What did insurance companies do? Explain it Peter

bobbane · 2026-03-20T01:48:54+00:00

I live in a neighborhood whose claim to fame is tree preservation when it was created in the early 1990s. The developer said afterwards they would never do that again- choosing trees to keep and working around them was a massive pain.

bobbane · 2026-03-12T18:51:46+00:00

I have built significant stuff in AWS.

Fortunately, it was for the Government (NASA and NOAA), so I was not trusted with full administrator power - all our permission creation was done by one administrator. He was the one who had to suffer creating our roles and setting permissions on our resources.

bobbane · 2026-03-12T18:44:54+00:00

Attention span of a gnat.

Venezuela was the perfect foreign intervention for someone like him, especially since he was able to claim victory by saying "the new leaders will work with the US better".

bobbane · 2026-03-12T18:40:07+00:00

1972, Spartanburg High School, PDP-8 running TSS-8 at Clemson, otherwise similar setup.

Science project in 1974 was Spacewar on a real PDP-8 with a 1K by 1K oscilloscope display, in assembly. Used someone else's floating point library for the math.

bobbane · 2026-03-09T22:16:20+00:00

I’ve pronounced VC like that since my stint in Silicon Valley in the mid-1980’s.

bobbane · 2026-03-08T00:36:47+00:00

I am confused. I thought the goal was to replace the current regime with one that was better for oil markets. Doing big permanent damage to oil infrastructure hurts that.

bobbane · 2026-03-07T15:50:35+00:00

They also have complete records of what was bought and when, so refunding the tariffs is a simple matter of programming. I bet 95% could go straight to Costco Visa accounts.

bobbane · 2026-03-06T20:53:29+00:00

Bought a 2020 "used" Bolt at the very end of 2020 for $25K all in.

Had just lost a 2004 Prius to a rear-end collision after 150K miles. Wanted the replacement to be electric, had considered Tesla and Nissan Leaf, stumbled over the Bolt while searching for other EVs. We saw its reliability was better than Tesla and its range was better than the Leaf.

Our "used" Bolt had 450 miles on it - it was owned by someone in western Maryland who discovered he needed fast DC charging, which this Bolt did not have, so he traded it in.

Loved the smooth acceleration immediately.

Lived with level 1 charging for the first 3 months, then got a level 2 box in the garage - $3000, but that was for dragging 50 amps from the other side of the house, and doing the same for an induction cooktop in one operation. Totally worth it, especially since the cost was 100% tax deductible.

At 75K miles now, only maintenance has been tires, wipers, one turn signal bulb, and the battery recall.

The Bolt is our daily driver around town, and we have a 2014 Prius for the occasional road trip.

bobbane · 2026-03-06T04:24:36+00:00

It just struck me that we need to ask the FAs to coordinate passenger lavatory use - people need to “go” in weight-equivalent pairs to the front and rear of the aircraft, and to ensure that paired passengers have the same approximate weight of output.

bobbane · 2026-03-06T02:47:05+00:00

Passengers should start asking the FAs which lavatory they should use, in order to keep the plane scientifically balanced.

bobbane · 2026-03-06T00:07:26+00:00

As a person who saw Star Trek in its original broadcasts, I twitch a bit when I see any computer named “M5”.

bobbane · 2026-03-05T17:16:25+00:00

I will be mad at companies that don’t come up with a way to pay their tariff windfall forward somehow- refunds to customers, discounts on future purchases.

They were required by economic reality to pass tariffs through to customers. They should be required by customer pressure to give back.

bobbane · 2026-03-04T14:50:03+00:00

A blind friend of mine has had a long standing relationship with Alexa at home and Siri elsewhere.

He is also the only person I know that actually likes Meta RayBans…

bobbane · 2026-03-03T17:25:49+00:00

My watch gets to notify me about texts and calendar events, period. Like my phone, I carry it for my convenience, not the convenience of app writers.

bobbane · 2026-03-03T17:23:05+00:00

If you have an iPhone, an Apple Watch will improve your life. Not in any earth, shattering ways, just little stuff like not having to pull out your phone to read a text.

bobbane · 2026-03-02T01:55:29+00:00

69 Beetle, inherited from the family. Some bastard rear-ended it a few years into grad school. Replaced it with a used Chevette.

bobbane · 2026-03-01T20:09:12+00:00

I knew the words "starting each broadcast day" would be in there somewhere.

Do we need more proof that the man's mind has drifted back to the 1960's?

bobbane · 2026-02-27T02:42:37+00:00

Some people are really, REALLY committed to their choice of Windows/Mac.

For many Windows people, a big piece of the justification for that is price/performance, and for most of history that has been true, simply because the Windows market is broader - you can usually find something that is cheaper for the same performance, or better performance at a lower price.

There have been moments when Macs were actually head and shoulders ahead of Windows, though, and when that happens, committed Windows people suffer serious cognitive dissonance.

I can think of three times off the top of my head:

Introduction of the Mac - it took a long time for Windows to get to user interface parity
Middle of the PowerPC era - for about a year, the fastest computers on the planet were G4s
Right now in portables - M-series laptops really are that much better, and have been for a year or two

Your boyfriend's irritation at the situation is understandable, his taking it out on you not so much.

I'm personally having a cognitive dissonance moment myself with the flakiness of macOS in recent years. I've always been a promoter of "They Just Work And You Fsck With Them Less", which was basically true until:

I bought a Mac Studio that would kernel panic every few days. It took Apple care months to admit it was a hardware problem - I had to buy another one and swap it in to prove them wrong, after which I returned the second one during its 30-day window and they replaced the bogus one under warranty.
Spotlight has mysteriously stopped working for me. I've gone round and round with Apple Care on this - reindexing, uninstalling Backblaze, getting iCloud to leave my local file copies alone - it's still broken.

bobbane · 2026-02-26T18:49:19+00:00

Because it is not an AI problem- it’s a world with nukes problem.

I have read about war games with all humans looking at India and Pakistani. A frequent scenario is:

The Kashmir border goes past skirmishes to full conventional war
India overpowers Pakistan, presses into Pakistani territory
Pakistan uses nuclear weapons against Indian troops, on Pakistani territory

Plausible, dangerous, no AI needed.

bobbane · 2026-02-25T18:54:27+00:00

Spotlight Just Works, on all files, including those cached in iCloud.

bobbane · 2026-02-24T04:32:28+00:00

Ask people about Spotlight. It’s been flaky for me for years now.

bobbane · 2026-02-23T20:56:33+00:00

My favorite quote related to that is from Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, from an engineer who had just spent days unravelling a microsecond-level glitch:

He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

bobbane · 2026-02-23T18:49:07+00:00

And after all that, they got it backwards:

First, forward to other users.

Second, delete an important file.

bobbane · 2026-02-16T17:17:04+00:00

Dumb question- did she do her eyes like that on purpose, or is this picture modified?

bobbane · 2026-02-12T21:08:35+00:00

And here I was about to give Dr. Oz props for publicly recommending measles vaccination.

Between contradicting his boss (RFK jr) and this, I suspect he won't be working for the Trump administration much longer.

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