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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.










  • The fatphobia is real, but I’ve never bought the bit about the books being against Hermione’s anti-slavery stance (I assume that’s what you mean by a woman who speaks up as well). My interpretation was that Hermione was always assumed to be in the right because slavery is almost universally condemned in modern society. But she’s standing up against a system where even one of her two closest friends has been indoctrinated into it. Standing up to “others” is hard, but standing up to peer pressure is harder.

    That said, the depiction of chattel slavery is of course inaccurate. Slave revolts were common, whereas the house elves want to be subservient to humans. I guess that could be marked up to house elves being a distinct species that may have been manipulated to be subservient, but that’s never explained.



  • I hated that attack line so much. It was about an optional benefit that my representative wanted to add for Medicare recipients, a voluntary consultation on living wills. This had been requested by the AARP. Sarah Palin latched onto it, lied that it would press people into ending their lives, lied that it would be mandatory, lied, lied, lied, and lied some more. It really demonstrates how much Sarah Palin was a large part of the Republican Party’s descent into Trumpism, though you could also trace that back to Reagan’s lies about “welfare queens”.