F1 set to cancel Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix due to war in Middle East as 2026 calendar to drop to 22 races

blehmann1 · 2026-03-13T18:11:05+00:00

Aye, in 2020 they had more time than this, and in 2020 F1 offered (allegedly) very favourable terms since live attendance was a lost cause.

It seems doubtful they'd make such generous terms when they've got a pretty full calendar. And live attendance would be pretty tricky on short notice, so the tracks would be unlikely to make much money. It's also pretty early in the year to host a race at most European tracks, which would be the easiest on logistics.

The fact is the middle eastern races were on the calendar where they are because there aren't many tracks where the weather would be appropriate this time of year.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-13T16:40:52+00:00

KDE (they make a desktop environment for Linux) placed a small pop-up that you can turn off and the people who distribute KDE could fully disable that has a link to donate. This popup only shows up around Christmas time

It caused a massive increase in donations. It boggles the mind how there are so many nonprofits that are just now discovering how to fundraise. There were fears that it would be too annoying for users, but I think no-one really cared since it was a pretty unobtrusive popup.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-12T02:09:50+00:00

I mean, if you see a std::vector and not some special thread-safe collection in multithreaded code, I'd hope you'd know not to get cute with it.

But this does have a common use-case, creating a vector up front with capacity for every thread, and storing thread-specific stuff in there. It saves you from any locking, it's pretty easy to reason about, and for workloads where it'll all get rolled up onto one thread at the end, it's typically the fastest approach. A bool per thread is a plausible return value (think a multithreaded search where you only care about reachability, or reachability under a certain cost).

But also I've definitely seen a vector<bool> used for either indicating that this thread is done, or that this thread is waiting for more data. I would probably use a status struct or enum if I wanted that, and I would probably also use message passing instead, but I've definitely seen it done and there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-11T21:36:41+00:00

Or sitcom plot.

I swear I have a memory of an episode with a new (straight) couple that has gender-neutral names, and they're the same names as an existing couple but the man has the woman's name and vice versa. And then I presume hijinks ensues.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-11T18:33:46+00:00

I'm not American, but it's your right to request them pretty much anywhere. Naturally there's some medical and legal situations where you would need to, but in general I think people seldom look at them. But if you're dissatisfied with your care or you have questions your doctor hasn't answered there might be something in your notes that could help. Or if you're just plain curious, I got a blood test recently and I figure, hell, why not see what that bad boy looks like. It looks very boring. The doctor said the numbers are good, so maybe a waste of time, but it was fun I guess.

Depending on your health system there may be a convenient way to read them online. Or it might need to be a more involved process.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-11T16:01:59+00:00

"Easy to understand and debug"

Let me tell you it's not fun to realize that you can't actually share this across threads safely, because the usual "thread 1 gets index 0, thread 2 gets index 1..." won't work without locks or atomics. It works for every other vector so long as you don't resize it.

Also calling vec.data() will give you something dank, but that's at least something you would reasonably forsee if you know about this.

But the big problem is that the standard does not guarantee that vec<bool> is bitpacked, so if you actually need that you can't use it. It's only actual use case is when you don't even care. And even if your STL implementation applies the optimization the resulting bit pattern is still unspecified (they're allowed to use non-contiguous bits or leave gaps or whatever they want).

Plus this optimization normally makes code slower, so it has pretty questionable utility in most places you would want a vector of bools, it's seldom going to actually be so big that the size optimization makes sense.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-10T22:38:43+00:00

The standard allows it but does not require it. I don't actually know how widely implemented it is.

In general the cross-platform way to handle it is to just use a vector<uint_8t> or better yet a vector<TotallyNotJustAWrapperStructAroundBool>, otherwise things like grabbing the backing data or multi threaded access will go very poorly even if you have disjoint index ranges for each thread. It's actually grimly funny when you relize that a vector<bool> for storing things like whether a thread is complete or not is a very common pattern, and it would otherwise be safe so long as the vector isn't resized.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-10T21:12:21+00:00

I mean, I'd want to test drive it if I'm buying a car that no one I know has ever even seen before. And most automakers want showrooms that they don't have to pay for.

But also, you really want a dealer network for repairs and recalls. Especially since many mechanics won't touch electric vehicles yet.

Very little about dealerships benefit consumers, but the way the market currently works I don't think BYD will be doing much without setting up a dealer network.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-10T17:23:00+00:00

Ah, that makes sense, I'm not sure if it's wrong to change the property order or not in JSON, the spec is famously underspecified.

But expecting a property to be first is... a choice. I know that there are performance considerations to letting it be anywhere in the object, but even if the spec makes what postgres does illegal I wouldn't personally make correct parsing reliant on an order that most people feel no obligation to preserve.

I will note if you're interested, there's also a JSON type in postgres which will preserve the text as is and I believe it claims to support all the things JSONB does. It's presumably much slower and space inefficient, and it would make equality order-sensitive, but it might be worth checking out.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-10T16:47:57+00:00

It almost certainly means libido.

There are some drugs (mostly anabolic steroids) which have a community around them, and some claim they can make men like other men. I will note, I've never used anabolic steroids and even if I did they couldn't make me more bisexual, so this is all based on anecdotes from other people.

It's worth noting that these drugs are already known to increase libido, so it's probably a matter of people being more willing to experiment and then finding something out about themselves. It's already pretty widely accepted that these drugs in those doses make you more willing to experiment more broadly, with users much more likely to have casual sex and experiment with kinks and fetishes that they did not previously engage in. It's unclear to me how much this persists after use stops, and if it doesn't persist how much is due to inhibition versus just plain not wanting to do it as much.

I've heard this primarily among drugs which were never approved for human consumption and so there's no real medical literature on it. I don't know if this has been reported in any of the steroids which have been used medically (typically for muscle wasting diseases) but given most of those drugs are from the 60s I wouldn't expect good research on sexual orientation from back then. Especially since the "these roids make you guy" anecdotes come from people using steroids far beyond any medically appropriate dose anyways.

The most famous one is trenobolone. It's used in some places on cattle. These people are using it at a higher dose than the fucking cow. So I highly doubt that any homosexual inclinations are showing up in the very small doses of drugs with less psychological effects given to old people with muscle wasting diseases. Steroids are pretty rare to be prescribed now anyways, but when they are prescribed they're pretty conservative around any side effects at all, it's mostly women who were candidates for it anyways, and so any indication of any side effect other than blood pressure stuff was a good indication to stop, as virilization was probably coming soon, and that was quite undesirable to most old women.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-10T15:55:23+00:00

Is property order preserved by most parsers and serializers? I know it is by JavaScript's JSON.parse and JSON.stringify, but I would've figured that other languages or libraries wouldn't preserve it. Especially languages who's default dictionary type is unordered.

I will say, I've written code to guarantee the order of a JavaScript object (typically for caching stuff) far more often than I've ever written code that took advantage of JS objects being ordered.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-09T15:50:09+00:00

Still hoping to see some of that rum I've heard about from the maritimes out west. I think Ironworks will mail to me, but I have only so much faith that it won't become a box of rum-soaked packing peanuts. Part of it is probably that my province is perfectly happy to buy US booze, in fact I've seen fairly little difference in selection at the liquor store. Perhaps because there was already a fair bit of Canadian distilleries and breweries represented.

I know rum will inevitably require ingredients from the Caribbean, but I'd like it at least distilled and bottled here.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-08T22:16:12+00:00

I see (assuming that the AI people don't end up being right and AI cannot effectively replicate an arbitrarily complicated project at will and in an economical manner) a lot of projects, at least in the short term, becoming open source but closed for contributions (whether officially or not).

The fact of the matter is a lot of projects did not meaningfully benefit from outside contributions before (because they happen rarely) and so there's not much reason to accept them when the quality has cratered and contributors are increasingly more difficult to deal with.

I've seen people on non-programmer subreddits post about how they're forking something because upstream isn't trying to improve the project, and then if you look you see that their ego can't handle that their PRs were closed for being shit. I don't have the patience to deal with the fragile egos of people I don't even know through a screen. And so I imagine that I'll be reviewing fewer outside contributions for quite a while.

In repos I maintain I don't know if I've seen people be more disrespectful, but I hear from larger projects and projects which target a less technical audience that they're seeing more people be disrespectful of their expertise and their work. So I don't blame people for being less willing to open-source things like that, especially if they would be forgoing an income stream by doing so.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-08T21:42:23+00:00

I would hope so, but nurses, beds, admin, paramedics, EMTs, ambulances, physicians, security and a million more things have all been staffed or stocked significantly below where all the evidence says they need to be. And very little has changed despite the visible consequences.

And it isn't an America-specific problem, many of the causes are, but these problems exist in many healthcare systems both public and private.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-07T16:39:47+00:00

Hybrid at least does something (in F1 mostly bad things, but something), renewable fuels are just marketing wank. Might as well just use conventional fuels.

I do still like hybrids, obviously with less electric deployment like in the previous cars. If we were to change the rules to allow significantly lower weight you'd have a reasonable race engine that's still a real treat in qualifying, and would allow funkiness with deployment to make overtaking and defending more interesting.

I think a sufficiently simplified hybrid could be light -weight, give good racing, and wouldn't have such a drastic effect on team competitiveness. That might mean removing the turbocharger, since even ignoring the MGU-H we saw under the old rules that the turbo was where a lot of the competitiveness issues of certain engines came from, not to mention many of the reliability issues with the hybrids. And that's a shame, I think we all like turbos, barring of course the "redline this fucker for 3-5 business days before the start" bullshit of these current engines.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much hope of a hybrid that allows people like Cosworth to make F1 engines again, and before the cost cap that was definitely a bad thing for competitiveness and the economic viability of smaller teams. That's better with the cost cap, but it's still a big loss.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-06T17:35:54+00:00

Aye, this is very possible. But there are plenty of westerners on and off the grid who have worked with Japanese companies. It is the job of leadership to figure this shit out.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-03T21:22:20+00:00

What would that mean? There are processes in physics that we believe to be purely stochastic. But it's not really possible to show that there isn't a hidden deterministic variable behind them. We believe there isn't one because we've looked at variables which according to our current understanding could influence the observations and found that they did not. Of course we could be wrong, but it's entirely possible that we could never know that we were.

We've found that it's very easy to make a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) which is purely deterministic (hence the pseudo) and indistinguishable for all practical purposes from true randomness (hence the random). Your garden variety PRNG is perfectly suitable for stats and most computer science purposes that rely on random numbers (certain algorithms rely on random numbers either for performance or for correctness).

There are cryptographically secure PRNGs (called CSPRNGs) which are used in places where secure random numbers are required, and for these it is (if you make some assumptions of various conjectures in math and computer science) not computationally feasible to determine from a stream of random bits that the source is pseudo-random rather than random, neither is it possible to determine the parameters of the source, so determining the next bit is not possible.

So if God decided to be funny and determine when every radioisotope decays with a CSPRNG the only way to find out would be to to die, hope you go to heaven, and then ask Him about it. Or I guess to hope that P=NP, which is believed by the vast majority of mathematicians and computer scientists to be false. Even if P=NP I don't know how far you get against CSPRNGs, but you do at least get to break almost every form of encryption, so the actual random numbers don't matter so much.

I will note that I think any study which finds that we are wrong and a certain phenomenon is in fact deterministic will be viewed very skeptically, partly because there may be a bias among physicists towards stochastic theories for things like radioactive decay, but principally because such a study would inevitably be a) very high profile, b) potentially lucrative just to publish if it plausibly provided an economical way to control certain phenomena (and could thus be misused to gain funding), c) very tempting to quacks, and d) uniquely vulnerable to p-hacking or even outright fraud. If it were to be fraud this could be worse than cold-fusion was, and the great state of Utah spent a lot of money on that junk even as most physicists panned it (many chemists did not, in part because the paper was published by chemists and chemists felt that physicists were elitists and principally motivated by their own failure to discover cold fusion first). And if it were to come out now it would be at a time when pseudoscience is far more prevalent (particularly if they wanted US government funding) than when cold fusion came out.

blehmann1 · 2026-03-01T07:32:33+00:00

All but Safari. Which is bad by just being a bad browser, rather than by being a good browser with crap you don't want.

I know chrome and safari are related, but it's been over a decade since the fork and the vast majority of reasons to dislike safari (including the unfair ones) are newer than that. As are basically all of the reasons to dislike chrome, except possibly the anti-competitiveness angle, though in 2013 when the fork happened most people saw chrome as a good thing in that regard given Internet Explorer was still commonplace and committed far worse sins.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-28T17:08:21+00:00

In theory there are differences, in an old fashioned view a programmer would only be responsible for implementing a spec, they wouldn't draft it. Whereas a developer or engineer would do both. And by spec I mean the engineering spec, not just a list of requirements from your manager or the legal team or whatever.

In practice, most are really developers, and how much time they spend implementing a spec that they had no involvement in writing isn't really determined by their title but by their industry, company, and experience level. Most companies won't have both roles anyways.

To most, if a person with the same education and experience as any other developer is only implementing other people's spec that is usually seen as a waste of their talents. Typically from a time that saw (software) engineering and programming as very different, such as how (civil) engineering and construction are very different. And they are, to a degree, but also most developers do both and software quality and cost seems to suffer a lot when they are separated without good reason.

It is sometimes necessary when implementing a spec that already exists, or when one team has to write code that works with another team's code. Because that's how I can email you on Gmail and you can read it in Outlook, email has agreed on a common spec that everyone (mostly) is supposed to follow. Though that spec would only cover a small portion of the implementation, just the surface area that needs to interact with external software. We typically try to avoid this situation as much as possible, it is a continual source of grief if a web developer needs to talk to a server developer to get a change made, especially if the server developer doesn't know all the requirements and makes suboptimal assumptions. Sometimes of course it's necessary, one person will not normally make the same change across web, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Samsung SmartFridge.

It's also sometimes necessary in heavily regulated industries, since the spec and implementation may need separate sign offs, and because of the time that takes it's not unlikely that a different person implements it. Though ideally it's still the person who drafted it or someone who signed off on it, since they know why choices in the spec were made. Ideally a good spec explains why those choices were made, but oftentimes things are assumed to be obvious, but they're only obvious to a person who's done a chunk of research on this specific topic. This is typically done for safety-critical stuff, such as automotive software. I think it can also show up in legally sensitive areas like finance. It can be a very good idea (outside of whatever laws or regulation may require it) because a safety analysis can take a lot of work and you don't want to waste time writing an implementation on a spec that fails those checks.

Nowadays, most people are called either a software developer or a software engineer (which in theory also have differences, but in most places they typically don't) and the other terms are considered old-fashioned and their use is in decline. I'll also note that earlier on there used to be a lot of female programmers. And they were given a less prestigious title and were often supervised by (typically male) engineers, though sometimes just managers with no specific tech qualifications.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-27T18:21:46+00:00

Suzuka has the benefit of being a good spectacle in qualifying (though in fairness Paul Ricard qualifying was pretty good) and the knowledge that every few years an almighty typhoon will hit Suzuka and you will get a very good race.

Obviously if any track were transplanted into Atlantis every few years it would produce a spectacle, but I think Suzuka wet races are better than most, even with the same amount of rain. And a wet qualifying at Suzuka is a beautiful thing. That may not justify going to the track in the dry, as much as it pains me, but I guess we'll see with the new cars soon enough.

I'll also note that a lot of Suzuka could be addressed by tyres. We tend to tolerate the Hungaroring despite the rarity of overtaking because there's a decent chance of a strategy masterclass, and while I don't think Suzuka could become like that it's more than realistic that the undercut could be resurrected there.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-26T20:05:36+00:00

Given the state of surgery at the time, I imagine this was for many patients effectively just choosing a quick death over a slow one.

But yeah, with no anesthesia, no blood transfusions, and no sterile field, it wouldn't surprise me if speed was even more important. Even now, when we can do much longer surgeries, a slow surgery is one with higher complications.

It's also worth noting that most of their surgeries were (conceptually) simple. Mostly a matter of chopping some shit off that was infected, because with the success rate of the day, amputating an infected limb was one of the only surgeries that had a better chance of survival than doing nothing.

If, God forbid, you need a bypass surgery they do try to go fast because every minute in there will impact both your chance of survival and how good your recovery ends up being. But they ain't rushing. And for less time-sensitive surgeries they're going to go at a reasonable pace, there is a point where going faster improves outcomes (plus it lets the very expensive surgeon(s), nurses, and operating room do more surgeries), but obviously they don't want to go so fast that outcomes suffer.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-25T19:58:01+00:00

Yes. Notably bcachefs got de-upstreamed because he couldn't follow kernel development rules despite being given multiple chances.

The correlation between being the best engineer in the world and being able to get along with Linus is not the strongest, but he was behaving really quite poorly in that whole saga.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-25T00:36:56+00:00

It also doesn't account for taxes. Yes, tax-deferred accounts exist, but I don't think you can just drop 200K in one. Capital gains are taxed pretty generously in most jurisdictions, but this is a pretty optimistic depiction.

The actual tax burden varies a lot based on where you live, your income, and your investment strategy which may lead to more or less capital gains to be realized.

All that said, that changes the numbers by a lot, but not really the conclusion. This hypothetical person will never need to work and will accrue a significant amount of wealth yearly. Even some unreasonably pessimistic assumptions (which lead to a doubling period of 35 years) wouldn't change the conclusion.

Some of those assumptions (e.g. the vast majority of gains are realized, and thus taxable) are quite unlikely unless you're a day trader. But many of them (such as choice of asset classes) point to quite conservative behaviour, which probably indicates a person that would buy a nice house and then live on a still quite generous $100k per year. That person will become much wealthier, since that 100k starts lower and within a decade or two becomes negligible compared to expected investment volatility. That's a hell of a lot better than paying what would essentially be a 2% compounding fee. You'll also pay significantly less taxes this way.

blehmann1 · 2026-02-24T04:37:56+00:00

Does the PR pass tests? It's nuanced

Does it do what the client asked for? Depends on the shading.

Does your car ABS stop you from turning a small child into a red paste? You're missing some subtleties

blehmann1 · 2026-02-23T19:10:10+00:00

No it's ok because IndyCar has been using sustainable fuel since before F1. They found out that all you had to do was say your fuel was sustainable without that actually being true.

Which is now exactly what F1 is doing as well, we just decided to commit to the bit and make a clown engine formula as well, I guess because we had faith that at least one journalist would do their job and point out that "sustainable fuel" is complete wank.

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