proggy

I don’t see how this is complicated, it’s simply a technique. The creator of the video has no stated agenda, and it’s on the viewer to decide whether or not they want to learn and apply this method. Lots of people find joy in solving the little things in life that would otherwise cause them frustration. One of the top comments on the video is a nurse saying they’d been tying their scrubs with bunny ears for 30 years and always had to keep adjusting them. Certainly it isn’t overly complicated for them.

Possibly AI, possibly younger folks (18-24). “Mental health incident” is only one step removed from algospeak like “unalived”, “seggs”, and “neurospicy”. A detached, memetic phrase that has been implanted into the lexicon by a toxic brew of algorithmic social media moderation and heavy exposure to LLM conversational patterns.

versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with

I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.

I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.

Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.

Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.

This rule only applies to a single adult + child pair, and not the entire traveling party. For instance, if you have a party of 1 child and 2 adults, the airline is well within its rights to charge seat selection fees to the second adult. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to pay an extra $40-$50, per journey, to United to sit next to my wife and child. And that’s with the current “consumer friendly” rules in place.

I feel like our planet’s long-term academic health would dramatically improve if something resembling the following statement was posted on the wall of every K-12 and college classroom:

ChatGPT is not a primary source. Wikipedia is not a primary source. Google Search is not a primary source. Microsoft Encarta is not a primary source. The Encyclopedia Brittanica is not a primary source.

Information aggregators are not primary sources. Identifiable people are primary sources.

Creepy is subjective of course, but it’s pretty high on the list for the most isolated and/or inconveniently-located platform in the country. The only access is via a narrow footbridge leading to a 486-step staircase that goes 70m underground (230ft). Unlike most other 50+ meter deep train stations, there are no elevators and no escalators. The only way in or out of the station is via those stairs, which makes platform-to-street time a non-trivial part of the overall journey.

This is the real answer, not the pat “no one builds new used cars” nonsense. It is entirely possible to build new, no-frills apartments that are 100% habitable and to code. But because of all the regulatory boxes one needs to check — namely all the fees spent, and time spent waiting for seemingly endless approvals — it is simply not possible to rent out bottom-dollar builds at a low market rate. The same logic applies for single family homes sold for purchase. The startup costs are just too damn high.

They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.

What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.

In my view the author is putting the cart before the horse here. His primary argument seems to be that people already think in bullet points, so the fluff around them is unnecessary and can be excised without destroying the original message. But that fluff is there for many reasons. It adds context, it allows us to commingle our meaningful and valid emotions alongside our facts, and ultimately, it lets us tell a human story.

The way in which we create and consume information has a direct effect on our experience of the world, and I think there is a deeper point to be made here about how the way we use communication technology. The endless firehose of information is drowning our brains to the point that we are compelled to find a way to cope. But I would argue that the way to do that is to rate limit receipt of messages so that only the quality stuff gets through, rather than letting everything through and destroy every human aspect of them in the process. It’s Twitter’s 140 character limit argument from last decade all over again; the medium becomes the message, so we must be careful what mediums we use.

I’m gonna be straight with you. I used to think this way — that living small was a form of protest against the ills of society. But life is too short. For many of us, that cardiac arrest, car accident, or pandemic-related terminal illness is right around the corner. Don’t say no to things that bring meaning, joy, purpose, and expansion to your life. You only have one life to live.

Circumstantial evidence is still evidence.

The coup started well before January 20th. And likely with the blessing of VC funds like Y Combinator…watch this post, it’s a proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Zero power? Explain that to USAID, Treasury, OPM, and GSA. Actors working on behalf of digital services (i.e. DOGE) are commandeering IT systems and sending out ultimatums to the workforce about complying with their orders at risk of being punished with administrative leave for insubordination. It is a highly unlawful operation that goes far beyond the consult and advise mission you’re alluding to.

Giving up the power to do the one thing you are constitutionally permitted to do, just because it doesn’t work for one particularly teflon-coated individual, is incredibly short-sighted.

Yes the reality of the situation is bleak. But to give up on impeachment would cede even more power to the executive branch.

The reason why our courts, which are historically apolitical, tried to convict him is because he committed a nearly uncountable number of crimes. And he broke even more norms.

Our biggest failure as a nation was not convicting him sooner and more decisively.

Eh, I get all that, but Narita is still quite useful as a transfer hub for passengers traveling between North America and East Asia. Haneda’s gate capacity is also a limiting factor, Narita is a necessary companion airport to soak up excess passenger demand.

It’s an interesting business model to be sure. They source from pretty much anywhere people tend to lose things. Theme park with more items lost than found? Theater with a bin full of abandoned gloves and coats? Unclaimed Baggage will pay you for it.

I would imagine a battery replacement would be more cost effective than swapping to a brand new drive system. The $5k estimate appears to be completely hypothetical, presumably based on bill of materials alone.

The single use plastic bag bans are a drop in the bucket compared to overall plastic waste generation. In my view, plastic grocery bags have become a popular point of regulation because they are notorious for accumulating in public spaces, notably parking lots, parks, and other places that city leaders are pressured to keep clean. So long as plastic items end up in waste receptacles, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

I’m seriously impressed at how much effort was put into developing aesthetically interesting ITTS screens for so many DCC releases. Some of them are genuinely good examples of artistic expression within a limited medium, and it’s a shame they were never seen by consumers despite being there the whole time. Seems likely that a machine capable of ITTS output was in the pipeline, perhaps even on the verge of going into production, but was canned due to soft sales of the DCC format. If DCC had come out a few years earlier, perhaps, it might have been more popular as it was quite capable, even though it was always destined to be a transitional medium.

I can’t find the source, but I think this practice was mentioned in the recent Fulton County, Georgia indictment of former president Trump and his associates. It was also employed extensively by the now-disgraced General Petraeus to facilitate his extramarital affair [1]. It’s a pretty popular tactic used by people who aren’t very wise to the fact that their cleverness does not equate to actual privacy.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/petraeus-reportedly-used-d...

One of the shuttle missions that resulted in loss of crew was caused by operating the vehicle outside of the rated temperature envelope (for the SSB O-rings). If that requirement was honored, the failure rate could have been halved.

The other loss of crew was caused by a genuine oversight in the design of the system, in that the orbiter was always susceptible to strikes from insulating foam falling from the external tank.

Unlike Titan, neither one of these failures were due to the inevitable cyclic wear of the primary pressure vessel. They were both devils hiding in the details, neither one the result of reckless hubris.

OceanGate full on admitted that its carbon fiber hull, a major red flag component at the center of its design, was highly experimental and did not know exactly when it would fail. They foolishly thought that strain gauges would detect issues well in advance of failure, while completely ignoring how immediately and catastrophically composite structures are known to fail. They recklessly sold tickets to fund their experimental craft, inviting people aboard who were definitely not made fully aware of just how flawed the design was up front. These were not all members of the Explorers Club — a former head writer for the Simpsons went on a dive, for goodness’ sake.

So to return back to your point, I’d rather take a shuttle after a few dozen flights than get inside a Titan II after a few dozen dives.

It’s a relief to see that the Marine Technology Society saw this coming 6 years ago, and did what they could to encourage OceanGate to do the right thing. There are inherent, known risks with deep sea exploration and firms need to be held to a minimum standard of safety out of a basic respect for human life. Being a scrappy startup isn’t a valid excuse for cutting corners when it comes to engineering and qualification of a pressure vessel and its essential components.

I really hope that the foresight of the MTS is recognized amongst the general public, and the DSV space doesn’t suffer a setback in perception and/or funding. At present, it does seem like the general sentiment is that this specific submersible was built to an incredibly poor standard when compared to, say, the famed Alvin or Deepsea Challenger. I hope that sentiment holds.

It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to.

Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-existent. Their test program was extremely lightweight to say the least, and the results that came back from what little hull testing they did do were ignored, resulting in the dismissal of an internal whistleblower [1]. We also learned that there were flammable materials within the pressure vessel, no practical contingency plan to speak of, no emergency beacon fitted, the list goes on. The whole thing was just cobbled together, not fully thought out or vetted, and yet the intent was to journey to one of the most unforgiving environments imaginable.

But getting back to the account of the reversed motor above -- it is one of the purest examples I can now think of where life imitates art. Piloting a stolen (but seaworthy) deep-sea submersible to the wreckage of the Titanic -- that was only able to make right-hand turns due to a "sub club" anti-theft device -- was a major plot point in the pilot episode of the TV series "Pinky and the Brain". Narf.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/post/173802/missing-titanic-sub-face...

Anchor Hocking is still around. For now. But if this pattern of private equity destroying trusted brands continues, one can only imagine how difficult it will be as a consumer to purchase well-made household commodities. I do not want to navigate a world where the provenance of every product is unknown, its white-label manufacturing origins hidden behind an alphabet soup name like MALACASA, KOMUEE, or M MCIRCO (all actual names of oven safe glassware products for sale today).

I don’t have an answer to your question. But I had quite a bit of trouble finding a affordable, drop-in replacement Raspberry Pi for a recent project, so I went looking for alternatives. There are a number of companies that make comparable single board computers and sell them at the $35 price point, for example LibreComputer. The board I received was very nicely put together and worked well for my purposes. The only practical difference between the clone and the genuine Pi was the lack of a Pi-branded GPIO library.