FishFace

Do you understand on an intellectual (as opposed to instinctive) level which topics are too serious for small talk?

Because if not then start there. If so, then it's possible to get better by taking your time to reply and think over what you're about to say so you can back out!

The weather isn't a topic that will last for long. Maybe you can ask "did you see that crazy rain/wind/hail/whatever" but either the subject is going to change or one of you will segue into "I remember when I was xyz and there was this crazy rain/wind/hail/whatever".

Conversations are about finding connections and judging what the other person might want to hear. Sometimes there's no connection though and you've just got to bring up something else. Questions are good because they allow the other person to talk :p

Ope

Pathfinding is another great example.

Yes, neural networks are, usually, AI, but no, thermostats are not AI.

The definition of AI is more or less "a machine that can accomplish something that an intelligent thing like a human can do but which would be unfeasible or impossible to create an explicit algorithm for the machine to follow in order to accomplish it."

So natural language translation is AI: before it became usable in the 2000s, this was seen as something that only humans could do. Producing meaningful text and recognisable images from scratch or a prompt is AI for the same reason.

On the threadiverse people equate AI with Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. something capable of true reasoning, with something we might call "understanding" (not a concept that I can attempt to define, but if you think about that ability which LLMs lack in spite of being able to produce text as if they had it) but this is ahistorical.

Why would repeatable read raise an error? I'm a little rusty but I thought it was only serialisable that could do, and that repeatable read simply ensured that the committed writes of transaction 2 would not be read in transaction 1, so it updating over the top of 2 is fine.

Wouldn't that be an error due to serialisation failure if in postgres if you enabled serialisable isolation?

If you didn't, you could get anything, because unless I'm mistaken this is the typical example used to illustrate what goes wrong when you don't have full serialisable isolation.

It's condensation

Well if we have evidence of that sure, but in the case of PTFE for example (which is a PFAS) we don't have that, so banning it seems just as nonsensical. Yos be banning it because it might be harmful.

Cool, I'm not gonna tell you you must use teflon pans, but I think we were talking about bans...

That kind of thinking applies to any chemical though, surely

1. there is nothing as non-stick as non-stick coatings; some alternatives come close, but you are still losing something
2. what about other applications of PTFE? PTFE tape for sealing pipes, PTFE feet on computer mice, PTFE-based lubricant, electrical insulation, ... the uses are many.

Damn, you're right, I was thinking of PFOA not PFAS.

However, I think blanket avoiding an entire class of chemicals without evidence is an overreaction.