For inside hobbies there’s board game groups, tabletop roleplaying, TCGs (Magic, Pokemon). A lot of Local Game stores run events that don’t require you to know anyone to start. If you like cooking, there could be local classes or a short course run by a college that you could do.

More out of left field, I found that dancing introduces you to a lot of people. Lindy Hop (vintage swing dancing), Salsa, Bootscooting. Pick your poison and there is likely to be a dozen classes or social dances in your area. Not for everyone of course, but usually if someone goes out to dance they want to be social, so you’re bound to find someone to chat with.

You mean ‘Creepy Polar Express Harry Potter dies and goes to so-fi toy heaven’? It was not a decent ad. It was weird and smooth. Every shot was just short enough to prevent Sora from giving the child sixteen eyes and giraffe antlers. The writing felt like ai. “One day this guy had a dream. He dreamt about dreaming of his dream. We hope you can dream a dream someday to” while a version of the toys r us theme plays that sounds like it’s been composed for the cinematic trailer for the gritty Toys R Us film.

It was just weird.

This Coke ad is just as bad. The trucks change shape in every shot. At one point the AI thinks that the angle of the trailer means that it doesn’t have a truck at the front, so a trailer drives itself into town. Again, every shot is short in order to stop the AI from making the polar bears melt into each other. No one commits to a movement, the AI does not understand it is drawing squirrels so doesn’t understand how squirrels move, which makes the squirrels sort of mill about for a bit on screen before we cut away rapidly. Uncanny and creepy.

This is a bad trend that I don’t think we are going to see the end of.

If your only requirement is that a man once existed by the name of Jesus and was crucified, then the bar is on the floor. Jesus was not a rare name, and the Romans crucified many, many people. It is not out of the realm of possibility that these two common data points would overlap and give us a crucified Jesus.

Is there proof that it was THE Jesus though? Do we have corroborating evidence of a man travelling the countryside with his posse, changing the minds and hearts of the masses?

Some of my local supermarkets have these already. The worst part is that they use real shitty, dark displays. It was always easy to see the price when it was black ink on white or yellow paper, but trying to check the price on what amounts to a calculator screen at ten paces is horrid. Doesn’t help that the displays are so much smaller than paper tags, and the stores like to put the “3 for $10” as the priority, meaning the actual unit price is millimetres tall.

But is Android doing the on device LLM already? Because it sounds like they aren’t…