I find it much more enjoyable than jogging. Also, easier on my leg joints.

A cursory search says about 900 officers above the rank of Colonel (aka general/flag officers). There are about 1.3M active duty and 800k reserve personnel in the US armed forces, meaning about 2300:1 ratio of troops to GO/FO.

My country, Canada, has about 130 senior officers, and about 87,000 total members, for a ratio of 670:1.

The UK has about 475 senior officers, and about 172,000 total members, for a ratio of 362:1.

(All numbers are subject to human error on my part. The UK senior officer numbers in particular I’m not 100% on as I literally just counted the names on Wikipedia)

I didn’t feel like doing research beyond that, but while the USA does have a lot of military brass, they also have a lot of people in their military, and the ratio isn’t as top-heavy as other militaries.

EDIT: changed the wording in the first paragraph to line up better.

It’s a personal thing, but the smell of cumin kills my appetite. I had a bad experience with it once and I can’t shake the association between the smell and the experience.

Interesting that you were still using StoCard. Some months ago the app broke for me and directed me to download Klarna. My info had been migrated over and everything.

I promptly found a new loyalty card app (SuperCards) once I saw the microloans and other unnecessary garbage in Klarna.

Did Startropics have an ad like that? A quick search didn’t turn anything up.

I’m sure there’s a joke to be made here about the O-Train, but I’m not clever enough to be the one to make it.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer company.

Anecdotally, Klarna is the company that bought StoCard, an app for scanning and storing loyalty cards, and replaced it with their own app. I personally liked StoCard and found the microloan bloat of Klarna to be unbearable.

I realize that’s not as serious a charge as the predatory microloans themselves, but it does give me some measure of personal satisfaction to read about their self-inflicted wounds.

The original GDQ event took place starting 1 January 2010, and was called Classic Games Done Quick. Its capstone game was Final Fantasy VI, which was released on 11 October 1994 in North America. So FFVI was a little over 13 years old when CGDQ happened.

SGDQ2025 took place starting 6 July of this year. That means GDQ events have been going on for 15.5 years, and the event is older than some of the “classic” games from CGDQ were at the time of that original event.

If SGDQ2025 had wanted to use a Final Fantasy game as its capstone, the game of comparable age as FFVI was during CGDQ would have been FFXIII-2, which released on 31 January 2012 in North America.

It’s good, with one point of contention: I stopped going to church a decade ago, while my family has remained devoutly religious. While I wasn’t disowned, it remains a rift that we sometimes have to awkwardly dance around.

Most of the time it’s fine: I don’t discuss my atheism, and they don’t discuss the theological aspects of their church life. But sometimes it gets weird, like one camp is unsure where the boundaries for polite conversation are.

I don’t know how to feel about it being an RTS, as I’m pretty bad at those.

I guess a straight slow-time game might end up too similar to the board game, though.

Bruce Fanjoy winning Carleton was one of the funniest things to happen in the last election.

I’m not expecting Polievre to lose this race too, despite the effort put in by some of his opponents. This is one of those “blue fence post” ridings after all. But if he only gets 45% of the vote instead of 75%, I’ll still get a chuckle.

This is one of my favourite shitposts. Growing up with things like The Donut Man and Psalty the Singing Songbook makes this almost feel real, like it was some half-forgotten fever dream.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

Here’s my original post again. I bolded the key part: it’s Trump telling the lie, and the news organizations are credulously repeating it.

This same article doesn’t provide any pushback to this claim until much later in the article, and then it only says that, “Carney said Canada accounts for only about 1% of fentanyl imports into the US,” instead of calling it what it is: a lie.

This is what has my onions cheesed: that major news outlets are uncritically repeating all the fetid slop that spews from Trump’s mouth. Another example was the ‘Governor Trudeau’ bit from a few months ago, where I saw one clip of a gormless CNN anchor nod their empty head and chuckle as Trump’s lapdog displayed the most wanton disregard for civility and the truth.

Canada had “failed to cooperate” in curbing the flow of fentanyl and other drugs across the US border. The Canadian government says it is cracking down on drug gangs.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:

I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner’s guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and “robust” without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.

As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.

Now on the flip side, I’ve also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.

Part of the game in making these memes is to always subtly edit the size Chuck’s face.

The first time I tried this was with my kid’s crib. I ended up forgetting it was there and I had to borrow tools from the movers instead. I got most of the way through the disassembly before finding the hidden allen key and realizing I had outsmarted myself.

I realized a while back that one of the primary goals of these LLMs is to get people to continue using them. While that’s not especially notable - the same could be said of many consumer products and services - the way in which this manifests in LLMs is pretty heinous.

This need for continued use is why, for example, Google’s AI was returning absolute nonsense when asked about the origins of fictitious idioms. These models are designed to return something, and to make that something pleasing to the reader, truth and utility be damned. As long as the user thinks that they’re getting what they wanted, it’s mission accomplished.

Our first also needed a frenotomy, and we had to go to a specialist clinic outside the hospital.

My best understanding of that situation was that they first wanted to make sure it was actually a problem over a week or two of observation. Then, the procedure was technically classified as dental surgery, so a doctor at a hospital couldn’t perform it for professional/ethical/insurance reasons.

How much support new parents get seems to vary by city (and maybe province?).

I’ve also had two children born in Canada in the past few years, but in different cities (and provinces). Neither gave us a baby box, but the first provided a free and unprompted hearing test right in the recovery room, while the other required us to make a seperate appointment in the weeks following the birth for that same service.