https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism

Under “Term coined by”

The moon is about 1.25 light seconds away from Earth. There are retroreflectors placed on the surface of the moon by NASA, some of which are still functioning.

Given the number of people that stare up at the moon, it seems likely that someone has blinked twice with correct timing to be at the same time as their reflection.

On the other hand, I have blinked with my face only a few cm away from a mirror, so my reflection blinked 0.00000000007 seconds after me, so maybe “at the same time” is doing the heavy lifting here in the sense that there is some minimal period of time between most events we would consider simultaneous.

The universe can’t be a simulation, the framerate is way too good.

I’m destined to go to heavim forever.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which planned, built, and owned the site. They also operated it from construction until July 2001.

The world trade center was required to be insured against terrorism by the banks in the leasing deal. That was an obvious requirement for the banks to include because of the recent (at the time…) 1993 world trade center bombing.

Larry Silverstein got the insurance so recently before the attack because he signed a lease that included the insurance provisions, and he signed that lease in July 2001 because negotiations for the deal took from January 2001 until July 2001. Prior to that, the Port Authority was having trouble keeping the occupancy of the building high, and they thought private management of the building would increase tax revenue, and give them money for other projects. The plan for privatization began in the 1990s, and coincided with other revitalization efforts in the area, some managed by the Port Authority, and others stemming from the city government.

I think in context there’s nothing surprising involved here, and the timeline of the attack was driven by different things than the timeline of the leasing deal. In other words, this is a coincidence.

It’s a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they’ve lost billions on this. Why haven’t they done anything?

“AAA” gaming began as a reference to the “AAA” creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) “certain to repay the loan” // “certain to earn more than the development costs” (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there’s kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce “fun”, and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That’s where you get the wild “no one (in the know) would expect this to work” ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won’t go after the same concept under most conditions.

For me, it’s “Jessie’s Girl”. The things we learn about this girl are: She has eyes, she has a body, at some times she talks cute with Jessie, she loves Jessie. Then the question, “Where can I find a woman like that?”

The contrast between the exceedingly generic description, and the exasperation (as if no other girl would suffice) annoys me every time I hear the lyrics. This is then multiplied by the fact that the song is catchy.

Are you perhaps thinking of someone else? As far as I’m aware, Schrödinger is only well known for work in particle physics, quantum mechanics, and related physics fields.

A 1.5" long number 8 wood screw has slightly more than half the holding strength when it is driven by a hammer into 2 3/4" pine boards, relative to the traditional rotating the workpiece approach, but takes only about 1% of the time to install. You can very easily add a second screw to achieve the desired strength, while often gaining resistance to torque in the workpiece.

Meanwhile, 3D printed screws usually break when struck with a hammer, so they’re no good for this approach.

It’s already been made perfect once. What updates would you make it divinely inspired code?

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.

I suspect this is the (non-word) singular form of the noun “electronics”. If there’s a better term for such words, and you let me know what it is, I will give you my thank.

Trees are obviously made up by Canadians to disguise where maple syrup Really comes from.

Huh, I always thought Linux stood for “Linus eXtreme”. The more you know…

Charmeleon is not as cute as charmander, and not as powerful looking as charizard, so it’s second place in the things that matter for merch interest.

If small numbers are much more frequent, it’s better to return early. Really, you should gather statistics about the numbers the function is called with, and put the most frequent ones at the top.

“Trunk records” for indie music seems 110% appropriate to me.

1970 was during the cultural revolution. In that year, the world population was 3.68 billion, and the population if China was just shy of 830 million - China had 22% of the world’s population, so if they held (only) 20% of the world’s prisoners, they’d have a lower than average incarceration rate.

The same is not true for the US today, we have less than 5% of the world’s population today.