Ironing is the only time of the week where I have the time to watch TV or movies. Not that I don't have free time, but I usually spend it in other ways. During ironing, I'm a captive audience. That said, I don't iron all that much. I remember the last season of The Boys took me four months to finish...

Irish Times is known for their clickbait articles. Not too long ago, an article that was written just to generate outrage (fake tan is cultural appropriation), was found to be generated by AI, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case. My advice is to ignore anything Irish Times is writing. (I've been living in Ireland for well over a decade, and I learned to regard IT as the low end of the already poor media landscape here.)

Just another byproduct of enshittification. Novadays, a top-end Garmin watch lasts about as long as a Chinese watch of a brand with random characters you buy off Amazon. Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit. Banking apps are beginning to require phones that are no more than 4 years old. TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades. So, consumers are trained to buy cheapest, least reliable electronics, because over time they'll provide more value than top-end items which used to last much longer. (This was written on a 13 years old phone. I may not have access to my banking app anymore, but otherwise it works for everything I need, and I haven't contributed to e-waste in this regard. Not that the pollution angle was my reason to keep the phone, but it's a nice extra bonus.)

As a Dubliner (Ireland, not one of the many Dublins across the pond), I must say that Americans are really weird about Paddy's Day. We have a large parade in Dublin and smaller ones in smaller cities, and then those of us who have kids ho to family fairs, and the rest for a pint at the local. We leave the city centre to the tourists who get shitfaced on overpriced, prepoured Guinness for no good reason. And even though we did some weird things with our river (the time in the slime), we never dyed the Liffey green.

I'm inclined to believe it. I worked for a Wall Street firm when the stock market switched from fractional quotations to decimal. Lots of my coworkers printed out a conversion table from fractions to decimals, and even so often had problems figuring out which of two quotations was greater than the other one (in decimals). Those were smart people, but if you work with one system for so long, your brain gets hardwired and difficult to change.

I have tthe benefit of a smart watch, so I know my stats quite well. Over the long term, I average 13 breaths per minute, or 18,720 breaths per day. That translates into $936 per day. When not injured, I average 22,000 steps per day, which would get me $5500 per day (currently injured, so no running, so I'm down to 12,000 steps or $3000 per day). Breathing would win only if I averaged fewer than 3744 steps per day. I think I get more just walking to my corner newsagent and back.

Agreed. I used to be the tech support for my family members. Everyone I switched to Mint Cinnamon stopped calling me. (That's also when I realised my relatives never call me to share good news or to ask about me.)

Funny... My company (over 100k employees worldwide) is blocking CNN as a security risk...

Radio Garden - Listen to hundreds of radios around the globe (with a pretty interface to find your favorite radio station). Having lived in several countries, I have a list of radio stations I grew to like, and now I can have easy access to all of them.

In fairness, the meme doesn't work all that well in Europe. The "far left" statement is defines centre-left parties here; far left is usually about enforced wealth and income sharing, even if it means imprisoning or mass killings. See Marxist collectivisation efforts, for example.

To be the devil's advocate (or GRRM's attorney), I see the merit of his and other authors' concerns. Chat GPT makes it feasible to generate short stories in their world and with their characters, which can easily replace their licensed products. This is not just their main work, but also other products that generates them some revenue stream.

Example: A friend of mine is using Chat GPT to generate short bedtime stories for his daughters. A typical request is something like this: "Please write a five paragraph story where Elsa from Frozen meets Santa Claus. Together, they fly in Santa's sleigh over the world, and Elsa is magicking snow on all Christmas trees." Normally, you'd buy a Disney-licensed book of short Christmas stories (I have one for my kids), but Chat GPT is more flexible and free.

Same goes for GRRM. He doesn't write Children stories, but one can still prompt Chat GPT to produce stories from the universe, which scratch the ASOIAF itch. This substitutes the officially licensed products and deprives the author of additional revenue stream. Just for the fun of it, I prompted Chat GPT: "Hello GPT-3.5. Please write a four paragraph story set in the Game of Thrones universe. In this story, Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister go fishing and catch a monster alligator, which then attacks them." It produces a surprisingly readable story, and if I were a fan of this universe, I can imagine myself spending a lot of time with different prompts and then reading the results.

(On a side note,AI-generated content already has at least one group of victims: the authors of short fiction. Magazines like Clarkesworld were forced to close submissions of new stories, as they became overwhelmed with AI-generated content.)

Forcing companies to pay for commute time would also force companies to lobby for more efficient public transport and cycleways, and limit private car access to areas with regular traffic jams. In addition, there are certain job categories where driving time is limited by law: truck drivers, bus drivers, and others. However, these rules only apply when the driver is being compensated for being on the road. So, your bus driver may have driven for two hours to get to work, and now he's towards the end of his nine-hour shift, bone-tired. If the company was forced to pay him for his commute, his shift would end after seven hours, and possibly five (if he has to drive back home for another two hours). That would improve road safety. I think the two aspects - more public transport and more road safety - should be enough for everyone to support the idea of paid commute.