BuyMyBitcoins

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.

It’s to the right of SCE to AUX…

You might enjoy reading about theorized “Superhabitable” planets. A super earth with about twice the mass of Earth would likely have plate tectonics and even more internal heat. Plus, if it orbits a K-type star that’s about 85% of the mass of the Sun, it could remain habitable for tens of billions of years.

By comparison, Earth may be barely habitable. It is amusing to think that we may be living on the galactic equivalent of Australia.

Perhaps the upside is that our gravity well is low enough to make routine spaceflight possible.

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

Heavy milk (whole) is required for cookie enrichment. But depleted milk (skim) still has value.

Microsoft said something about a Copilot…

It’s a fun idea to consider, but I suspect the true push is due to how capable China is proving to be in spaceflight. They’ve got plans for a manned mission to the moon and are eyeing the same craters at the Lunar South Pole as we are.

While the outer space treaty forbids claiming territory in space, it doesn’t forbid building a base and putting a “Keep Out” sign on the airlock.

>”Why would someone let an elected official enrich themselves and their friends with your money? Why would the legislative branch allow that?”

Let is a heavily loaded term here. The most an individual can reasonably do is cast their single vote in an election year. I could attempt to bring a lawsuit against a politician, but it would almost certainly be thrown out due to a lack of standing. Activism is certainly an option, but that is really just an effort to convince others to cast their single vote differently. Outside of those options, one would have to break some laws.

The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.

Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.

>”those religious groups that forced card payment processors to ban pornhub et al”

I question how much influence such groups actually have, given that payment processors already dislike dealing with adult oriented businesses.

The percentage of chargebacks and disputes made for those transactions is significantly higher than any other category. Companies hate having to investigate such claims and issue new cards, even when it appears fairly obvious the purchase was made by the cardholder. It’s also tricky from a customer service standpoint, because the cardholder may likely be lying in order to hide an embarrassing purchase from a spouse or other family member.

It seems like payment processors just want to get rid of a hassle for themselves.

There’s no way to test UBI without implementing it fully. Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached stipend isn’t accounting for the fact that the money has a negligible impact on the economy and produces no meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these experiments are time-bound. Participants know the payments will stop.

I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove that giving people money makes them happier. But there’s nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market haven’t changed, the tax structure hasn’t changed, and no goods or services experienced any shortages.

There’d be a revolt. You might be able to get away with doing this in some small area, maybe a city block or two. But anything more than that is just begging for a backlash from the local population.

Gaming, and Microsoft enshittifying Windows 11 to an absurd degree.

The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.

For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.

I detest newsletter modals.

There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.

>"you’ll sooner or later end up dead."

What a defeatist attitude, I plan to live forever or die trying! /s

Don’t forget the Thagomizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer

Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.

While Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons, it did not have the launch codes, infrastructure, technical knowledge, or the economy needed to convert them into an arsenal under their sovereign control. Moscow still “held the keys” for all of those warheads.

Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.

While spores seem hardened against the extremes of space, we haven’t shown that any of this hardy life is capable of colonizing a barren world. It seems like all life on Earth depends on some already functioning biosphere. In other words, even if we sent tardigrades to a world with oxygen and liquid water, what would they eat? Where would they get nutrients such as vitamin B? All the vitamin B we consume is created by bacteria, no animal produces it on its own. So we would have to send thousands of interdependent species. And I’m willing to bet the majority of them aren’t nearly as hardy.

Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work. But I can’t help but think whatever life we introduce would be at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.

Let’s bump up the AI even more, instead of “dead giveaway” you should have used hence.

A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic.

I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.

>”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.”

Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.

Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.

As a fun aside, have you heard of Nominative Determinism? From a purely rational standpoint, it is mere coincidence that I know a dentist with the last name “Pullum” and an electrician with the last name “Cable”. My confirmation bias doesn’t account for the 99.9% of other people with unremarkable names.

But then I realized… whenever I create fake people for unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation? And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?

So maybe we’re living in an edge case!

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

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a bad thing. Microsoft has really ticked me off lately, and I lament the fact that there’s really nothing I can do to change this. Microsoft doesn’t really listen to feedback, and when they do, they tend to just delay the rollout until after the controversy has died down (Recall).

Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work.

That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.

I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.