davidgh

And having the ability to read the room, understand your audience, and adjust your communication accordingly.

I mean, yes - but somehow this feels like a different category. At least to me. I view slop as the classic garbage like:

[Thing] isn’t just [X]—it’s [more dramatic Y]. And [short validating statement].

I can see and smell this type of slop from a mile away. What I’m referring to is in the same family as slop but somehow different - it fools my brain by putting on the presentation of credibility and thus it is even worse. I can skip right over classic slop without much effort. This kind of text tricks me into laboring over it before I realize it’s hollow.

So in that way, it’s worse than slop.

I understand the sentiment, but not quite what I’m thinking. It’s not that the AI is necessarily wrong, it’s more like, it replaces clarity with rich but unhelpful text. Maybe like candy. Full of flavor, texture and color but lacking the nutrients.

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources.

I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to quite describe it, but because the text was polished and well constructed my brain was giving me the the signal “if you aren’t getting this it’s because you’re not focusing” so I’d read it again and then again and it still was not landing. It sorta felt like when you read something technical or heavy when very tired - you are reading but not processing.

Only after wrestling with this for a few days did I realize that it wasn’t me. As I started going through, sentence by sentence, forcing it to re-write things to be more clear the concepts became easy to understand.

I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

The more complex the topic, the more I sense this.

My frustration is with services like Uber, Bolt, Airbnb, etc. where you need the push for core services and then the provides use them to slip in spam.

You can use it here: https://scoreboardmax.com/

All features are included in the free version, just some usage limits. If you decide to use it, send a message using the “Contact Us” from with the account and I’ll send you the details on the analytics / charts as they are at unpublished URLs.

A group of us in our community broadcast many of the local high school sports. Our original setup had a scoreboard that was really clunky to manage and was hard to learn, so I built a web-based version that pretty much any 12 year old with an iPad could use.

I have worked with the logs extensively over time to convert the simple data inputs from the scoreboard controls into charts & graphs that update in real time on the screen to “tell the story” of the game, and generate “talking points” from the data. It allows us to plug in students as commentators and they can talk about the game much more confidently because they can visually see the game's storyline that is based on actual data. “The Trojans are on a 14-4 streak starting late in the 3rd quarter, and that has flipped the lead in their favor” is a lot more fun than “the Trojans are doing well the last little bit”.

It’s been fun (and challenging) to develop the right UI to display the game’s story in a way that is rich yet easy to read at a glance. And it has been cool to see the students increase in how professional they sound on the live broadcast.

This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.

Rumor also has it that in virtually any major grocery store in the USA you can put in any (valid) area code and 867-5309 and it will work as a rewards member number to get you the discounts. I have done it when traveling and have had success.

Sadly, it seems this option is fading away, at least in the US.

https://www.smseagle.eu/2025/05/08/no-support-for-email-to-t...

To be sure, Live Nation owns and / or operates many of the venues. They also provide management services to artists. So it’s not that TicketMaster demands exclusivity from the venue, they #are# the venue.

> a state government inhibiting that choice

A state government inhibiting that choice for minors, which is a well-established practice for all sorts of things. Alcohol consumption, tobacco, driving a car, voting in elections, gambling, and ability to enter into certain types of contracts, to name a few.

Here are a couple of references for you.

Compulsive Internet Pornography Use and Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Sample of University Students in the United States https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7835260/

Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/

This is the way China is going [0]. Based on success there it seems it will follow in other places.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

You have it exactly backwards. Thou is singular and informal, ye is plural and / or singular formal.

Ye is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (nominative), spelled in Old English as "ge". [0]

The word thou is a second-person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in most contexts by the word you. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Agree.

“Ya’ll” is linguistically necessary in English since the word “ye” was deprecated.

A common alternative to remove ambiguity between singular and plural “you” in some parts of the US is “you guys”.

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Yeah but you can get away with pretty much anything in a construction safety vest. [0]

0. https://youtu.be/GyvRamX1VyA

You mean, become a typical agency?

I made a previous comment that I deleted because it was a bit sarcastic which doesn’t help the conversation. More seriously:

If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?

Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.

There are a variety of documented undesirable side effects of heavy pornographic use [0],[1], including issues with mental health, sexual disfunction, and the ability to maintain normal romantic relationships.

It may be hard to stop, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7835260/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/

I think there’s a difference. “You are the product” means that your usage and data are the primary thing the company develops (with software) so it can be sold to their actual customers, namely, advertisers.

I’ve been involved with many software companies that gather various metrics (analytics, crash logs, user info, etc.) but do not sell that data to anyone. As such, the user is not “the product” but the customer. I think there’s a meaningful difference here.

Which SMTP server do you use for sending? Are you able to use Gmail's SMTP servers with your setup?

Not necessarily. They could be performing a “lower case” function on all passwords before hashing them.