My theory is that psychosis due to self-imposed sleep deprivation causes some of the crazier things Elon Musk does.

This is why my programs don’t come with documentation. If you want to use them, the best I can do is a messy script that “works for me”.

Sometimes when I open my mouth really wide, I somehow spray a little stream of saliva, like from a squirt gun. It makes me feel like the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, but so far I haven’t been able to do it on purpose.

It reminds me of this more recent fashion trend:

Are you claiming that Batman wears spandex because originally he was supposed to be naked but the CCA wouldn’t allow that?

Deadpool. He’s not funny, he’s just obnoxious.

They’re on the windowsill. Just open the window and help yourself…

Nice restaurant food, but I guess that doesn’t count.

Lychees. The funny thing is that I can afford lychees, but I always think “Why buy them when these perfectly good grapes cost three times less?”

If you had the choice, would you choose to be that buff if it meant also being that hairy?

I have found kvas in Russian delis to vary in quality quite a bit, but unfortunately I don’t remember which brands I liked and which I didn’t. Good luck!

I was just a kid when I came to the USA so most of my memories are in the context of how different things were after we came to America.

One particularly vivid memory for me is of bananas. My grandma would go on business trips to Moscow sometimes and she would bring bananas back for us. Otherwise the fruits we had were the ones that grew locally, and you had to preserve them if you wanted them out of season. It blew my mind when I came to the USA and I could just go to a grocery store and buy bananas at any time.

There were a few foods there that are harder to find here.

• Buckwheat, which is my favorite grain.

• Fresh peas, not the kind that people eat along with the pod but rather the kind with an inedible pod and big seeds, like canned peas but raw.

• Russian-style rye bread. My family was so surprised that Americans had such an abundance of food but still ate Wonder Bread.

• Kvas, a sweet beverage made out of fermented bread. I think it tastes way better than soft drinks so I’m not sure why everyone isn’t drinking it. Maybe it’s an acquired taste?

Also American cakes are usually terrible and American deep-fried french fries are inferior to Russian pan-fried potatoes.

Edit: one more thing, crepes. They’re not exclusively Russian, of course, but they’ve very common in Russian cooking with a variety of sweet or savory fillings - applesauce, jam, cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, ground meat, etc. Sometimes they’re fried after being filled.

You can hope that billions of people choose to act against their own self-interest in a way that has never happened before or you can move somewhere with a cooler climate.

There’s a difference between being unable to move out and simply liking to live with your family. If you like living with them, I don’t see why you should move out until you find your own long-term romantic partner and need more privacy. I know there’s an expectation in the USA that adults won’t have a lot of contact with their parents, but I think that’s sad. I don’t currently live with my family for practical reasons but I live near them and visit them every weekend. My life is richer because of this.

There’s a legend that the Roman Emperor Tiberius executed the inventor of flexible glass.

After the inventor swore that he was the only man alive who knew the manufacturing technique, Tiberius had the man beheaded. He feared that the glass would devalue gold and silver, since the material might be more valuable.

So y’all better watch out with any plastic…

No. I don’t like where I live (because it’s a big city) but I’m living near my family.

If not for that, I would probably be back in New Hampshire. I used to live there alone with a 100% work-from-home job and I would go weeks without speaking to another human being face-to-face. I left because it wasn’t great for my mental health but for some reason I still really want to go back.

I don’t think that would make much of a difference. Training AI on copyright-protected data appears to be fair use.

Maybe this isn’t the answer you’re looking for: my job is my passion and the idea of retiring sounds horrible. I image it will only happen when I’m too senile to keep doing what I love, and that’s clearly not something to look forward to. But who knows… I know old people who are tired and just want to rest.

(I got lucky, since I happened to be passionate about computer programming. I know most other people don’t have the same option.)

I had a six-month-long marriage. My ex-wife was not a nice person and everyone else could see it almost immediately, but I was swept away by how determined to be with me she was. It felt so good to have a woman who was attractive, successful, and very, very interested in me. Too good to be true, as it turned out. I’m not sure exactly what was wrong with her - something like borderline personality disorder? Once I committed to her, she became very jealous and would go from sweet to angry frequently and with no provocation. Although she only ever yelled at me, I was scared of her.

I’ve made mistakes in my life that were good for me because they were learning experiences. My marriage wasn’t one of them - I wish that it had never happened. However, I did still learn from it:

1. Don’t look down so much on people who make obvious, foolish mistakes. You might end up as one of them. I didn’t think I was the kind of person who would ever get divorced but here I am…

2. Admitting that you made a big mistake feels terrible, but the real problem is the big mistake, not the admission of it. I was a fool to be married for just six months, but I would have been a bigger fool if I stayed in that marriage longer than that. I’m still ashamed that I married my ex, but I’m proud that I had the courage to leave.

3. Time does heal wounds. All my hopes and dreams about the future with her were garbage, my judgement was no better than that of a daytime talk-show guest, and my humiliation was known to every single person who was important to me, since they were all at my wedding. Then years passed, and while I still haven’t spoken to some more distant relatives simply because I don’t want to explain that I’m not with my ex-wife any more, I have in fact moved on with my life.

5v USB charging port.

I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.

(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)