Coconuts have evolved to spread from island to island by floating, but it's still weird that one happened to float to the other side of the world in historic times. I would have guessed that either the currents could never take a coconut there or that the currents would have taken a coconut there long ago.
(When I visit Florida, I see coconuts float by sometimes. Some have been in the water a long time - they're covered in barnacles. However, if they're still floating does that mean they might still be viable?)
I was confused about how the restraining order could conceivably lead to shutting down the agency but apparently Leland Dudek simply wanted to spite the court.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” he said to Bloomberg News on Thursday. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.” He continued, “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency."
I hope that the "clarifying guidance" he received from the court before he changed his mind included an explanation of the judicial smackdown which he would receive if he tried this bullshit.
You're one of several people mentioning shared cultural references, but if you're male and your partner is female then I'm surprised that she has any interest in things like Thundercats or He-Man regardless of her age. I'm more of a Transformers fan myself and I've never even met a woman who would respond to anything Transformers-related with more than just polite disinterest.
I'm a nerdy heterosexual man, and in my experience practically no women share my interests or hobbies. Therefore my relationships have been built around doing the things that pretty much everyone enjoys - eating a nice meal, going for a walk, talking about current events, playing with pets, etc. A good partner is someone who enjoys doing these ordinary things with me. Maybe someone who does share my interests would be even better but I don't think finding a person like that is likely enough to be worth passing up other opportunities.
I wonder why your experience is apparently so different from mine. Am I unusual or are you?
I think that even in the scenario where AI is great at voice acting, there will be human voice actors left in the same way that there are people who perform live music left - a tiny number of superstars (new AIs will be trained on their performances), a few talented but obscure professionals who manage to make a relatively meager a living, and some hobbyists who do it for fun. There might even be more human voice actors than there are now simply because of population growth (or rather because of the growth of the population well-off enough to worry about that sort of thing). However, what Béart seems to be saying is that there won't be excellent AI voice acting, not that at least some human voice actors will have jobs despite the AI, and I don't think she's particularly qualified to make that prediction.
(I admit that I am baffled by the fact that people think AI won't be able to do something at all simply because AI isn't particularly good at doing it right now. Why are these people ignoring the extremely rapid rate of progress of AI?)
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to those guys, at least because an older relative of mine was a skilled mechanical engineer who simply could not make the transition from pencil-and-paper drafting to CAD software despite trying very hard. He had the common "old people have difficulty using computers" problem despite actually having a great deal of interest in the new technology.
With that said, he was out of a job whether or not he deserved that.
I think Béart is a good voice actor but I don't think that gives her special insight into the future of AI development. On the contrary, those people who would lose both money and meaning if a certain task is done well by a machine will be biased towards underestimating the probability that that task will be done well by a machine in the near future.
I've heard that statistic but it doesn't match what I've seen in my own family. My grandparents weren't physically intimate with each other even when I was a kid and they were relatively young. (I lived with them so I would have noticed if they ever wanted private time together, and they never did.) This, combined with the fact that many people in nursing homes are in no condition to actually have (consensual) sex, makes me wonder if the explanation for that statistic is not as straightforward as it seems.
But are you saying that there can be romantic attraction without significant physical aspects, or are you talking about romantic attraction with fewer (but still some) physical aspects but more emotional ones?
What do you mean by "emotional attraction"? I enjoy spending time with my good friends, and I would even say that I love them in the way that friends love each other, but I am not attracted to them.
I don't see how I could have a romantic relationship with someone I didn't want to have sex with. The man I mentioned who is no longer attracted to women his age does have a woman his age in his life who was his girlfriend when they met 25 years ago and the two of them still enjoy spending time together, but they no longer have a physical relationship although he does still have a sex drive. He's sad about this but accepts it as the way things are for older people. I don't know how she feels.
I can understand how you don't want to date someone a lot younger than you, although I don't have any personal experience with that - I've never had a partner more than a couple of years younger than I am. However, I'm a man who has had little in common with most of the women I've dated, simply because I have little in common with most women. (My hobbies might be crudely called "autistic".) Thus, for me dating has involved finding women I get along with surprisingly well despite having so little in common.
Maybe I also wouldn't enjoy the company of someone a lot younger than me, but the main problems I foresee are that (1) no one like that would want to date me and (2) even if I found someone like that who wanted to date me now then I doubt she would still want to date me when I was old as opposed to just middle-aged.
Floating upstream - what a coconut!