I actually hope the media keeps this narrative of Elmo being the one in charge because I'm sure Trump will have his very bigly ego hurt and lash out.

Just going to leave this here with proof that Elmo said cars would be fully driving themselves by 2018: https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/autonomous-driving/timeline-of-tesla-self-driving-aspirations-a9686689375/

Buying a social media network: $40 billion

Buying a US election: $0.13 billion

Democracy is fucked.

There's an even better way to handle spam calls if you have a recent Android phone: use the automated call screening. Every time robocallers hang up immediately before saying a single word because they know if the person flags the call as spam then Google now has a recording to automatically flag future calls even if they spoof new phone numbers.

My new rule of social media: Unless I know and trust the person or the organization making a post, I assume it's worthless unless I double check it against a person or organization I trust. Opinions are also included in this rule.

Good Old Projection: The Republicans are already using X to cheat the election and they don't want competition.

I've used an LLM that provides references for most things it says, and it really ruined a lot of the magic when I saw the answer was basically copied verbatim from those sources with a little rewording to mash it together. I can't imagine trusting an LLM that doesn't do this now.

Just last week, Abbott ranted about a male teacher who wore a dress to some school events in the state who was driven to quit his job by online trolls. Abbott said that the teacher was “trying to normalize the concept that this type of behavior is OK” and said, “This is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.”

I seriously want to ask conservatives in Texas why they are comfortable letting their government dictate what clothes they are allowed to wear?

Voting is the same as the trolley problem. You can make a conscious choice between two bad outcomes, but if you do nothing then one of those outcomes will happen anyway.

I use regex in SQL to parse HTML stored in a database. It can't universally parse and validate every HTML document, but it can still be used to find specific data like pulling out every link.

There are medications that measure the active ingredient as a percentage too, like topical creams. I think it's done to make the relative strength easier to compare when the volume is varied. Labelling a keg of beer or a barrel of wine with the actual volume of alcohol it contains doesn't make it easy to tell the amount that would be in a single glass.

Relevant study: https://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/deaton_kahneman_high_income_improves_evaluation_August2010.pdf

tl;dr: Happiness increases logarithmically with income, leveling off at about $75,000/year (at least in 2010).