One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they’re absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don’t think a single disk survived that year.

I also remember when my school got a fancy new “computer lab” that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.

Thousands of military drones have been remotely piloted for decades. This news isn’t as ground breaking as it might seem. Some of these drones are large: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk

I know a military drone isn’t the same as a passenger carrying airplane, but for cargo I think the only reason this isn’t already a thing is because drones are military tech and most governments don’t want that falling into the wrong hands.

I got LASIK earlier this year. It’s an expensive solution to the many small inconveniences that glasses have, but totally worth it imo.

I went from -5.25 with mild astigmatism to 20/15 eagle vision basically overnight.

I like this sentiment, but giving the US intelligence apparatus what amounts to a veto for elected/appointed officials feels like a recipe for disaster.

The only way I see that being workable is if the clearance grantors are transparently beholden to elected officials or the people directly. Which are essentially what elections and the congressional confirmation process are supposed to be. But both of those processes feel like they’ve been subverted. (Elections by the two-party system and the fact that half the population seems intent on electing a dictator, and the other by the senators/representatives that come out of that electoral system).

This is simply not true. Starvation isn’t the only thing that kills people - they die of easily treatable medical issues all the time because of lack of health insurance. Unhoused people die of exposure every summer and winter.

Not trying to defend Jeff here, but generally these kind of space megaprojects rely on manufacturing materials in space. I.e. capture an asteroid and use its material as the radiation shielding. Not that that’s currently anywhere near feasible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Are kernel maintainers not unpaid volunteers?

Yeah I had convinced myself that I would only do it for a year and be able to retire much much sooner.

I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)

In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.

Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.

My business daddy pays for my Apple machine and it’s great for ssh-ing into various cloud-based Linux boxes.

Makes me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentition#Dental_formula

Teeth can tell you a lot about an animal. Their size, shape, number etc can tell you what it eats or how it eats or how much it eats. Dental formula can give you clues for how animals are related to each other. If two different animals have the same dental formula then maybe they share a common ancestor or have a similar diet. If two animals are already very similar but have different dental formula then maybe they’re only very distantly related or there’s been some convergent evolution elsewhere.

I used to work for a startup that laid claim to all “ideas” that I had, in or out of working hours, during my period of employment with them.

This article is worth reading if only for this line:

However, though drug companies have had some success targeting the Death Receptor-5, no Fas agonists have made it into clinical trials.

Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).

People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.

It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.

I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.

I wish the US had better passenger rail infrastructure so people traveling long distance didn’t need to road trip.

I’m lucky to be in a position where I can ride a train to the two closest cities so I’m picking up an EV. Anything longer distance and I’ll either fly or rent an ICE.

Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.

IDF can probably find entrances that are in use, but probably can’t easily detect how those entrances connect to each other, or what is actually in the tunnels (a weapons cache? Communications bunker? Hostages? Nothing?) Not to mention emergency exits or booby traps. If IDF seals an entrance, how do they know there isn’t a back door that nobody uses regularly? How do they know they aren’t sealing hostages inside too?

Op, did you make this yourself or buy it somewhere? What do you play where you want this kind of mouse? I’m interested in mice where the sensor is closer towards the finger tips and it looks like that’s what this is? Would you say that makes more of a difference than the weight?

Like when I’m going from my shift at my first job to my shift at my second job?

Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.

I’m thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don’t know if that’s common with any crops where the seed itself isn’t the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor’s non-gmo status).

Finally, this could be useful if it can be “switched on” i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant’s gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive’s population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.