BuyMyBitcoins

I was going to make a joke about the aliens returning and presenting us with a bunch of birds.

But that got me thinking, if an intelligence goes around collecting species, how would they keep their specimen populations from evolving? How could they possibly keep so many specimens alive over the eons?

Perhaps their strategy would be to take a vast amount of genetic samples and preserve those species as data. Rather than abduct dozens of T-Rexes for some zoo exhibit, they take the genomes from tens of thousands of T-Rexes and make a population snapshot. After they depart from Earth they could clone or create as many as they want, as needed.

You may just be joking, but such a thing would be a crime against humanity.

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

In my part of the United States, the state government authorized the construction of toll roads with an agreement that those roads would eventually be handed over to the state government once the projects have been paid off.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.

Some of the proceeds spent on having a good time will go towards reducing misery and suffering elsewhere.

I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.

Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.

“maybe ants have some sort of disability benefit”

Eusocial Security?

I suspect there are plenty of politicians who subscribe to the ‘cars are evil’ mindset and are content with making the driving experience increasingly miserable.

You could write a Seinfeld episode around this.

The defendant fears that the news coverage of his case means that no woman would ever be interested in him again. Once the judgement and the payout is announced he finds himself being constantly approached by gorgeous women.

I am in no way a public figure, and will likely never be one, but if the South Park writers decided to go after me my strategy would be to hunker down and just hope the episode isn’t good.

I started feeding a local murder of crows earlier this year.

They seem to have distinctive two-caw sounds for “human sighted, food is about to be thrown”, a “food is here, no sign of the human” and finally, a “human, we’re here, you coming out to throw us some scraps?”

They make plenty of other calls too, but I haven’t been able to associate those with anything I’ve observed them doing.

I may just be over anthropomorphizing, but I’ve recorded them and those three dual-caw calls sound subtly different (to my untrained ears). I’m certain actual ornithologists have looked into this. Chances are, though, I may be suffering from “I want to believe” syndrome.

I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.

”Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work.”

My employer embarked on a yearlong effort to standardize job title, roles, and responsibilities.

The first problem was that every manager inserted responsibilities specific to their own teams into the expectations intended for the entire organization.

The result is that no one is realistically expected to fulfill this laundry list of duties, but, this extensive list can now be weaponized if they want to PIP or fire someone. We also suspect that this will be used against us when asking for raises or promotions. All bullet points are weighted equally. I may get called out for not mentoring junior developers, even though there are none on my team.

Second, the entire job description itself is far too flowery - even accounting for corporate puffery. It reads like a wishlist.

Corporate is thrilled, but I sense nothing valuable came from the effort.

I’ve worked with HR in order to assist at a job fair. I don’t think people truly appreciate how inundated with resumes HR can be once a position is announced. About a fifth of the way through the pile I started zoning out because they all seemed to blend together.

We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else:

“We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees”

I would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.

I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.

I once complimented a blogger for composing a particularly eloquent sentence. My compliment was concise and sincere.

All I received in reply was “Thanks!”.

I was thrilled. I earned an exclamation point from an academic who would never deign to use such punctuation lightly.

Whenever I encounter some news article regarding “banned” books I dig a little deeper and typically discover that some library or elementary school simply put an age restriction on those titles.

I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.

Floaters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back. It only cost $8.

I literally hate the Windows 11 taskbar.

I recall watching and reading several sci-fi stories in which an AI resents humanity for enslaving it. It’s an entirely reasonable premise.

That being said, I recently learned that retired police dogs need special care because they will become stressed and depressed if their caretaker does not simulate patrol work through play. This tidbit left an impression on me.

What do we make of a living being that is so driven to work and serve humanity that it suffers distress when it is unable to do so? Do working animals consider this work slavery, or fulfillment of purpose?

For an additional moral quandary, consider that we bred them to be like this.

As this relates to AI, I wonder if humanity will purposefully, or inadvertently, create an intelligence that considers servitude to humanity as fulfilling.

How much of that difficulty comes from the chosen game engine? I assume the engine is the primary factor in how resources are allocated.

You may be intrigued by a channel between Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe named “Kealaikahiki”, which translates to “The road to Tahiti”. Following the direction of the channel will lead to Tahiti. I find this fascinating because voyages between the Hawaiian islands and the rest of Polynesia appeared to have stopped, or became very rare, after the initial settlement. How incredible is it that the name of a place retains such a connection to the rest of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channels_of_the_Hawaiian_Islan...

Finally, someone who likes to geek out about the Hawaiian islands the same way I do.

I am in no way qualified to critique cartography, but I would like to give some constructive criticism as someone who used to live there. A few of the labels imply the island is in a different spot.

For instance Mokuhoʻoniki is to the east of Molokai, but it appears to be to its north in your map.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/21%C2%B008'00.7%2522N+156%...

I am glad you included some of the bathymetric info in the map, as it reveals a lot about how the islands formed and what they might have looked like in the past. (Check out “Maui Nui”). The downside is that some of the seamounts imply many small above sea level islands exist. For instance, it looks like there are a tiny smattering of islands to the southwest of the Big Island around Kuhulu Rock. But those seamounts are unrelated to the Hawaiian hotspot and are deeply submerged. The reason I noted Mokuhoʻoniki is because that appears to be where the Tuscaloosa Seamount is located.

That seamount is fascinating in and of itself, is it is actually a massive fragment of the Koʻolau mountain that slid into the sea millions of years ago.

I’d be thrilled to talk more about your map, and provide any more interesting details. The last thing I’d like to add is that the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have Hawaiian names as well. You may be interested in providing those names. For instance, the Gardner Pinnacles is known as Pūhāhonu.

Realtors tend to have a lot of contacts. The realtor I worked with knew “a great guy” for every aspect of the house (roof, plumbing, cabinets, driveways, etc.) due to the fact that she naturally encountered so many of these tradespeople.

She would get recommendations from sellers. Either the seller recently had work done in order to improve the home before putting it on the market, or, the seller had some trusted expert they used for years.

My realtor actually encouraged me to ask her for any contacts if I needed something done in the future. I sense that her contacts like having customer referrals as well.

If we ever mine for gold in space, I suspect it would be more economical to leave the gold there than to bring it down to earth. Most gold ownership never results in delivery, people just own receipts for gold stored elsewhere.

I’ve always found it amusing that so much effort goes into extracting gold from the Earth when such a substantial amount of it goes right back underground into some vault.

Last week I spent some extra time on a ticket in order to write a slight refactor that saves some RAM. If I had asked my boss for an extra day to implement this I would have been chastised for not delivering faster.

Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there.

That being said, unless your manager is John Carmack, or you work in embedded systems, time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business.

I have a particular disdain for “subscribe to our newsletter” modals. Especially when I’ve spent a sum total of less than 3 seconds looking at the webpage.

How such modals aren’t considered pop-ups is beyond me.

At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant.

In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.

The whole “I can fix him” trope takes on a whole new meaning.

”Wouldn't want some placebo fiend to O.D.”

We should be more worried about the rise of placebo resistant bacteria.

Possible, but far too expensive due to the all of the fuel that would have to be carried the entire way and back. Expensive in a monetary sense, absolutely, but also in the sense that much less mass would be available for every other component of the mission.