monotremata

I mean, this was my first question as well. If you say "I don't trust that guy with my kids," then you also should not be leaving that person alone with your kids. If you do leave him alone with your kids, people aren't wrong to say that you very much are trusting him with them.

So I think it's legitimate to ask whether they mean they "don't trust Chinese and US firms with their data" in the sense that they do not provide their data to them, or just in the sense that they do give them a bunch of data, and then feel misgivings about it.

Which, y'know, it's something you have a limited degree of control over, certainly, and we don't want to fall too much into blaming the victims. But as someone who didn't manage to actually get off Facebook until last year, I definitely felt for a long while before that like I was complicit in my own exploitation, and contributing to a societal problem. I think even the people still there know that cancelling it is the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing the amount of data in the hands of dubious firms.

I think that might be pleurisy instead.

I think the idea is that this particular drug isn't suitable as birth control, but having identified that this mechanism/biological pathway can work for birth control, they can look for a less toxic compound to achieve the same effect.

I dunno if that's always the case. I still love The Phantom Tollbooth.

On the other hand, I remember being really frustrated by a phrase from another book. (I think it was "Kneeknock Rise"? I remember exactly nothing else about this book, though, so it might not be that.) It was a description of a scene, and it said the dog was asleep, "arms and legs akimbo." Now, I was in... maybe third or fourth grade, so I had never encountered the word "akimbo" before, and asked my parents what it meant. They explained that "arms akimbo" was basically the only phrase in which it's used, and it means having your arms out to your sides with your elbows bent and your hands on your hips. But this just confused me further, because the book said "arms and legs akimbo." I had no idea what it was trying to describe, and could not picture it. I tried to draw a picture of what it seemed to be describing, and continued to find it baffling. My parents agreed that was odd, and suggested I talk to my teacher about it. The teacher was very dismissive, though, saying "well, obviously you've never had a dog, or you'd know exactly what they're talking about." Which...what? Why would you even say that to a curious kid? Couldn't you at least draw a doodle of what it looks like?

So yeah, being forced to stick with a book you don't like does leave a very strong negative impression.

Extreme solopsist?

The song of my people.

That would be the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

Yeah, this is what I was going to call out. Calling it "100% solvable by humans" and saying "if human scores were included, they would be at 100%" when 20-60% of humans solved each task seems kinda misleading. The AI scores are so low that I don't think this kind of hyperbole is necessary; I assume there are some humans that scored 100%, but I would find it a lot more useful if they said something like "the worst-performing human in our sample was able to solve 45% of the tasks" or whatever. Given that the AIs are still scoring below 1%, that's still pretty dark.

I built one, but it was a (top-down) resin printer, so I don't think I have any useful advice to offer. Also, I kinda burnt out on the project after I came in one morning and found the resin had melted the vat and leaked onto the floor--somehow I just totally failed to consider that the solvents in the resin could obviously dissolve a lot of plastics. Huge mess, huge pain to remediate. At least it was a concrete floor. I got a replacement vat in glass, but I never worked up the will to work on it again. It did basically print before that, but I had a lot of off-layer curing and didn't get to do much work on tuning that in before the accident.

username checks out

Yep. I've only got three APs, and one is by the modem and router, so it's really just two long wires, and one of those is to my office, which is also where my main desktop PC is, so I needed that wire anyway. The other one was annoying, and I had to drill a couple holes for it as well as exploit a laundry chute, but all that was ten years ago, and having pretty complete wifi coverage since then has been worth it.

The one weak spot is the kitchen, where there's coverage, but it tends to be a bit slow. I just decided to upgrade my bedroom AP to Wifi 6 (from AC), though, and I might try switching the old unit over to mesh mode and mounting it to cover the kitchen. Mesh involves two wifi links so it's a bit slower, but the connection strength will probably make up for that. It's worth the experiment, at least.

I turned off wifi on my router and instead use multiple wifi access points connected to the router by ethernet. It's way easier to get good coverage and speeds that way.