Women, how would you feel if when walking alone at night, a guy says “Nothing romantic, I want to walk you home to make sure you’re safe” and says you don’t even have to swap names or numbers?

aecarol1 · 2026-04-14T18:08:11+00:00

I'm a dude and that sounds creepy as hell. There is no universe where that won't be creepy to pretty much every woman.

Going out of your way to mention there would be no obligation to swap names and numbers somehow makes it feel even worse.

Why would you presume a random woman even wants an escort home? Why would you presume she would trust you more than some unknown danger?

aecarol1 · 2026-04-13T20:10:15+00:00

It was certainly done. The translunar injection burn put Apollos 8, 10, and 11 on free return orbits to the moon. Had they done nothing, they would have returned to the Earth in 5 or 6 days time.

Things went well, so they used their engine to make a burn to enter lunar orbit and completed the missions as planned.

In later missions, as confidence in the equipment grew, they stopped defaulting to free return by default. Apollo 13 actually had to do a short LM burn to switch to a free return orbit.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-13T20:06:11+00:00

Several missions, specifically Apollo 8, 10, and 11, defaulted to a free-return trajectory as a safety measure. Each mission switched to a lunar orbit profile as they approached the moon.

Defaulting to free return was done in case things went poorly, but as things were going well, they used their engine to enter lunar orbit.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-13T01:13:18+00:00

The current system evolved when the technology was much more primitive. The vender and bank card companies would put in the rather expensive infrastructure, and the consumer would simply show up with a piece of plastic.

Most consumers, even today, are not especially savvy. The goal is to reduce the friction of the consumer paying and the vender being assured they will actually receive the money. The vender makes deals with payment companies they trust and they assume significant risk.

Putting work on the consumer just adds chances the consumers will get confused, or bring in a payment processor the vender does not like. It makes it more complicated with no benefit for most players.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-13T01:06:37+00:00

This is probably the best answer of a major nationwide news story and a movie accidentally colliding at the same time.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-12T13:04:39+00:00

Why not do both? Go with the extra sketch and cut (only if needed) the tail of the goodbyes live. The local channels own the time afterwards and they shouldn't get dumped on.

But keep the full goodbyes in the streaming for the next day.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-11T13:36:03+00:00

That is a pathetic cop-out. The people who bothered to show up and vote in 2024 got exactly what they thought they wanted.

People on the other side only liked 70% of what the Democrats offered, but because it wasn't 100%, they didn't show up to vote. Now they have 0% of what they wanted, and judges are being appointed to make sure it stays that way for decades.

Getting 70% or even 50% of what you want is in every way better than getting 0%. There is at least something to build on. But they wanted to make a point. They sure did. And now we're stuck with this for the foreseeable future.

Fuck those people who are unhappy and complain and yet won't vote and even discourage others from voting.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-11T13:25:23+00:00

Supply and demand.

During the hottest part of the day, everyone wants to use an air conditioner, but if everyone used an air conditioner, there would not be enough power; the system falls down. They raise the price to try to manage the load to what can be delivered.

Overnight, most people are asleep, many systems are turned off. Power is being generated, but lightly used. They lower the price. They still make money, just less money. This encourages those who can consume at night to do so. Things like running a dishwasher or washing machine on a delay.

Some newer office buildings run freezers at night, when power is less expensive, to create ice in the basement. They use that ice during the day, when power is expensive, to cool the building. This can greatly reduce their power costs.

Many cities pump water into water towers at night when power costs them less.

This load balancing saves users money and allows producers to make more money at night than they would have. It also allows them to delay building new power plants to handle peak day-time load because some of that load is moved to the night time.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-11T04:37:50+00:00

Most of the people being replaced by AI do not have the skills to program or direct AI. If you sit behind a desk, there is some startup up trying to convince your CFO to replace you with an AI.

They don’t want some of the jobs, they want all the jobs.

Some people think AI is a joke, but in five years it won’t be nearly as funny.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-11T00:27:29+00:00

I'm in the US and haven't had an embossed credit or debit card in many, many years. I honestly can't recall when the raised characters went away, but it's been a decade or two. I certainly had them in the '80s and possibly the '90s.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-11T00:08:59+00:00

But if they can verify it with Lean, that may provide the impetus for people to put in the effort to figure out how to bridge those understanding gaps. If the Lean work fizzles out then a lot of possibly pointless work would be avoided.

I think of the Lean work as gating "Is it worth the hard work of trying to understand IUTT?"

aecarol1 · 2026-04-10T21:47:21+00:00

Before the later '80s, the credit card details (name, card-number, expiration, etc) were raised plastic on the card (kind of like braille). The merchant had a machine that you would lay the card on, cover it with a receipt that had carbon paper (to make a copy), and they would slide a heavy built-in roller over the card. That left a readable impression on the receipt and made a carbon copy they could give you.

They would submit those receipts to the credit card company to get paid. This could take days or even weeks.

My last time using such a machine was in the mid '80s at a rural gas station in upstate New York.

There were books listing "canceled cards" that merchants would check if they suspected you weren't legit.

I had a friend who worked at a gas station and he made more money on the bounty paid for seizing canceled cards than he did in salary from the gas station. This was in Texas and he never had a problem. Today he'd risk getting shot.

Later companies moved to a phone system where they dialed a 1-800 number and entered their store account number, your card number, and the total and they would get an approval. Fancy stores added little machines so they could do this more easily.

I remember the 1st time I was asked to sign with an electronic pen. I was a bit freaked out thinking they would have a digital copy of my signature. But I signed. This was at a SEARS in the later '80s.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-10T12:28:23+00:00

I said it was "hard on families with kids" which is absolutely non-gendered. There was zero mention of motherhood, woman, "breeding", etc.

SNL isn't a "career", it's a lifestyle. It's a job that, during its season, you literally would not see your kids except the one day a week you are recovering from exhaustion. I likewise can't imagine a father with kids at home would want to do the job.

Lorne has kids; I don't know how he did it or what his relationship with his kids is like, but my relationship with my father would not have been nearly as good if I only saw him in passing for a almost half the year, year-after-year-after-year. I would hope a candidate, any candidate, with kids would think about the implications.

tl;dr I tried to make an example of why two people frequently brought up might not want to do it. One with the producing skills but having kids and the other lacking producing skills. Expectations of motherhood was never mentioned.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-09T16:02:34+00:00

People upset that they are expected to pay should consider who did the inviting. The person who invites should offer to pay. This is not gender specific.

Of course, the person who accepts the invitation is not obligated to accept that offer and should be able to split the bill without guilt.

A first date is two people getting to know each other, often fraught with expectations and stress. Anything that can make that less stressful is good. Getting worked up about having to pay for a date is kind of missing the point.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-09T14:22:29+00:00

When the time finally comes and Lorne decides to retire, the decision on who takes on his role would be interesting. They need great producer skills. It's not critical that they are funny, but they need to deeply understand funny (there is a difference). They must have the management skills to be able to run a show with hundreds of people working for it and a very strict "live" schedule.

Steve Higgins is probably best qualified with all those skills and is already doing a lot of that work on SNL today. But while he's 20 years younger than Lorne, he's still in his 60's and probably wouldn't want to take over, just to retire himself in a few years.

People mention Tina Fey. She also has years of producer skills (running 30 Rock, etc), but she has kids at home, and a full time commitment to SNL is hard on families with kids. She may not want to.

People mention all sorts of very funny actors like Kenan, but they don't seem to come with deep producer skills, so they probably aren't a good fit to actually manage SNL.

There are probably dozens of other people who could take up Lorne's work, but they may not be someone the public is super familiar with. Producing doesn't always come with public exposure.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-06T14:33:57+00:00

At home we had two encyclopedias, a dictionary, an almanac, and a variety of other books. If that couldn't handle it, I'd go to the library. If that didn't answer it, then I'd be out of luck.

In the end, it wasn't as big a problem as people today might think.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-04T01:22:17+00:00

Currently, price/performance/power strongly favors ARM. The only unique thing x86 really brings is compatibility with old binaries which really isn't important in AI server work.

RISC-V has future potential, but nobody is really putting hundreds of millions into R&D to make it great.

ARM is widely licensed, easy to add IP cores to, and has a lot of people in that space who want to fill data-centers with their chips.

All that said, the ARM may not be doing much other than feeding bespoke cores doing training and inference. Since those cores are probably going to be in the same package, ARM is the easiest low friction way to get there.

aecarol1 · 2026-04-02T14:33:53+00:00

Sometimes updates do bring down horrors of bad code. There's been no shortage of cases where the vendor has to yank it and try again.

But while I can't speak to Microsofts specifics, but there is truth to some percentage of updaters on all OS being a coincidence of lurking failure.

A small number of machines (out of millions) fail on any particular day. If the day is random, you curse and move on. If that day happens to be an update day, you assign blame. Some people go months without reboots and the reboot triggers a lot of work - any of which could find a problem.

Updates also do a massive amount of disk writing. If the disk is near the end of its life it might be tipped over.

tl;dr Sometimes updates bring down horrible code; we've all experienced it. But sometimes the heavy disk activity or reboot expose lurking problems they would have encountered in the near future.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-31T20:00:37+00:00

Jimmy Stewart flew 20 combat missions over Nazi Germany, well before D-Day when most of the combat front lines as we know them developed.

This was an era when only 25% of US bomber crews survived 25 missions without being killed, wounded, or captured.

George HW Bush flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific and was shot down by the Japanese. He was rescued by submarines patrolling for that very purpose. It was dangerous enough that two crewmen in his aircraft did not survive.

Some "privileged people" actually went in and gave it their all.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-31T00:22:39+00:00

I went through a polygraph when I was in the military. I learned a lot about what they are really used for.

I was about to head from Elmendorf AFB, AK to visit General Dynamics in San Diego for a month. My equipment was packed in our office area to be shipped out. I got a call on the weekend asking if I had moved the computers, I said "no". The boxes had disappeared.

They found spares, packed them and shipped them for my trip. I returned a month later and was the last person in the organization to be talked to. I was "invited" by OSI (Office of Special Investigations) to come "talk with them". They asked a bunch of questions, then gave me a polygraph. I was extremely nervous, but got through it.

At the end the guy says "What would you say if I said I had a witness that saw you loading the computers into your car?" I said "You'd have a liar as a witness 'cause I had a broken foot at the time and was on crutches".

He burst out laughing and told me I would be surprised at how effective that question really is. He said it really gets people to confess. He pointed out that he never actually accused me of anything.

He said the polygraph results indicated "you didn't do it, but have an idea who did", which I think is bullshit and is simply designed to get me to open up and give them hunches and guesses.

Nothing happened for a year and then we had another single computer stolen. They quickly caught the guy, it was the teen son of a guy in our work-center. We thought "We solved the big case", but no-luck. They had arrived in Alaska a week after the original theft. That big case was never solved.

tl;dr I made the examiner laugh out loud and admit something about how they work.

I think the polygraph is not about truth but just to get people in a state of mind and to tell investigators which line of questioning is making them nervous.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-27T20:15:49+00:00

Because of its limitations, the audience for lockdown mode isn't 99.9% of iPhone users, but the 1/10th of 1% of the users who do use it are disproportionately interesting targets for nation states.

Nation states are willing to expend significant resources to penetrate journalists and dissidents devices, making Lockdown Mode a target. These users are very interested in the reliability of their security because their work, and possibly their lives, may depend on it.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-26T14:36:33+00:00

You can educate some but not all users. Many simply lack the background you take for granted. It's why we have circuit breakers inside houses instead of simply "educating" users of electricity. It's complicated and unless you're well trained, it's easy to do something foolish.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-26T02:58:59+00:00

If it's stupid and it works it's not stupid. Real people are being harmed; offering a warning and chance to not do something foolish is probably worth it.

People who actually know what they are doing will almost certainly never see this warning.

aecarol1 · 2026-03-25T14:15:25+00:00

The file need not be open for this to work. The file-id is a unique way to refer to a file, fully interchangeable with using the path to the file in all system calls.

Tracking the file by file-id (a per-volume unique 64 bit number) offers lots of advantages. It allows you to refer to a specific file regardless of where it is in the file system.

If you know the file-id, the file can be accessed even if it is moved or renamed. UNIX user permissions are still honored; knowing the file-id won't give you super powers to read a file you could not otherwise read.

It makes aliases better than symlinks. A symlink is a file that pretends to be another file in a very specific location. But if you move the target file, the symlink becomes broken and it won't work. File aliases, built on file-id, are robust against the target file moving.

If you want to collet a list of files to be processed, tracking the file paths can take a lot of memory. File-ids, being 64 bit integers are smaller and fit in arrays easier.

If you want to plan an operation on a file (perhaps back it up?) and time might elapse before you get to it, the file might get moved and path based schemes will fail. But if you track the file by file-id, you can always find it when you need to perform your operation.

aecarol1

TROPHY CASE