sjm-lbm

I still have both the screensaver and the moment that I realized that disabling the screensaver allowed processing to happen meaningfully quicker burned into my mind.

I agree with your first point (and I wasn't trying to defend Kavanaugh, just pointing out that the dissent calls something out), but I disagree with your second. Kavanaugh isn't lying - this ruling causes some chaos and uncertainty and I think that one of the reasons Kavanaugh doesn't like it is because it causes some chaos and uncertainty - but, to your first point, he doesn't appear to be acting in good faith.

The Supreme Court absolutely could have handled this much better, and is part of the reason there's so much to undo.

No, but it is a weakness that they have neglected to provide the clarity that would be required to clean it up.

If you read the opinions, it's even less clear. The majority does not make it at all clear whether or not refunds are due, and Kavanaugh's dissent specifically calls out this weakness in the majority opinion.

Even if the executive branch's actions stop here, there's still a lot of arguing in court to do over refunds.

Also worth noting that who owns the risk is a regulatory question, not a technical or product one - and, like all regulatory questions, is different for different countries/regions.

Chip and pin and NFC transitions took off much quicker outside the US because merchants generally owned more of the chargeback risk than in the US, and therefore were willing to update their POS equipment accordingly.

Risk (like debt) is another place where a US-centric view will likely lead you to misunderstand the purpose of Visa/MC.

As best as I can tell, there was less than 10 minutes from the last successful request I made and when the downtime was added to their status page - and I'm not particularly crazy with my usage or anything, the gap could have been less than that.

Honestly, that seems okay to me. Certainly better than what AWS usually does.

To be fair, that is true. Texas is around the 5th most difficult state to vote in per the Cost of Voting Index.

This was common in Texas, but becomes challenging when one polling place serves voters that might have different elections to vote for - say, at a polling place on the line between two school districts or something like that. You can't just print one sheet of paper, and it to everyone, and call it a day. Toss in a few different jurisdictions that don't directly overlay each other, and the number of combinations become nontrivial.

(the machines used in Texas vary by county, in my county we use Hart InterCivic machines that are touchscreen but produce a paper trail - honestly I think it works well)

Pretty similar here. Another thing I keep thinking is a phrase pilots use when flying airplanes using FMSes and autopilot: "never fly your airplane to a place you haven't already been to in your mind" - that is, don't ever just sit back and let the automation work, stay a step ahead of the automation and drop down to less automation when you aren't certain that it is doing the right thing.

When you send Claude Code something and already have an idea for what an acceptable solution looks like, you're a massive step ahead when it's time to read the diff and decide what you think of it. This does mean that every so often my productivity drops to basically zero as I try to understand what is actually happening before I just put the AI on the job, but so far it seems to be a good rule to keep in mind that allows me to use AI effectively while generating a code base that I still understand.

More or less yes.

If you want to see the way this looks on the flight displays that a pilot sees, this video shows some examples (generated from a flight simulator): https://youtu.be/L5KQ0g_-qJs?si=AtYkellEROnHZ89e&t=349

That's the debt ceiling, which is a different weird quirk of how the USG is funded. The relevant page for shutdowns is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_Un...

"Funding gaps have led to shutdowns since 1980, when Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued a legal opinion requiring it. This opinion was not consistently adhered to through the 1980s, but since 1990 all funding gaps lasting longer than a few hours have led to a shutdown. As of October 2025, 11 funding gaps have led to federal employees being furloughed."

just FYI you can watch on your Android device now. It took them a long time (seriously, I think more than four years after AppleTV+ launched), but they did finally release an Android app.

Is this true though? Texas has had some well-publicized failures (well, really one major one), but as best as I can tell they are more or less middle of the pack on grid reliability[1].

I mean, you'll need a backup generator anywhere, but the report I found (admittedly with just a bit of googling) makes it seem like Texas is a better potential location than quite a few states (including California).

[1] - https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...

FWIW, at least as of today, American Airlines' website attempts to show you round trip prices.

When choosing your outbound leg(s), they show a price inclusive of the cheapest return journey on the day you selected to return using the class of service on your outbound leg. So, there's all sorts of ways for it to be incorrect - maybe you want a different class of service, maybe the cheapest return has a stop but you'd like the direct, etc. - but it's still really useful for figuring out the best options for your flights.

I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.

I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.

Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).

Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.

I use pfSense CE, and rely on DNS entries to be automatically created for DHCP addresses. That worked fine for more than a decade, until they made Kea the default a couple of years ago (or did they just put a bunch of notices in the interface that old DHCPd was deprecated? It's been long enough that I don't remember).

Anyway, at the time Kea (at least in pfSense) wasn't able to do that, which caused things to break for me for a bit. It's a small thing (and, I mean, totally fair with free software) but the fact that they pushed an update to Kea before Kea (again, at least in pfSense) was at feature parity rubbed me the wrong way and has kept me from using it since then.

(edit: on the off chance anyone cares, I decided to check and it looks like this issue has been fixed as of pfSense CE 2.8.)

It's not at all a similar ride, but Epcot Center's Horizons (at Walt Disney World) used two Omnimax screens back to back as part of a dark ride. There's a map showing what that looked like here: https://parklore.com/main/horizons/3/

I sort of wonder how many of them had this exact fate - the Ft Worth Texas one was in the exact same situation. My understanding is that both parts to maintain the projection system and people with the knowledge to operate it were getting very rare, and the people largely retired when the pandemic closed the theater. Since a lot of the Omnimax screens were build during a similar range of time and would have had similar challenges, I wonder if that fate was common.

(luckily, the Ft Worth theater specifically was converted to an LED screen and recently reopened)

Yeah, I do agree with that. Honestly part of me wishes they would have used the old assets - put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler, and lock the player's position while the video plays. I mean, your position was locked in the original game.. so that should be possible without breaking things, right?

That said, I really do think all of the tradeoffs that they did make were understandable - pretty much like you said. Doesn't keep me from being nostalgic for the 90s, though.

Since we're getting pretty far down the nerding-out-on-myst rabbit hole: the original version of realMyst, at least for Windows, had some bug that would cause it to immediately crash on any system with a multi-core CPU. At some point someone released a patched EXE that fixed it, I have no idea if gog and/or Steam ever released an official patched version.

Also, while talking about remakes: Riven got a remake last year, and it's fantastic. The sprit of the game is entirely intact, but they made changes to some puzzles that both make the experience fresh (for anyone that played the 90s version of Riven) and much less annoying (for any first time players). Can't recommend the Riven remake enough.

.. and all the talk of multicloud makes me feel like I'm reading an IBM press release, which is never good.

Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.

Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.

FWIW, you're thinking about the DoD/the Pentagon, not the federal government as whole - and yeah, the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in ~6 years.

The defense budget is somewhat more opaque, though, for national security reasons. I don't know if they are good reasons or not, but that's the story at least.

I'd suspect that there is. That kind of ruins the point of Sonos, though - their appeal was their ability to do a lot of different things, automatically, with just a wifi connection. Having to set up some sort of alternate source of audio means that I really should have just bought a cheaper speaker back when I bought my Sonos products.

As someone that an Android user, and has been a user (and formerly, major fan) of Sonos for about ten years now, it honestly seems worse than that. For a while, Sonos speakers appeared as Google Cast targets, which was a phenomenal (if slightly overcomplicated) way to use them without opening up the Sonos app. Then, the cast functionality became really unreliable. Then, it just went away one day. Then, the Sonos app itself became basically unusable.

So, a decade or so ago, I spent $1k+ on speakers. Over time, due to software changes, they've become more or less unusable for me. My recourse on this is.. pretty much nothing.

Since we're talking about books, this statement reminds me of one that OP might want to look at: Super Founders.

It's been a while since I've read it, but off the top of my head: most successful founders are older than you probably think, have less industry experience than you probably think, start (like nVidia) with more competitors than you think, but (to your other point) are more likely to have more entrepreneurial experience than you think (even very young famous founders like Zuckerberg or the Collisons had another venture before the one that made them very well known).

Honestly I found Super Founders kind of dry, but it's one of the only data-driven books about what differences exist between founders of businesses with exception outcomes vs founders with less successful outcomes that I've read.

To be fair, the automatic belt "fad" was more interesting than that. For a brief time in the 80s (and into the early 90s), cars were required to have either automatic seat belts or airbags. Generally speaking, air bags were more expensive during that time period, so automatic seat belts were more popular.

I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.

.. and as soon as you stop just uploading files (which, as you say, nobody does), a lot of the other advantages go away also. Laravel and Symphony both make PHP much slower. If you are going to have sane routing, you're probably going to need to tweak your websever to behave, well, less like a web server. There's a decent chance you'll need to clear a cache after you upload your changed files if you want to actually see those changes.

I actually like PHP a lot, and it's amazing how far it has come in the past 10 or so years, I just think way too many people assume you get the 2004-era PHP simplicity with all of the 2024-era PHP refinements, and you really don't. There's tradeoffs.