Ten years ago we were getting ten times the weekly questions that we're getting today.

That's from the public site analytics tools that you get access to at 10k reps. It's not the private moderator-only admin analytics.

It all leads to asphyxiation asymptotically, and probably a good bit before. Zombies that don't know they're dead yet.

@tchrist 🤕 ouch 😳

Even the answers per question ratio has fallen on hard times.

@Robusto Whoa whoa whoa... don't be haggling with -my- money... million and a quarter no higher.

Watch the distance between those two lines convert as you move right.

@HippoSawrUs OK now you're giving it away for free?

chatGPT is the final nail in the coffin

@Mitch Jess who you be callin a gibbon olman?

@HippoSawrUs how about 100 rep points? That's really all I got.

@Robusto Ho w about just regular old vomit. projectile vomit is kind of high bar.

@Mitch OK. If you're not ashamed to cheap out, I have no problem with it.

@Robusto I shot coffee through my nose a couple of days ago.

@Mitch Limbo dancer!

I only choked a little on it today

@HippoSawrUs An excellent purgative.

That only proves you're old

Cures nothing

@HippoSawrUs Aren't neti pots the hottest thing?

@think_meaning_buildß Say what you will about ChatGPT but it is much easier to use than StackOverflow and is also more satisfying (whether it is more accurate is almost irrelevant)

I'm not seeing all my tags all the time

@Robusto No shame here.

It's like there's a chatroom

and a parallel universe chatroom

@HippoSawrUs Nice!

On command?

@HippoSawrUs The messaging group that you don't belong to?

@Mitch there's a chatGPT chatroom open 24/7 with them chatting with each other

When other people are in the kitchen and it sounds like they're talking about something that you're not invited to.

@tchrist My daughter-in-law and her mother tried to get me to use a neti pot like a decade ago

@think_meaning_buildß 1) Yeah I've seen videos with two chatbots conversing. Kind of boring really.

@HippoSawrUs Nay, I need no further proofs.

2) waste of energy, pushing out CO2 into the atmosphere for nothing.

I was like, 'What is wrong with you Washington people!?'

I blame the Grateful Dead in general

Bunch of hippies

Get a haircut!

What else would I blame, apples?

Oh, the drugs

Oh. That.

Surely there can't be systemic hallucinations

In expected news he's giving his fellow felons all a job:

People on the Atlantic side don't pour water down their noses on purpose

We had to squirt saline down babies' noses and suction out the snot

I nearly quit

@HippoSawrUs Mass hysteria.

Yes

Exactly

Toast.

Well, I have to go buy hot cocoa now

@HippoSawrUs If you were a true hot cocoa aficionado you'd already have a supply.

Because I bought mugs that mentioned cocoa

And movies

So now I have to buy cocoa, popcorn

An Amazon gift card

It's hard to speak with someone who is not an aficionado in this pursuit.

And possibly marshmallows

Just the cheap kind

But I bought my brother-in-law the British kind

@HippoSawrUs They just won't stand for Redcoats, that's what.

Not the cheap marshmallows! My body is a temple!

No, I'm buying our grandson's girlfriend the cheap cocoa

@HippoSawrUs It's 60 degrees here right now. Not Washington Crossing the Delaware for Rescue Hot Cocoa from the Redcoats weather.

And very good marshmallows, of course

@HippoSawrUs baking

Are there bad marshmallows?

I'm only allowed to smell them

The kind without any marsh in them.

Unless I'm angry

Then everybody is afraid

Sorry I meant the kind without any rendered horse hooves.

And throws marshmallows at me

I'm okay with it

I take it you would do anything for a few marshmallows.

My stepdaughter sneaks them to me

Sneaks?

Hides them in sugar-free snacks or whatever

Like 17 at a time

It's almost like heroin but better

Sneaks, as in slips

Are you insulin dependent? What's your hemoglobin A1C at?

I'm sure they're synonyms

Yes, IDK now

@HippoSawrUs JUst get Swiss Miss. All-in-one and you can microwave it.

@tchrist That is an impertinent question.

It's ok to have one or two if you hide them in a wheel barrel portion of ruffage.

I've been starving all morning so I can go get cheap cocoa

I've run out of rewards for the British kind

@HippoSawrUs Oh yes. Very old ones. Pre covid ones.

@Robusto I'm just trying to assess how sneaky she has to be!

The thing is, you always just want to start with straight cocoa powder.

Nothing else added to it whatsoever.

I buy the Starbucks cocoa from Costco. I have about six or seven canisters.

Then you build your own, more sanely and safely.

Unless you're a dog.

I just have to walk around Walmart

With people who believe masks are the Devil

@Robusto THat sounds like cheating.

I don't have to drink the cocoa or anything

You're outright cheating.

I'm Christmas shopping

I buy pajama pants

for myself

Are you in CostCo right now?

Add skim milk and stevia. And butter. :)

LLBean if I have rewards

@Mitch Hey, I paid for them. I usually keep the supply at half a dozen, because they stop stocking those when spring comes.

I do have a Costco card

Thanks for reminding me

@Robusto Still and all. It sounds like cheating

Costco can go f themselves.

I spend $160 of my $180 TJX rewards

It was nearly impossible

You pay $100 a year, they check your ID when you come in, and then they have the effing -gall- to do a shoplifting check as you're leaving.

GA has nothing but junk

@Mitch That's funny, they don't check any of us. Do you look particularly shifty?

I'd like to see someone try to shoplift a 100-count tray of chocolate croissants.

We have a Christmas blanket now with pink houses on it

IDK why

It seemed like a good idea at the time

@Robusto Whether it's me or everyone, eff them.

And it's warm

@tchrist Don't eat all that at one sitting.

@Mitch I never do.

We get a Costco card for Christmas every year from my stepdaughter

@HippoSawrUs De nada.

@tchrist Very temperate.

I think she wants me to buy my own marshmallows

Maybe 1000 of them

@HippoSawrUs Oh. That's sorta nice.

I'll try to be nicer

That way you don't have to pay money in order to -pay money-.

Happy Holidays

That was gripe number three.

unless you count it under gripe 1.

@HippoSawrUs I think they have that many.

@Robusto Yeah, no, that wouldn't fit in your pants.

Or, and hear me out, unless you were somehow missing a leg.

@Mitch Your devilment knows no bounds, sir.

Which is an alternative weight loss surgery too.

I don't know, but maybe Costco is checking prostheses now.

@Robusto bows

gets tie caught in rotating car parts

@Robusto I considered suggesting that to the anti-greeters (the ones who do the receipt check as you leave), but ... they might actually do it.

@Mitch I'm not being woke, but you can't use the term "anti-greeters" anymore.

@Robusto How dare you call me racist.

Their proper name is "The-Employees-Who-Kick-The-Shit-Out-Of-Shoplifters" now.

Is Michelle Yeoh in everything now? Everywhen Everysome All at once, Star Trek:Diversity, Crazy Rich Asians, some other movie, Wicked...

Wait Wicked part 2?

THere's a -second- part?

OMG

Did they go to the same fake business school seminar as CostCo?

@Robusto I go into a store, I don't want to have to talk to anybody, even the checkout person. But that shoplifter guy -has- to say something.

FU Costco

I mean it's just his job sure

@Mitch Perhaps I misjudged you. Go ahead, switch to BJ's. You'll be happy there.

@M.A.R. The newspapers seem to be cheering on recent al-Qaeda affiliates, which is a bit odd.

and I bet once some time a long time ago one guy did by mistake walked out with something he didn't pay for (it's always a dude) but really it was a mistake he forgot the -50 gallons of crude oil- in the lower rack of the cart.

@Robusto T be frank, to be honest, and to be clear, I may have been talking about BJ's this whole time.

@Mitch I want my money back.

Talk about bait and switch ...

BTW, I believe crude only comes in 40-gal. bbls.

@tchrist I like ELU and would like it to survive, but the closure rate is only a symptom of a product that’s losing (or has lost) competitiveness. So what do you do? Experiment with looser application of the rules; stretch the model; find new areas to explore.

@HippoSawrUs The best place to buy yourself Christmas gifts. But why are those fleece blankets so expensive??

@tchrist I did not name/blame/shame/flame/lame anybody.

Two seemingly contrary things can be true at the same time.

@Mitch Stop. You're going to get Elon Musk to convince Trump to do away with Medicare.

@Robusto I have both 'Musk' and 'Trump' as mute words for any messages, so not only can I not read what you said, I don't know what I'm even saying right now.

@Mitch Are "mute words" a real possibility in chat?

@Robusto Sadly, no.

You could probably write an adblock filter for that

curses

But I'm sure you could whip up some javascript that would do it.

jinx

@Mitch Yeah, I could. It'll have to wait till someone discovers a cure for laziness, though.

I remember when AJAX was a new crazy thing to use.

And then they'd have to get me to submit to the cure.

now I can't remember the last time it was even mentioned.

years ago surely

@Mitch How old are you?

It's the "fetch API" now

@Robusto That'll never ha

Oh

I get it.

They made fetch happen

I always use jQuery for those things. Much simpler.

@Robusto Does that date me?

I don't think -I- would date me.

High standards.

@Mitch Well ... if the AJAX fits ...

or I could be setting myself up for something much worse.

wasn't AJAX a new thing in the late 2000s? or early 2010a?

by then I had already created my own DSL, was programming in that, and creating an API in that to write in an even simpler DSL.

I call it Bit Mapping.

There were only 2 values, which I called 'A' and 'B'.

@Mitch I believe it was the early 2K teens.

And I could use it to index all integer values by a logarithmic encoding.

And then I used the integers to encode letters and all character sets.

I called that 'OneCode' because there was one code for all characters.

Turns out AJAX (as such) was born in 2005.

And then for flow of control, I had keywords 'DO IT' and 'MAKE IT SO'

Before that people were using the XMLHTTPRequest object, or something like that.

and If got really snippy I'd use the command 'JUST MAKE IT SO ALREADY'

@Robusto Yeah. Gross.

SO from that graph, the Japanese life expectancy is mid eighties... that's kind of a lot.

And with so many diseases and traumas and such that can happen well before then, most people are probably dying in their nineties.

That's a lot of walkers and senior support.

@Mitch My Japanese mother-in-law lived to 104. Both of her sisters were centenarians as well.

I mean, she was born three years before radio became a commercial venture.

To map her against a technology curve you'd have to plot it using a log chart.

@Robusto I did not mean to suggest you did. My apologies. I'm just trying to avoid people rounding up a posse on elu meta, complete with wanted posters and mug shots. That never ends well.

@Xanne No arguments from me on any of that. Some of the good questions go to ELL now. But I do feel you've identified a real issue that deserves to be addressed and which can be improved. I just don't know how to go about trying to do that. ELU opted out of the AI experiment, which we didn't think would help the site.

@Mitch No, you misrecall. Please remember the plural of Ajax is Aeantes.

Remember too that things exist prior to and independent of the nomenclatural act that creates their name; see earlier discussion here of holotypes and such. Said nomenclatural act does not reïfy things out of thin air that never existed before. The thing was always already there; only the name is new. But their names can survive them, in which case we are left with only the pristine word, naked and alone.