RF isn’t magic. It is awfully finicky though, so don’t touch the BNC cable

They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it

They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it

People with little mechanical sympathy definitely have less luck with equipment

Having worked in tech support for a system that I knew very well, I often saw problems vanish when users attempted to demonstrate them with me present

People would say my tech aura made it work

Really though people just take more care when an expert is present, and so avoid whatever error their earlier carelessness caused

I wonder if people who experience the opposite encourage less care among those around them

In the stone age and during an ice age

I originally learned qwerty and touch typed at 60WPM, during a really boring job before smartphones and before we had internet to the desktop at work and I entertained myself learning to type again, but on dvorak

So after 3 months I was back to 60WPM

I really like that dvorak has all the vowels on the left of the home row, and t and h are on the right of the home row right where finger tapping cadence works for “th”

So my speed hasn’t increased, but my fingers don’t need to move as much for common words. I don’t think it’s worth it if you play games on the computer, many games don’t map keyboard controls well. Eg Minecraft moves everything to whatever key is in the same place as the qwerty key; 7 days to die doesn’t change anything, so you need to choose keys for everything, or if you’re happy with the defaults, just change the ones that conflict when you fix “wasd” to “,aoe”

For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

It’s funny that they went out of fashion at the same time people started getting fat

High rise trousers belt above the hips, giving no chance of showing a plumber’s crack, holding them up solidly

RIFTS is set in the future, 300 years after an apocalypse brought magic back to earth

It’s fantasy + sci fi

I see zero subscribers, zero posts. I’m not breaking that streak

If I must

Although dictionaries will show words that significant parts of the population say are wrong, I’m still going to say octopuses is also correct because octopus is an English word and English usually pluralises like that

Octopusen is not common since octopus is too new to get that style of English plural

Of course significant parts of the population spell “than” with an e, or “then” with an a, and/or don’t know the difference between it’s and its

Would you care to pluralise octagon?

There are workflows using LLMs that seem fair to me, for example

• using an LLM to produce a draft, then
• Editing and correcting the LLM draft
• Finding real references and replacing the hallucinated ones
• Correcting LLM style to your style

That seems like more work than doing it properly, but it avoids some of the sticking points of the proper process

LLMs can’t cite. They don’t know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

You’d be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

If the student is clever enough to remove the trap reference, the fact that the other references won’t be in the University library should be enough to sink the paper

I can’t say I have ever considered myselfgender fluid due to my gender perfectly fitting the shape of its container (ie me)

His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers

His parents were employees, not business owners.

Amazon: people like books; people like next day delivery of stuff; people and companies like making stuff and running stuff in Amazon web services

Minecraft: Marcus Persson owned the game studio (and wrote quite a bit of the game) that made Minecraft, lots of people like it, Microsoft was willing to buy it for billions

Kiran Mazumdan-Shaw made beer, people like beer. They then used beer making processes to make biotech medicines - people like being alive and will pay a lot to stay alive, or even just a bit healthier

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk’s family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software “zip2” which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk’s money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX’s incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion’s drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster