses to every move. No, it didn’t cheat lol.

This reminds me of one of my very first programs, a tic-tac-toe game I wrote in high school. It displayed hardcoded grids of Xs and Os and blanks very similar to what’s shown here. This approach worked because of the much more limited move possibilities. The program could always win if it made the first move, and always win or tie if the human moved first, depending on if the human made mistakes. I wish I still had the code.

Text files used to be a thing.

Main problem: agreeing on a banner design. Also a fair amount of hating each other.

Do you want to get rid of the beard? Do what you want.

Flour I buy from Costco costs 90 cents/lb, salt and yeast for one loaf are less than a nickel, and gas to run the oven (including preheat time) is like 15 cents where I live. So maybe $1.15-1.20 per loaf. I’m talking about the basic loaf of bread I make all the time. Brioche etc. will be more, and you can get as fancy as you want, but those items correspondingly cost more from a bakery too. Doing a little of the actual math, eggs are abnormally expensive right now but say $1 each, a cup and a half of milk from Safeway would add another $.65, so call it $2.80 per loaf for fancy bread that would cost 2x-3x that much already made.

What are the little white bits, chopped onions?

And technically most of it would fit inside your butt. There just isn’t a market for butt phones.