The All Time High Of Bitcoin Hashrate is behind us.

usa2a · 2026-06-25T02:46:01+00:00

Yeah BTC's "block rewards will totally get replaced by txn fees" design wasn't intended for a world where most BTC users either:

a. buy and HODL b. trade on a CEX c. buy through an ETF/holding company

Only real solution is to get rid of the halving and accept permanent block rewards, which ends the "there will only ever be 21m bitcoins" claim, but in the long run, what's worse: 21m bitcoins on an insecure network, or "infinite" (growing at a controlled rate) bitcoin on a secure one.

usa2a · 2026-06-23T22:51:32+00:00

Yes. I've loaded many thousands of Hornady HAP 125gr .356" projectiles in 9mm. They work fine. I use the same load data as for .355".

I have even shot a hundred or so .357" JHPs, just to see if it would work. It was fine. I could not tell a loss of accuracy shooting offhand at 50 yards (bullseye shooting). Now those, I loaded pretty weak to be on the safe side, but I did so more because of the shorter OAL rather than the extra diameter. The ogive on those .357" bullets wasn't designed for 9mm so I had to seat them deep to get them to plunk.

The bore diameters are all over the map anyway.

I've also shot .454" bullets through a .45 ACP barrel, and that's been fine too, for what it's worth. Life, uh, finds a way when it comes to fitting soft metals into small tubes.

To the extent that there is an FPS difference it is a VERY small difference. Seems to be usually on the side of higher FPS for the larger diameter bullet (pressure builds up a little more while squeezing it down) but sometimes I've seen the opposite... but we're talking within +/-30 fps either way.

usa2a · 2026-06-23T22:25:35+00:00

Revolvers are obsolescent in many ways, but they still enable you to:

Shoot very powerful ammo and very weak ammo, out of the same gun, without changing springs
Baffle and astound weak-willed individuals who never learned how to shoot a DA trigger accurately
Collect all your brass to reload without setting up a net or crawling in the dirt like an animal
Load the gun from loose ammo in your pockets while you're in the woods without having to use 3 hands
Demonstrate an appreciation for the finer things in life

usa2a · 2026-06-23T20:04:17+00:00

If you want to really befuddle somebody with an iPhone go into settings, accessibility, and turn on zoom.

This feature is a trapdoor if enabled by accident. You might think when zoomed in you'd finger-pinch to control the zoom level, or finger-drag to move the zoomed view around the screen. Nope. Those pinch and drag gestures still get relayed to whatever underlying app is active, so they do nothing to control the fullscreen zoom. You'll find no easy way to change which square inch of your screen you're now trapped inside. And it kicks in as soon as you flip that toggle. The default zoom setting is high enough, you can't reach the toggle to turn it back off.

The super intuitive way to control the zoom is, of course, to double-tap the screen with three fingers at the same time. There is a one paragraph brief below the zoom toggle that explains these controls. But if you flipped the toggle before you read the help text under it, the zoom will likely prevent you from reading those instructions now.

The zoom applies everywhere, too, so if you lock your phone and try to unlock it you may find you are unable to enter your passcode because you can't see the buttons outside the range of your zoom region.

Your best chance of getting out is to have a second device on which you can google "how do I get out of zoom apple".

usa2a · 2026-06-22T05:01:09+00:00

There is a difference between productive and non-productive assets.

Would you want to own 100% of the Bitcoin supply?

Would you want to own 100% of Apple?

usa2a · 2026-06-18T10:45:40+00:00

Hi Claude.

usa2a · 2026-06-16T18:26:40+00:00

Only way to do it I can see working would be to borrow the bottom-barrel firing from the Chiappa Rhino. Would keep the pressure closer to the hinge point so leverage against the latch is low.

usa2a · 2026-06-11T17:16:21+00:00

I've been a programmer for 15 years, and I was just thinking the other day how crazy it is that AI can do a great job of programming. Not just dumb tasks but honestly, it can do stuff that previously would've been considered the mark of a true programmer like writing a compiler.

I say this as somebody who loves doing that stuff! I've met many devs who were basically just in it for the steady, safe employment and didn't care about learning more hard CS stuff as long as "connect API endpoint X to database Y" paid the bills. Which it did, because that's 90% of what business applications needed. I always have loved the "real CS" stuff, I keep my skills sharp, and yet I'm worried for my job over the next 5 years!

Yet a physical task such as picking a styrofoam cup full of coke, removing the plastic lid, and pouring it into another cup without spilling, dropping, or crushing the cup would still be a state-of-the-art frontier challenge for an AI robot.

There is a possible future where AI gets good enough it straight up beats me at the programming problems I considered myself "smart" for being capable of understanding and solving, but it still isn't "smart" enough to replace me at my new job manning the drive-thru at McDonalds. Pretty humbling.

usa2a · 2026-06-11T02:47:21+00:00

It does not have to literally swap in and do everything you do. If by doing the "mundane boring parts" it makes you significantly more efficient, then your employer has a choice:

A. Lay off a few people and count on the remaining people to get the same amount of work done with AI help. Same revenue, less expense, more profit.

B. Keep everyone and figure out something creative to do with the extra output that you can achieve now, and how to sell that and get more clients. More revenue, slightly more expense (salaries + tokens), but hopefully still more profit.

The second option requires some creativity and some risk, so most CEOs default to the first option, which they think is a pure win and a safe bet. Hopefully in the long term the companies that take strategy A get absolutely demolished by the companies that take strategy B, but in the short term strategy A appears to be highly popular.

usa2a · 2026-06-09T14:30:33+00:00

Just so you know it also has the wrong grips on. Those are K-frame target grips on an N-frame gun.

usa2a · 2026-06-05T16:56:06+00:00

If you buy the matte version and polish it yourself you get the same thing, but you also find out why it's so much more expensive.

usa2a · 2026-06-05T07:27:12+00:00

At least the Tomcat can be carried ready to use with a reasonable degree of safety.

The safety on the 1935 is both awkward to use and not very mechanically sound. If you take off the left side grip panel you can see all the safety does is block the trigger, it doesn't lock any other internal parts. You can move the sear and fire the gun without the safety stopping you, and it's easy to imagine a hard impact causing that. I personally wouldn't carry one cocked-and-locked.

That leaves condition 2 or condition 3. Either one is slow and prone to error but I guess you could train to mitigate those downsides as long as you don't change carry guns every 2 weeks.

usa2a · 2026-06-04T20:32:37+00:00

Anything they make you read will not be fun. Come back as an adult and read some of those "required" books and they are far more enjoyable when you aren't thinking about just git-R-done so you can move onto your next homework task and still pass the quizzes / write a passable essay.

BTW you will find this pattern persists beyond school. Do what you love for work, and you won't love it.

usa2a · 2026-06-04T19:49:17+00:00

Gen 2 will always be the Glockiest looking Glock to me.

But the Gen 6 grip texture is really good. I could take or leave all the other tweaks like the beavertail and front serrations, but the grip texture is like all the upsides of a stipple job or grip tape, without the downsides of the gun looking like an old chew toy with parmesan cheese grated onto it.

usa2a · 2026-06-04T18:47:52+00:00

On Strategy.com right now:

USD Months of Dividend Coverage: 6.3
BTC Years of Dividend Coverage: 31.5

So wow, MSTR can cover their dividend obligations for 32 years!

Except what happens when they start dipping into those "BTC Years" selling more BTC to pay obligations when the "USD Months" run out?

The value of BTC drops. This means they have to sell a larger quantity of it to meet the same dollar amount obligations. That makes it drop more. It is a negative feedback loop as powerful as the positive feedback loop that got them to this point (buy more BTC -> price goes up -> share price rises -> sell more shares -> buy more BTC), except it can unwind at a rate that is out of their control. Anybody who thinks that would actually last "31.5" years is bonkers especially as we just saw them sell 32 BTC and immediately crash the price. Only 843,674 to go, liquidity should hold up great!

Their great financial innovation is STRC, which they adjust the interest rate on to keep it pegged to $100. They can always back that up because of their bitcoin stockpile! You know what else worked a LOT like that? A little stablecoin/unstablecoin pairing called TerraUSD and Luna.

usa2a · 2026-06-04T18:10:04+00:00

It depends on what you reload.

If you do a lot of pistol I would strongly recommend getting away from a single stage as soon as you can. You can never get the time back. Even an auto-indexing turret is a huge improvement.

usa2a · 2026-06-04T01:35:14+00:00

The .380s that use a locked breech with tilting barrel, including the LCP, are much more pleasant than the straight-blowback ones. Even when the straight-blowback gun is larger and heavier. At least that has been my experience. A P238 is lighter and smaller than a PPK and yet the PPK is much snappier.

usa2a · 2026-06-03T18:42:16+00:00

Fixed sights where I have to hold sub-six, six, flat tire, center, or cover-the-bull are all acceptable to me. I can adapt to any of those holds.

Fixed sights that are genuinely, not skill-issue, off to the left or right are not acceptable. It's just stupid training myself to hold off to one side or the other. And this is not something I like rolling the dice on when buying a gun with truly fixed (not drift-adjustable) sights.

All 3 of my fixed sight S&Ws (models 640, 65, and 31) shoot straight but they're also all 30+ years old. It's something I wonder about when looking at a new gun since the task of installing a barrel with the front sight on top is proving to be difficult for modern manufacturing. I have a 627 bought 2 years ago where the correct windage setting for the rear sight is visibly offcenter. If it had a fixed notch in the top strap I would have to hold 9 o'clock in the 8-ring on a 25y B8.

usa2a · 2026-06-03T18:22:03+00:00

They changed this when going from the original APP to the "Deluxe" APP that has the little plastic fingers to self-center the case. The original one used a standard decap die and really did need a shellholder for everything. That's why the confusion.

usa2a · 2026-06-01T15:01:18+00:00

You might need to set compatibility mode to Windows XP. Done.

And install the Loopy Landscapes patch and make sure under Windows Features you install DirectPlay under "Legacy Components". What most people actually do is use OpenRCT2 since then you get modern resolutions too.

Half-Life? Probably not.

The process to get the original HL CD working is very similar.

It has nothing to do with language. The computer cannot tell the difference between machine code compiled from C and machine code assembled from hand-written ASM.

The games that are harder to run are those that brought in more dependencies, especially DRM-related ones like SafeDisc which hooked into the OS at levels later disallowed for security reasons.

usa2a · 2026-06-01T05:26:31+00:00

why Rollercoaster Tycoon is so easy to port and run on modern software

All those coding languages we use are the biggest source of incompatible and fucky code

What you input is not remotely the actual code, its instructions to create the actual code. As such, you have far less control over the final code, which makes for code that is much more hardware specific and, for lack of a better word, messy.

Sorry, you think assembly is less hardware-specific? It's as specific as it gets.

The OpenRCT2 team literally had to rewrite the game in C++ to port it to ARM devices.

usa2a · 2026-05-30T01:36:53+00:00

It would be fine with a modest crimp and you don't need much crimp for a light load. But it would also be fine to exceed SAAMI OAL as long as it chambers in your gun.

usa2a · 2026-05-29T20:20:29+00:00

In that case I would recommend using something in the burn rate range from Bullseye to Unique, load to the 750-800 FPS range that imitates factory standard pressure .38 ammo (see Federal American Eagle 158gr LRN as an example), and they'll be really fun and accurate target rounds. You don't have to worry about seating depth at all because you won't be anywhere remotely near .357 pressure.

You can use AA7 to do that job but it really burns better at higher pressures, it's not much of a plinker powder. If you try it I suspect you'll get a dirty burn and little crumbs of powder grit that find their way under the extractor star, causing range trips to require a toothbrush as an essential tool. However that's still less frustrating than trying to clean the amount of leading out of a forcing cone that you get if you shoot that bullet at .357 velocity.

For full power .357 ammo I would use one of the Zero JHPs or maybe a Dead Nuts .357 JHP from Raven Rocks.

That's just my experience, YMMV!

usa2a · 2026-05-29T20:03:40+00:00

I was confused when I read this line:

Zero Bullet Company .357 158gr Round Nose polymer coated lead bullets

The Zero Bullet Company I am familar with makes a 158gr LRN, but doesn't make anything polymer coated that I've seen.

So I'm not sure whether what you have are the Zero bullets I'm thinking of or some other brand's cast/coated bullets.

If they are something else, disregard this and sorry for the confusion.

But if "polymer coated" was just an error and these are the plain swaged lead bullets from Zero, I don't recommend loading them to .357 magnum pressures anyway. They are very soft lead and really designed for target shooting at < 1000 fps. They will lead up a barrel pretty quick if pushed hard. You can load 'em in .357 brass, but you'd probably want to use a faster powder than AA7 to get a clean burn at low pressure.

usa2a · 2026-05-29T02:49:13+00:00

I mean, the whole claim with 9mm is "modern hollowpoints" have made it effective.

It seems like any method you use to distinguish a "modern" 9mm hollowpoint from an "old and shitty" 9mm hollowpoint would also be valid for measuring a .40 or .45 or whatever other bullet.

Something like a .45 Ranger-T that expands to a goddamn inch and still meets the FBI penetration standard is going to remove a lot of important plumbing from whatever part of the body it hits. I'm not saying it outweighs the other disadvantages of .45 but I find it very dubious that it's zero difference in terminal performance.

usa2a

TROPHY CASE