I went to a technical college that had a police training program. Technical colleges sometimes have the reputation of being glorified high schools. That’s mostly unfair, but there were three guys in some of my classes who were determined to make it that way. Give you one guess as to what program they were in.

I wouldn’t trust those three to be security guards at a shopping mall.

Now that there is some classic American anti-Catholic sentiment.

Large corporations are allergic to capital expenditures. That is, they don’t like investing in new things to make the business run. They want their previous investment to run as long as possible. On occasion, the workers will arrange big projects to be covered as “maintenance” rather than capital expenditures.

Oil companies have invested in oil pumps and refineries. They could invest in all sorts of other things, but that’s less money in the hands of shareholders. That’s all there is to it. Money spent on new investments isn’t making them richer right now.

New DnD artifact dropped.

Oh, they did. Telling if someone was really dead was difficult until modern medicine figured it out in the last century or so. People got buried alive by unwitting village elders all the time.

You do these things to setup solidarity and organize. Want a general strike? It starts by getting lots of people to come out and protest. Then, people see that there are other people who will join them in a general strike. You can’t start by randomly calling one. Each individual person will see that they’re taking a risk of losing their job, and that risk can only be justified if everyone else is doing the same thing. Can’t fire all of us. If the organizers of the same protests you’ve been going to are saying we should all participate in a general strike, then individuals are assured they won’t be sticking their own head out there only for it to get hit by a truncheon.

Replace “general strike” with whatever sort of large scale action you’d prefer.

Yes, and if you pop into conservative spaces for a lurk, you will unironically see them saying they’re the real inheritors of punk rock.

Snyder v. United States from June 2024. The ruling is that money given before an official act is a “bribe”, but money given after an official act is a “gratuity”.

Yes, our Supreme Court is batfucked in the head, why do you ask?

We all know how AI has made things worse, but here’s some context on how it’s outright backwards.

Early search engines had a context problem. To use an example from “Halt and Catch Fire”, if you search for “Texas Cowboy”, do you mean the guys on horseback driving a herd of cows, or do you mean the football team? If you search for “Dallas Cowboys”, should that bias the results towards a different answer? Early, naive search engines gave bad results for cases like that. Spat out whatever keywords happen to hit the most.

Sometimes, it was really bad. In high school, I was showing a history teacher how to use search engines, and he searched for “China golden age”. All results were asian porn. I think we were using Yahoo.

AltaVista largely solved the context problem. We joke about its bad results now, but it was one of the better search engines before Google PageRank.

Now we have AI unsolving the problem.

Some brain cells cobbled together from stem cells that have his DNA. None of the life experiences that made his music. You could likely get similar results with the same technique using the DNA of any random person on the street.

There’s some servers using SSDs as a direct extension of RAM. It doesn’t currently have the write endurance or the latency to fully replace RAM. This solves one of those.

Imagine, though, if we could unify RAM and mass storage. That’s a major assumption in the memory heirarchy that goes away.

TIL boobs look bigger on CRTs

If you don’t have an especially long commute, good chance you’re between 12k to 15k per year. That’s a typical yearly amount, and leases are usually set around there.

13k in six months is about twice the average.

On the contrary, this is pretty close to what we have right now. Companies don’t like to spend much on R&D once they’re out of the startup phase. A good chunk of that startup phase R&D was actually taking place at a university with public funds. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals. So the answer to the question of “when does it get handed off to private industry?” is to just look at what’s happening already.

The exception is big monopolies. AT&T’s Bell Labs is a legendary R&D department. IBM, Microsoft, and Google all likewise have significant pure R&D going on, and even engineers who don’t like those companies salivate at the opportunity to work in that capacity for them.

But then you’ve got big monopolies on your hands, and that’s a whole other problem.

In the manufacturing space, people are questioning if patents help them at all. There is no stopping China from copying your design and selling it on Aliexpress. In fact, since you’re almost certainly getting your product manufactured in China in the first place, there is no stopping the very manufacturing plant you’re using from producing extras and undercutting you.

Consider this old EEVblog vid about bringing a product to market, and the #1 tip is “don’t bother with a patent”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BL1O0xCcY

Patents have evolved to be useful to patent trolls. That’s it.

That’s not what Dorsey and Musk are after, though. They want to kill copyright law because it’s inconvenient for AI training data.

We have the wife of the world’s most famous pro wrestling promoter, who someone gave the title of Secretary of Education. You may ask why the the wife of the world’s most famous pro wrestling promoter is Secretary of Education. As in, that is a question that may be asked.

I can make the sound of one hand clapping.

It was a thing that went around my middle school. You keep your hand at about a 90 degree angle to your arm, and then flap back and forth with your fingers loose so it hits your palm. Takes a little practice.

I’m someone who doesn’t even like click adventure games (I said it, and I’m not taking it back), and I like this one.

I swore that kid had braces, and it took me a second to figure it out.

Also, the United Parcel Service.

Tried shipping a GPU to PR from mainland USA once. UPS wanted $60 because they think of PR as international. The USPS will do it for a flat rate shipping box of like $15.