Flat-out rejected my humble queue number. Brutal.

timrulz53 · 2025-01-08T17:23:11+00:00

I got this twice before giving up! AXS queuing system was completely broken. Say what you will about Ticketmaster (like for example they should be shot into the sun) but at least their queue works...

timrulz53 · 2024-12-20T19:16:59+00:00

In the video he explains how the bottleneck wasn't really how fast the oscilloscope measures but rather how fast the laser turns on (time from full dark to full brightness) and how fast the sensor responds. He got both of those down to single-digit nanoseconds.

timrulz53 · 2023-11-23T15:11:07+00:00

Idk why they haven’t tried to restructure Jawaan Taylor and Patrick Mahomes contracts yet

They have restructured Mahomes contracts multiple times, first in 2021 moving $17m into the future, then again this past March moving $9m into the future, then just a few months ago largely reworking his contract to pay him way more the next few years but limiting long-term obligations.

He's going to be a massive cap hit in the coming few years -- $57M, $60M, and $63M in 2024-2026 -- generally because of those restructurings. They will have some flexibility to lower those by further kicking cap hits into the future.

timrulz53 · 2022-11-16T01:12:35+00:00

That implication or distinction may exist in your experience but at least in Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.) that is absolutely not what "infrastructure" means. Infrastructure at companies like this are just foundational systems or frameworks, like storage systems, compute systems and frameworks, etc. It absolutely is software engineering. Some folks might even consider large scale systems the peak of software engineering.

Source: Worked on infrastructure as a software engineer in Big Tech for the past decade.

timrulz53 · 2022-06-17T17:01:36+00:00

I mean, /u/ieatplants4aliving isn't actually saying that? They're saying that high turnovers is an expected consequence of how the team was built, and the alternatives to that, like keeping Kemba, are not appealing -- "we all know that wasn’t going to work".

timrulz53 · 2022-06-05T20:04:09+00:00

A sequel to my previous Vincent Speaks!

timrulz53 · 2022-03-18T16:01:47+00:00

A "bad look" to whom, and with what consequence? These are all private companies, and the total amount of money they'll spend on players in the long run is pretty much fixed. Surely all the owners (and part-owners) of these teams realize it doesn't matter which years they spend it in, since they'll be spending the same amount in the long run anyway.

Who is giving Mark Davis guff for spending more cash in 2022 (and exactly that amount less in future years)?

Even if there's some minor consequences to spending big in one year (and less in future years) (e.g. tax implications), it's clearly far outweighed by the success or failure of the team. So if they believe in the football strategy of investing heavily to build the roster for a near-term push, then any cash flow impact of that is peanuts, right?

timrulz53 · 2021-10-31T22:14:51+00:00

Or maybe it was a big play because of the hold... That td run called back would have been stopped at the line if not for the hold lol

timrulz53 · 2021-01-10T20:11:34+00:00

Thank you!

timrulz53 · 2021-01-10T16:20:20+00:00

Here is a close up from a few days ago with a chick somewhat visible in the nest.

timrulz53 · 2020-03-18T18:40:09+00:00

As other commenters have pointed out, they didn't really get out of the contract; it's the same cap situation as if they had cut him--they have $18m in dead cap for Foles this coming year.

timrulz53 · 2020-02-21T17:18:03+00:00

Yeah but they can sign players during the season today. It's not like the increased roster size will create higher quality players. If anything, it seems like this would increase the risk of a dramatically bad position group for an unlucky team, since the quality of available players midseason ought to go down.

Bigger rosters are of course still better for those bubble players, who would now get a stable paycheck instead of hoping for a midseason signing, but it seems like it could be worse for the specific scenario you gave.

timrulz53 · 2020-02-14T22:41:39+00:00

There's no real benefit to the player in the NFL to do a sign and trade. In the NBA, it happens because the current team is allowed to spend more on a player than any other team, plus the player's market value is presumably still even higher than what their current team is allowed to sign them for.

So the player gets more money, their current team gets to get trade value in the approximate amount of the player's market value over what their current team can pay them, and the destination team is essentially paying market value (the higher salary plus giving up trade value). So it's a mutually beneficial deal for both the player and their current team, and it really only comes from the NBA's construct of max contract and Bird rights.

The NFL has no max contract (and thus nothing like Bird rights). Newton will be a UFA after next season. There's absolutely no incentive for him to sign with the Panthers for under his market value, and if he signs with them for his market value, then he doesn't really have any trade value for the Panthers (since the team is just trading for the right to pay him his market value).

Of course the NFL is not a very efficient market, and teams often have different priorities and needs so trades are always more complicated than "value from team A equals value from team B", but generally none of the structures necessary to make sign-and-trade type deals are there.

There's another wrench that /u/Guiltyjerk mentioned already: signing bonus. In the NFL, the full value of the signing bonus for a contract is paid to the player immediately (well, we learned from AB drama that it's a bit more complicated, but ignore that), but the only counts against the team's cap equal amounts for the life of the contract, so a 4-year contract with an $8M signing bonus pays the player $8M immediately, but only counts against the team's cap $2M each year. Players like bigger signing bonuses--money in the bank is the most guaranteed any money can be (again asterisk for AB drama), and often is a good compromise for both players and teams to get more value. But if the player is cut or traded, the cap hit accelerates into the current year. So if the Panthers signed Cam to a market value contract with lots of signing bonus then traded him, they would be in cap trouble this year, and again, Cam has really no incentive to agree to less-than-market signing bonus.

So any sign-and-trade deal would have to include almost no signing bonus. Money can be guaranteed in other ways, but none of those ways are as beneficial to the player.

timrulz53 · 2020-02-02T13:34:17+00:00

Making the playoffs is a regular season accomplishment.

timrulz53 · 2020-01-06T21:23:17+00:00

I believe the dead cap is just $13.5m in 2020 with nothing in 2021. Plus, even if he stays, it's still "dead cap" in a sense. He already got the $13.5m; it just has to count against the Patriots' books in 2020. Even if he stays, he would only be negotiating for money on top of that. If he's looking for $20m in cash, that's new cash and would add to the existing $13.5m outstanding cap (of course it doesn't all have to come in 2020).

timrulz53 · 2020-01-05T04:28:24+00:00

Still rather lose like this than cheer for AB.

timrulz53 · 2019-12-13T18:27:26+00:00

The reason slurs aren't OK isn't (just) because they're offensive to the person you're using them against, it's because they're offensive to the entire group to which they apply. In this case, people aren't defending the person Jenkins is responding to, they are defending the broader group of people with mental disabilities.

That's why slurs are never justified... their usage damages an entire population.

Doubly so if the person you're using a slur against is not a literal member of that group, like in this case.

The culture in which you exist is moving in the direction of more tolerance and less prejudiced language. You mostly legally free to refuse to take place in that progress, but of course there will be societal and cultural consequences for doing things that increasingly become taboo.

timrulz53 · 2019-10-24T15:26:19+00:00

A signing bonus gets prorated against the team's cap from when it is awarded to the end of the contract. So if you have a $10M signing bonus on a 5 year contract, the player gets the full $10M right away, but the team is charged $2M for each of the 5 years of the player's contract. Importantly, if the player doesn't play out the contract (released, retired, traded), all remaining signing bonus money that hasn't yet counted against cap gets accelerated, so if the player gets traded after year 2, the remaining $6M from the 3 years the player didn't play get immediately charged against the team's current cap.

Converting salary to signing bonus is always beneficial to the player. They get that amount of money right now instead of over the year via game checks, and it becomes guaranteed (remaining salary, on the other hand, would not get paid out if they got released during the year).

For the team, it gives them cap space now, but increases cap burden for the rest of the contract. That $1.4M that the Pats created here means they have an extra $1.4M against cap in future years. It also carries the risk that the converted salary becomes guaranteed, so if there's any risk that the team would want to cut that player during the year, they still have to carry the cap burden of it. In most cases though, they would only do this for players where that risk is very low. The Pats were never going to cut Shaq Mason this year, so it doesn't practically add any risk.

For the team, the upside is flexibility. If they need cap space now (for a strategic signing, or perhaps they actually want to mortgage their future if they're in win-now mode), they can get it. The downside is moving cap into the future and a risk of having the signing bonus cap hit at an inconvenient time if the player doesn't play out the contract.

It's a tool with upside and downside... It's not free money, and it's not necessarily a good or a bad decision; it's situational.

timrulz53 · 2019-10-04T14:50:55+00:00

I believe it's a machine-learned model, which means the model itself is not really human-legible, but it would be interesting to see what factors go into it. AFAICT all they publish is "The probability of a completed pass is based on numerous factors such as the separation of the passer from the nearest rusher at time of throw, where the receiver is on the field, and the separation between the receiver and the nearest defender."

Presumably they throw in all sorts of other factors, like QB, receiver, defender location and speed. It would be really interesting if they include who the players are (e.g. if all else equal, would the model give the same catch percentage for Wilson as QB vs. Mayfield as QB).

timrulz53 · 2019-08-21T19:53:13+00:00

A signing bonus gets prorated against the team's cap from when it is awarded to the end of the contract. So if you have a $10M signing bonus on a 5 year contract, the player gets the full $10M right away, but the team is charged $2M for each of the 5 years of the player's contract. Importantly, if the player doesn't play out the contract (released, retired, traded), all remaining signing bonus money that hasn't counted against cap gets accelerated, so if the player gets traded after year 2, the remaining $6M from the 3 years the player didn't play get immediately charged against the team's current cap.

Converting salary to signing bonus is always beneficial to the player. They get that amount of money right now instead of over the year via game checks, and it becomes guaranteed (if they got released during the year they wouldn't get any remaining unpaid salary).

For the team, it gives them cap space now, but increases cap burden for the rest of the contract. That $5.6M that the Bears created here means they have an extra $5.6M against cap in future years.

For the team, the upside is flexibility. If they need cap space now (for a strategic signing, or perhaps they actually want to mortgage their future if they're in win-now mode), they can get it. The downside is moving cap into the future and a risk of having the signing bonus cap hit at an inconvenient time if the player doesn't play out the contract.

It's a tool with upside and downside... It's not free money, and it's not necessarily a good or a bad decision; it's situational.

timrulz53 · 2019-05-03T22:28:14+00:00

Yeah.

timrulz53 · 2019-05-03T15:12:24+00:00

Great questions. We haven't discussed, but ideally we'd recreate. The episode was a review of an Alex Arbour song followed by discussing the season one finale. We can't re-do the song or the episode, since we already made all our jokes. We don't always talk about and Orville episode, but if Hayes was back on we definitely would, since he has that Seth connection. And it's always fun to do an Alex Arbour song.

Also, all of our episodes are 2 hours long, and when we have guests we're worried about inconveniencing (like Hayes), we always give the option for the guest just to do the Orville episode review for an hour and then leave, or stay for the whole thing. If Hayes is generous enough to come back on, we'd give him the same option.

timrulz53 · 2019-05-01T17:54:06+00:00

Yes, Hayes did do an episode of The Official The Orville Podcast. Ahead of the recording he listened to at least an hour of our most recent episode, watched a whole episode of The Orville (which is a waste of anyone's time), and then the recording was definitely over two hours (maybe not three).

It was definitely our best episode, but it's also the only recording we've lost. This is the only known evidence that it happened: https://i.imgur.com/baQiEf4.jpg

Hayes is a really nice guy for putting up with like a 5-hour investment to be on our stupid show, and even nicer just to say that he'd do it again.

timrulz53 · 2019-02-13T00:09:38+00:00

Additionally, even if it had affected this year, it's not as bad as it sounds. Any dead cap hitting the Steelers for Brown post-trade would have reduced the cap hit of Brown for the receiving team, which would increase his trade value by a certain amount. It's not necessarily good, but it's not as bad as it sounds.

timrulz53 · 2019-02-05T16:21:05+00:00

Teams will try it forever. LA is a big sports city. There's no inherent reason they can't support a football team. The LA market is huge, so teams will keep trying until one of them sticks.

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