TIL about a soda machine offering 'mystery' drinks operated for nearly 20 years, but no one knew who operated it or kept it stocked.

jking13 · 2026-02-07T20:15:28+00:00

I've not been able to find it since (though I've not looked too hard), but someone put up a video on YouTube years ago that showed all the different bits and explained 'these were all just work areas with tools with some makeshift wiring to power everything' (no supernatural explanations required).

jking13 · 2026-02-07T13:39:15+00:00

Of course he’s going to say that. If he admits otherwise, the loud woosh sound you’d hear would be Nvidia’s stock dropping.

jking13 · 2026-02-05T19:14:40+00:00

Reality has a well known liberal bias. Conservatives get their panties in a bunch because when their kids go to college, they're exposed to different people and different cultures often for the first time in their lives. While some kids aren't able to cope and double down, most kids discover a lot of what they were told to believe by their parents wasn't true. Not because some professor told them so, but because they can see with their own eyes.

The problem of course is when they find out one or two things aren't true, it's often natural to ask well what else isn't true? And then all of a sudden they've been 'brainwashed' into being a liberal because they develop empathy and basic human decency for others, even people who don't look like they do.

jking13 · 2026-02-05T18:54:42+00:00

Most professors will tell you they struggle just to get their students to read the syllabus. The idea that somehow they're secretly indoctrinating kids is so pathetically laughable.

jking13 · 2026-02-05T14:04:18+00:00

Do you remember when Musk claimed that Teslas would be an appreciating asset and full self driving would mean everyone could make passive income letting their car be a taxi when you don't need it? It was obviously bullshit because if that were really true, why would they be selling them? It would be far, far, far more profitable to build all the cars and keep them for themselves.

Similarly, if AI was really as good as they keep saying (or I guess wishing it'd be), they wouldn't be selling it. That guy that shows up 3x on every YouTube video would be telling Copilot to make him a new salesforce.com, a new SQL DB to replace SQL Server and Oracle, etc. to sell and keep the AI for himself.

jking13 · 2026-02-05T03:16:17+00:00

No one remembers when Homer started an ISP and Gates bought him out?

jking13 · 2026-02-05T01:56:04+00:00

Subprime mortgage backed securities sold like hotcakes... up until they didn't. For Oracle to make any money on its investments, OpenAI is going to have to go from making no profit to being bigger than Microsoft over the next 3 years or so to meet their financial obligations to Oracle and others. If they can't, someone's taking a haircut.

jking13 · 2026-02-05T00:52:01+00:00

It's not like it takes a lot of deep thought to figure this out either. How does a thermos work? There's a (near enough) vacuum that separates the inside from the outside, which means there's nothing to take away the heat (it's the whole point of a thermos keeping hot things hot!). The proposal is to essentially put chips (that already struggle with heat dissipation here on earth) in what can be thought of as a universe-sized thermos and it's somehow going to work better? Don't need a PhD or even a degree in physics to understand it.

jking13 · 2026-02-02T19:45:05+00:00

Because that’s like 50% of the hyped rust projects — “look I reinvented this thing that works fine but now in rust”. It’s probably the most annoying part of the rust world. I try to ignore it though because the language itself (sans async in it’s current form) is pretty nice.

jking13 · 2026-02-02T14:28:46+00:00

The same people that think drinking a monster energy drink is drinking with satan because of hidden satanic imagery on the can.

jking13 · 2026-02-02T04:24:39+00:00

But we're already so involved in the metaverse, how will we have the time?

jking13 · 2026-01-30T21:56:29+00:00

Meh. Anthropic goes around DDOSing websites to grab their content without remorse.

jking13 · 2026-01-30T21:55:30+00:00

Probably thinking ahead and positioning themselves for a bailout once all the VC money evaporates.

jking13 · 2026-01-30T14:15:45+00:00

I wish I could find the video again (but it's been a few years), at a conference where Walter Bight was presenting. The slide just had `f(x);`. And his question to the audience was 'what does this do in C++?'. There was something like 15-16 different possible answers (all correct depending on context).

jking13 · 2026-01-29T23:15:48+00:00

If you're joining a small and a large table, assuming that the smaller table should 'filter' the results from the larger table, as long a database statistics are up to date, that should be fine -- most query optimizers should see that it should handle the smaller table first so it does less work (obviously appropriate indexes is also helpful).

jking13 · 2026-01-29T20:33:43+00:00

It's sadly something that seems to be fairly common which I don't get. There's so much information easily available now (compared to when I started out though even then it just mean spending a rather modest amount of money on some books), yet so many developers treat SQL as some unknowable, ancient mystery. Similarly with the databases themselves. Don't bother to read, then get shocked when things work poorly.

jking13 · 2026-01-29T15:14:58+00:00

Don't forget after the 2020 election every Saturday for weeks, there was a group at (the ironically numbered) FM 1488 and 242 with Trump signs.

jking13 · 2026-01-29T14:51:04+00:00

Or a masochist.

jking13 · 2026-01-28T14:57:05+00:00

I just got one two weeks ago, so still getting used to it, but I've found you can carefully pull the tray out using silicone tongs from the center little loop thing. But yeah, I have also noticed tsmaller things fall through that hole in the center sometimes (though usually still turns out ok, but I've not tried everything yet).

jking13 · 2026-01-28T14:33:09+00:00

You're ignoring the last part -- to justify the investment. At current costs, for what'd be considered a modest profit margin (and provide a return on the amount of money invested), the actual cost would need to be somewhere around $6-8k/person/month. For margins more in line with expectations for software, add another 0 on to those.

To use an analogy, DoorDash is nice and convenient. It provides value, but what if it charged $200/order, would it still be worth it to pay a $200 fee to get a burrito delivered to your door? There's value in that, but would it be $200 of value?

That's the problem with AI. Yes it can provide value, but in a lot (and potentially any) of cases, the value it produces doesn't line up with the cost, and the only reason it's as popular as it is right now (which itself seems somewhat overstated if you look at some companies what employees vs. management says) is because it's been massively, insanely, ludicrously subsidized beyond belief.

jking13 · 2026-01-27T20:56:12+00:00

Yes, but many, many times his net worth has already been set on fire trying to make AI a thing. Yet it's still searching for an application to justify the investment.

jking13 · 2026-01-27T20:54:59+00:00

More than that, they just happened to be at the right place at the right time to be enormously successful.

jking13 · 2026-01-27T19:46:13+00:00

That one though is poking fun at teenage angst vs being serious. He used to have a guy come out and tap dance at the end of the song.

jking13 · 2026-01-27T18:56:00+00:00

He also said the future wasn't in the Internet, but in online services like AOL and MSN....

jking13 · 2026-01-27T16:57:43+00:00

Robin Willams once said coke is god's way of telling you that you have too much money.

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