https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W3q8Od5qJio

Fun fact: Texas gave that strip of land to Oklahoma so they could keep slaves.

Actually, that’s not really a very fun fact.

Oh look, it’s me.

There was an interesting physics paper recently that suggested that time travel was possible, but you wouldn’t be able to travel to before when the machine was built. Of course, it also would require an impossibly huge amount on energy, but that’s a problem for the engineers.

Much like all of life. Expectations cause suffering.

Robbing a stagecoach.

When I was a very junior EE I ended up working mostly on microcontroller code. There was one bit of extremely ugly code I inherited that parsed a terribly designed serial communication protocol by using a giant maze of nested if statements. I really wanted to rewrite it to something better, but I never quite came up a solution while I worked there. Years later after I was no longer at the company I had a stress dream about it and finally came up with a working solution. I still wish I could go fix it. I really hope it’s no longer used, or that someone else has finally fixed it.

A write off is a colloquialism that refers to reducing your effective taxed income. A more realistic example would be, let’s say you make $250k, but you’re self employed and spent $50k on business expenses like a car and office space. Then you can write off that $50k and only pay taxes like you made $200k.

They are people who have fallen for and/or are grifting for a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that national laws don’t apply to them if they do some certain set of pseudo legal things. What exactly those things are, as well as what laws don’t apply to them,vary widely, but are usually centered around driver’s licenses and car registration, tax evasion and not paying child support.

Past that it’s hard to explain what their beliefs are because it is so vague and ever changing.

There are lots of options, use a CD changer, burn a mix CD, listen to the radio, run a pirate radio station. I’m not saying that physical media is always better in every situation, but neither is streaming. I like having the option depending on the situation.

I love physical media because it’s just much easier to use. If I want to play some album in my car I put the cd in and press play. No fumbling around with search or menus, just put a disc in a slot and done. If I want a friend to listen, read or watch something I hand them a small object and they have it. No need to text them the title so they can search for it later and then forget it.

Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.

Which word?

When someone says basic semiconductor, my first thought would be a single diode or maybe a transistor, not an entire integrated circuit.

Public Service Announcement: The Right to Free Speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, And they’re showing you the door. https://xkcd.com/1357/

Relatedly, the people who are the most upset about censorship when no one listens to them never remember the other right that goes along with free speech: Freedom of Association. That means that you can mutually choose to listen, platform support OR NOT with whomever you wish.

Frank is such an idiot. Why did we ever let them onto this team?

Also, me eating a prune.

I love it, though I haven’t tried using it as a daily driver in a long time. I should give it a whirl!

BeOS was the best desktop OS of its day, and from an end user POV still has features that I miss every day.