digitalsushi

Could the GPS provide a correct carrier wave for every electrical system to synchronize with?

in the 1980s we had the McDLT, a styrofoam container to keep the hot side of a hamburger hot, and the cold side cold. This desk kinda reminds me of that.

The fact that the one AI with a French first name went full French is hilarious.

we could just not use the old cliches, French people are just as hard working as the rest of us

A car caught by a dog has no purpose. The activity concludes with no output.

ii'd suppose there's an equilibrium where people will not or can not any longer tolerate the system and breaking it is superior to enduring it

but what if people managing society are using software to pre-empt trends and keep us perfectly balanced and docile

then, perhaps yes, PE will eventually own everything and we'll pay per view and rent it all back, as long as it's comfortable enough not to bother changing

I got sopwith.exe from my uncle's "big blue disks" subscription. plus a lot of other racy games an 8 year old shouldn't have played.

I tried playing a copy on a modern computer and the game started and finished on its own in about 1/4 of a second! i'm not that fast anymore!

I got very good at dropping the bomb while upside down and then flipping and getting outta there. i was also obsessed with disney's tale spin and imagined it was the seaduck.

If the majority of mail stops are junk mail only, I would love to see some napkin math of the effect of all those diesel/gasoline accelerations per mailbox, dropped across the daily fleet of drop offs.

They paid for an opportunity. Sometimes paying for a chance nets you nothing.

If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for, you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.

If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a winner, in the same objective sense.

Probably controversial. Eh.

that's weird cause if i am paid in tokens, how do i use those tokens on my employer's workflows?

shouldnt the tokens belong to the employer?

i understand the concept of an engineering having tools they own but if they're gonna shove tokens-as-utility down our throats, no boss, i'm not hooking you into my well water.

You are not alone. There are people who prefer medium sized knives.

after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be.

i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.

I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month

it's like bragging you're Spartacus

I wouldn't mind it getting fully tested in court, to be honest.

This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.

The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in

We don't need PCs or smartphones, we have AI now. They don't need to worry.

meddlesome priests?

there's always room for another software arms race. the personal area network is not ready and the evolution will be painful and good for someone - us, or them, without regard for what those divisions are, it's going to hurt.

if software engineers get displaced, they will eventually drift into other jobs that benefit from people who solve problems like software engineers. and if the former software engineers are willing to work at a rate reduced to their former positions, and if they bring better efficiencies with them, then there will be a slow cascade.

it doesn't follow that all software engineers are excellent at other work, please don't take that from my quip. but i could see the pattern, over time, being large enough to identify.

since software engineering jobs historically are very well paid, it does give some plausibility that former engineers working for less money would have this displacing effect.

its all icky no matter what i think, maybe someone else can tell me why i'm wrong and cheer me up

It's about as safe as trusting all the add-ons in your IDE, and all the packages your node app pulls from random package repos.

It's just the plausible blame that shifts.

If you read the script before you pipe it into your shell, it's safe.

And if that's not safe, then it's just as dangerous to trust that an unopened bottle of ketchup is safe.

Nothing is safe. Everything is a judgement. Being culpable is a professional service. Lucky people out-earn unlucky people. The world is a scary place.

This is an incredible tool.

As a child in the 1980s we'd go for long walks in the woods. One time a friend brought a pair of 30 inch bolt cutters with him, you know, as a personality extension. And of course, there was some dubious reason to use them, and he was a hero for being over-provisioned.

A solution like this is those bolt cutters - I can admire it, but the odds I'm out on a walk with it, is very, very low.

Now if you work in a bolt factory, sure, this can run on every laptop, every user account, every environment.

But I'd hope my edge firewalls are L7 scanning for cyrillic 'i' in my domains cause otherwise I'm just gonna connect and get myself hacked.

it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution

I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?

I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.

What would it look like?

I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.

Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

would it destroy the great lakes?

i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me

i started flossing religiously at 30 years old. i've missed three nights of flossing in the past 16 years

i have like 40 fillings; i havent had a filling since 30 years old (yeah so 46 now)

i am positive there's a bug in tahoe where the login screen passsword text input is waiting for something to settle in the background, either with my weird unicomp keyboard, a remap i do, or even the external monitors.

my password is always incorrect unless i count to about 20 or 30 seconds. once i have 'redocked' for the day, unlocking it subsequently doesnt have the requirement. but every dock insertion, it comes back.

ive got a desk full of octo coupler relays and an arduino learning kit and i'm using AI to goad me into making a cascading small motor starter thing with an air particulate sensor that's taking 180 days to show up from China, to automatically control my 6 small air scrubbers in my wood shop since i'm allergic to just about everything in there but love the hobby

i go wrestle the dogs or go toss some logs around in the woods, since i work at home.

i'm middle aged and my mind is a gelatin, not a liquid ... finding the time to carve through it is the most valuable use of my time

it is difficult for us to agree if there is a threshold to which a person who has accumulated wealth must have shifted from 'earning' it to 'taking' it, and whether 'taking' it is analogous to 'stealing' it.

sometimes people believe wealth transfer is a zero sum game, sometimes people believe it never is, and the truth is probably in between

if you believe that a single human can earn a thousand billion dollars, it follows you can believe a million people losing a million dollars is its just inverse

i dont know enough about people or money to make up my mind

i have a roaring vermont castings wood stove running, its -15C outside, and i am fine; i am 14 oak logs away from changing my world view

this system is fragile but we measure it instantaneously

This is a new years resolution question barely in disguise, but they're fun cause a lot of us are cooped up, barely 4 days into winter, 86ish to go, and we're champing at the bit for change.

I am pretty sure I'm a 50th percentiler. I'm mid 40s, kinda burned out but still struggling forward in my ok-but-not-hollywood IT career, I still have a passion for doing things well in a technical society that values doing things cheap (and well). The things I am known for being good at, I still google daily, and for a long time, I've been hungry for a change - any change - but especially one that isn't chaotically negative.

So in 2026, I wanna learn how dirt works.

I actually have a giant box of dirt sitting on a shelf at the UNH community co-op soil analysis lab, waiting to give me some kind of data about the soil behind my house. (Or is it dirt? I don't know what I'm getting into).

In 2024 I tried growing some corn. It never sprouted.

In 2025 I tried growing some corn. It sprouted and a few ears had enough kernels to make one full mouthful. Tasty, but maybe 7 calories of food for a year of effort.

So in 2026 I'd like to grow: one entire fully formed ear of sweet corn. Anything else is a bonus.

That's what I wanna develop in 2026 - learning how soil works enough to make it make a thing. Small moves, Ellie.

i'm probably using an informal fallacy but if online advertisers earn hundreds of billions of dollars, someone must be finding some return on their investment.

i might be wrong, it might just be a huge grift, but i dont know how to come to that conclusion

i got put on a statin 10 years ago and started to have blindness events, a migraine related symptom. the effect showed up within a few weeks of my first time taking the statin, at age 35

for ten years i lived with it

but then i experimented with coq10 and basically the day i started taking those the blindness and migraines disappeared

sharing out of a compulsion that it could help a wayward googler some day

this is not medical advice, this is an anecdote

well, what if an artist put something controversial in the lyrics, like, something that radicalizes a minor into developing something maligned like, agency, or self awareness