nabbed

I didn't realize that an 805 meter wide asteroid has enough gravitation pull to drag along a 170 meter wide asteroid (and vice versa, as they orbit around each other).

Maybe the "secondary name" is the part that comes after a colon, as in a book title:

  Department of Defence: The Department of War

Honestly, I thought you were quoting an SNL skit, but now I see this quote in a transcript from his 2026 state of the union speech.

That being said, over my lifetime I've heard many TV talking heads, people I assume are much more well informed than me, claim that presidents don't really have that much to do with the state of the economy, despite the levers they pull, and it's all a matter of timing whether they reap the benefits of a good economy or get pummelled for a bad economy. That doesn't stop them from taking credit when things are good (or pretending that things are great with things are actually pretty meh).

In my 20s and 30s, I used to turn on the TV to cover up my tinnitus so I could fall asleep. The TV probably didn't help the quality of my sleep, so maybe that's why my tinnitus got progressively worse (especially in my right ear). Once I got a TV with a sleep timer, I would set it so the TV wouldn't be on all night.

My tinnitus is much worse now, but I don't have a TV in my room anymore, so I just play a podcast on my iPad. That tiny built-in speaker doesn't really cover up the tinnitus, but the voices lull me to sleep (which is probably what the TV was doing all along).

>Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.

I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.

I'm glad I am no longer in tech because I just don't want to do this.

This is not a dig at AI. If I take this article at face value, AI makes people more productive, assuming they have the taste and knowledge to steer their agents properly. And that's possibly a good thing even though it might have temporary negative side effects for the economy.

>But the AI is writing the traversal logic, the hashing layers, the watcher loops,

But unfortunately that's the stuff I like doing. And also I like communing with the computer: I don't want to delegate that to an agent (of course, like many engineers I put more and more layers between me and the computer, going from assembly to C to Java to Scala, but this seems like a bigger leap).

>I think we all might be AI Engineers now, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Except the rest of the article strongly implies he feels pretty good about it, assuming you can properly supervise your agents.

I can't read the article, but Jack Dorsey said on twitter (seen via nitter):

"we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly."

and

"i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. "

I have no idea what these AI tools are that enable a company to lay off nearly half of its staff. That's not a dig at AI tools: I just have no reason or interest to go near them, so I really don't know what they are (beyond the headlines about vibe coding and agents with souls).

I actually just got rid of my landline (most recently a VOIP line) after having one for maybe 40 years (in one form or another). I am so late to the party that the thing I thought was old is now new again.

Back in the mid-2000s, I used to get calls in the middle of the night, multiple times per night, from fax machines to my fairly new but unlisted number. The ringing would wake me up. I answered a couple of times to try to understand who it is, only to hear the fax tone.

I thought I'd be clever and figure out whose fax machine was calling me, so I could tell them to update their call list. So I installed some fax machine software on my PC and hooked it up to the phone (somehow). Unfortunately, it was all advertising for various scam-like products and services, so I couldn't identify a caller.

Apparently, the number the phone company had given me once belonged to a fax machine. So I called the phone company and changed my number. The calls stopped.

100% agree!

The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.

With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.

There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.

If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.

>There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

This document was last updated in October 2024, but I am a little surprised to see this still available on a .gov site.

It's in my local library. I'll check it out. Thanks.

Good question, I never had an allergy study done. I do complain regularly to my primary doctor, but he has not referred me to an allergist (yet).

It's probably brought on by something found indoors in most places. It's not seasonal, it's everyday. I have allergies no matter where I am (my home, some hotel, other people's homes, in my home province, in other provinces, in other countries).

>they own a house on a single income.

You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty.

>maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s

I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home.

Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).

I might be in a higher risk group then: I can drink at most 1 coffee per morning (I love coffee but coffee doesn't love me). In addition, the only anti-allergy pill that works for me is a first generation allergy medicine (chlorpheniramine) that's strongly associated with increased chance of dementia. I could stop taking chlorpheniramine, but then my nose would keep me up at night, and poor sleep is also associated with increased chance of dementia.

So I am hoping there are confounding factors in all these studies, such that it's not coffee per se that helps with dementia but rather something along the lines of "the type of person who desires coffee is less likely to develop dementia".

>At this point, I don’t think we will hire another human for at least a year or two at our firm, but our efficiency will increase by at least 10% a month – the equivalent of two new full-timers.

and

>This isn’t dystopian. It’s nirvana!

Although the nirvana part is probably mostly in reference to having more free time to spend with podcast guests and other founders and less about being able to avoid hiring humans.

Such overheated, almost delirious writing. Lots of one sentence paragraphs with exclamation marks. I am not sure how to take it. Still, I am glad I exited the software business (and the workforce altogether) a few years ago, and it seems my timing was impeccable!

Hey, based on the picture, I used one of those 3179 models for about 6-7 years until my company replaced it with a desktop PC running terminal emulation software.

Years later, probably around 2003, when desktop apps started getting replaced by web apps (at least at my job), I remember making that connection between web browsers and 3270s. In the 1990s, clients got very fat (think powerbuilder), but then in the late 1990s and early 2000s much of the fat went to the server-side and the web browser became the thin(ish) client. The web browser was sort of acting as a block device (like the 3270) in the sense that the end-user filled data into fields and then sent the whole thing at once by hitting some button.

With Web 2.0, the client started to put on weight again. Then with mobile apps, the fat client was back, baby! It just keeps cycling.

That explains the incredibly attention-stealing animated knee joint ad I sometimes see on Apple News+.

On the other hand, the ads are usually static, the content on the page will stay put (unlike news sites on the regular web, where the paragraph I am reading will shift up or down and often will get completely jettisoned out of the viewport), there are no pop-ups, and the page has never scrolled back up to the top while I was already half-way down the article.

Wasn't there also a Pentium division bug of some sort. I didn't pay much attention to microcomputers back then (being a mainframe programmer at the time), but I remember hearing about it from the mainstream news.

Interestingly, when I was in Taiwan (not China, I understand, but in the general area) in 2012 to visit our Taipei office, the subject of the Apollo moon landings came up during lunch. All the Taiwanese workers at the table (about 3 or 4) said that the moon landing was a hoax.

A few years later, a few people from our Taipei office, whom I did not meet during my trip, transferred to our US office. So I asked them what they thought of the moon landings. They also said the landings were a hoax.

Not a perfect sampling, but still interesting.

I wonder what the average person in China thinks of the Apollo moon landings. Or maybe it's just that many non-Americans in general think that the moon landings are a hoax.

>Public approval of funding for the Apollo program peaked at 53 percent (around the first moon landing) but pretty much hovered between 35-45 percent for most of the 1960s

I had no idea. The article is right in saying that if you were a kid at that time (and I was just old enough to be aware of the moon landing as it was happening, although I was surprised at the time that it hadn't happened before), of course you approved. But if you were an adult, you didn't necessarily see the value.

Apparently it was Googie architecture from southern California.

I am not sure if the 1980s version of the show also used that architecture.

Although: "An exception will be made for LLM-assisted translations if you are having trouble accurately conveying your intent in English."

I am doomed, I guess. I didn't detect that. I thought this was sincere expression from an actual person, but an actual person who is also running for office and thus needs to tweak his writing accordingly.

Although I did note that it was a bit long (I guess I am out of the loop on tweets as well. I thought tweets were supposed to be short "hot takes". But this is practically an essay).

The "required login" pattern is particularly a problem. I seem to have namesakes around the US and UK that use my email address as their own when signing up for various services (mobile phone services, Shopify, Uber, various banks and investment firms, landscaper services, real estate services, home and car insurance, car repair shops, even Silver Daddies!!).

I can't open an issue (to ask the service to remove my email) without logging in to an account I don't have control over.

I don't want to use "forgot my password", because I don't want my IP address to be associated with a login to the account, because in some cases (particularly Shopify), the services were obviously used for fraud.

I have some sort of old flat screen TV, which I bought before there were "smart" TVs. But I don't have cable or over-the-air reception. Instead I have a Roku soundbar with Netflix, Apple TV+, and Youtube apps (plus some other apps that I don't use, like Tubi and Pluto). I haven't had cable or over-the-air reception for ~18 years.

I can't watch anything live unless Youtube is showing some live event (which it sometimes does). I could probably watch some live news using Pluto, but I never do.

"I just enjoy not trying to always be well curated, or careful with every detail of my life."

I agree with the author. I like to keep my tastes somewhat "peasant" so that I never have to fuss to enjoy my coffee (or food, etc.). I love watching James Hoffmann videos, but the number of steps he needs to take to make a simple cup of coffee would probably negate any extra joy from the improved flavor.

"The researchers say that the findings could lead to new understanding of or treatments for conditions where the brain's body maps have gone askew, such as schizophrenia or the sensation of 'phantom limbs' experienced by amputees."

It reminds me of this: Every time Yahoo sneaks into the tech news, somebody posts a comment along the lines of:

"TIL Yahoo still exists"

or

"What? There's still a Yahoo?".

It's almost like there's a bot that adds these comments.

Apparently, there is no overlap between Yahoo users and people into cool tech. (I am still a Yahoo email user, so I guess I don't like cool tech).