A tornado spawned essentially on top of my house in June and applied enough torque to fuck up my foundation. One corner of my house is coming off now. I'm fighting my homeowners insurance to cover it and I have a foundation expert coming out tomorrow to give me estimates for the costs of repairs. My cousin from ohio knows all about real estate, so he gave me and my mom so many tips for how to get the insurance to cover it. I requested a new adjuster for a second opinion yesterday and one should be contacting me next week.
This whole thing has me freaking out and more severe storms have rolled through and made it worse. The whole right side of my house has shifted on top of the one corner coming off. Found more cracks in the wall of the finished basement today. We had a crazy storm yesterday, which probably cause the cracks.
As the title. Why are some things allowed, e.g. the modifications to the wh east wing, while others are halted e.g. some states redistricting plan?
Also, why is the law so weak as to be frequently weilded as a strategic weapon/ shield if youre sufficiently well connected? Same can be asked of religion, actually.
I am looking into ultrastar (singstar alternative)
Is there an easy way, to start with a proper Library without doing all the editing work myself? Sailing is not a problem, but I can't find anything that still works.
Recently I discarded all of the Harry Potter movies that I've had in my collection. I had the mainline ones and two of the three Fantastic Beasts films. But, as much as I have liked the visual representation of what the films projected, I didn't feel that they were faithful adaptations. Because they changed too much for my liking.
Instead, I prefer the books because they do have better character representation than the uneven scaling of how the characters are in the movies. That's what I found important than anything else between book and film. If anyone were to ask me as to what exactly is the best way to get into Harry Potter, I would say the books, because they're going to get mislead by what the movies project. Is it the best optimal experience of the universe established.
It seems that UAE is literally nothing but high rises or skyscrapers (basically the same with Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Qatar) while Oman has none of that (since most of the infrastructure is marble white or using bright colors contrasting the sun), though they're on an even playing field when speaking about their wealth. Is it because Oman has a different approach on how they spend their money or retain cultural heritage?
Just gonna say it, back in like 2019-2023, I was EXTREMELY pro AI. I messed around with OpenAI's playground thing, messed around with that Dall-E Mini/craiyon thing, and was one of the first to hop on ChatGPT when it came out.
I had this really dumb opinion that it's just fun stuff to mess around with! This isn't gonna do any real harm! Thinking, stupidly, that most people wouldn't use it to like replace writers or just do their work for them.
It was around 2024 I became a lot more skeptical of it. I kept seeing slop art in like local restaurants and even this one club I used to hit up that I absolutely don't anymore. And the amount of time people say "I asked ChatGPT" drives me up the wall.
Like are you third partying your thinking!? And seeing it just dominate Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok also made me begin to lose it. It was literally the Dead Internet Theory becoming a fact. I felt like such an idiot for being pro-AI and thinking people would use it wisely.
That said, I'm not exactly anti-AI, to be fair. I have local LLM models on my computer running through LMStudio if I ever have want or need of these chatbots. It makes it way harder to use it and my poor gaming laptop screams for mercy every time I want to use Qwen, so I dunno.
I guess I'd say I'm AI-Skeptical and leaning more toward negative. But this isn't about me, it's about you. What do you feel about generative AI?
Having recently seen the first trilogy among Nolan's works, I wonder what opinions you hold about the movies in general. Seeing that I'm quite late to the party, I expect some strong and mature takes in the comments, but you are still free to voice any opinion you may have.
Example: Old people often complain about young people not having "basic knowledge" and say that younger generations know and understand less of the world than they do.
I heard that back in the days, people used to just go when their work was done on the farms and there was no concept of 9-5 (these days seem 24 hours work). There used to be a lot of holidays.
Is that true? If it is, then given the abundance in technology, why our work hours increased and why do we have such weird lives that we live to work?
I have a '79 corvette with <90k miles. I love it, but I don't drive it. I would like to sell it, ideally to someone else who will both love and drive it. I don't want to use Facebook and I live in a rural area. Is there another good option?
ATM's in the Netherlands cap at 50€ (so any higher denomination must be requested at the bank), due to people using contactless payments frequently there's less incentive for cash. Even then, why did the EU decide to print 100€ or 200€ notes (forget about a 500€ note as they've stopped printing more since 2019 but it is still legal tender). Stores refuse to accept a 200€ note for a 150€ purchase, why do these denominations exist?
The world is considering renaming United States on their maps. As the indigenous people discovered and explored the land thousands of years before the first Europeans, it's fitting that they should do it. Many nations made up the area. Is there any name that would be representitive of all?
There's a style of 'animation' that has become widely used on YouTube where they take a still image of a character then make them sway back and forth repetitively. I guess it's cheap to make but I find it distracting and weird, even a bit patronising, as if they think we need moving pictures to keep us interested. I think it started with Veritassium and spread to other edutainment YouTube channels and now I just flat out avoid channels which use it.