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Silly dream
An especially silly but cheerful dream this morning. I was going to carjack a car and rob the people. But I noticed the car had an interesting shift lever, so instead of carjacking I asked them to show me how it worked. They showed me the details of the linkage. Then I walked to the…
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Drip Gas reprint
Mentioned in previous item on waste water. Reprinted from 2016. = = = = = START REPRINT: Let’s go back to Polistra’s Cave Gas station, the location that represents Patient Things. Where would a Patient Gas Station get its gas? In the earliest days of cars and fuel, some gas stations got their gasoline directly…
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Water isn’t the consumable
Basic rule: Protestors are always working for Deepstate whether they know it or not. Government creates two sides so it can punish one side and “follow the will of the people” on the other side. One of the main complaints against AI data centers is the use of water for cooling. The complaint is a…
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Tabling vs tabling
New PM Burnham is starting right and speaking straight. We don’t know how far he’ll go, but he does have the backing of his party with a good majority in Parliament. He is proposing a new direction, which in Britspeak is tabling a proposal. Burnham says it’s time to “end rough sleeping”. US governments at…
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Latest on the Anthropic lawsuit
July 21: Latest update: The judge has given final approval and the payout will start. = = = = = May 15: A judge in Frisco heard the final set of arguments and objections. The basic decision was already pled out by a settlement agreement last year, so the money WILL be paid in some…
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Headline words
Newspaper headlines and radio announcers had a vocabulary of short words replacing longer words. I was thinking about famed. It was standard headlinese, but it only saved one letter vs famous. It also saved a syllable, which must have been why it stuck. While pondering this deep philosophical conundrum, I noticed a headline in the…
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Sounds extremely good.
Burnham’s first speech is short but perfect. He wants to end rough sleeping in Britain. Brits like understatement but they can also speak with less euphemism. No American politician would ever be so straightforward. We pussyfoot around the question with bizarre phrases like Individuals Experiencing Distinctive Domesticity. Mostly they don’t talk about the problem at…
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Y no Dewey for code?
Question asked by somebody on substack, aka Onlyfans For Books: We have lots of new categories in books. Have librarians been updating Dewey and LC to keep track? Easy answer: We don’t have new categories. Cybernetics isn’t new at all. Academic journals and popular scientific books have been discussing it in detail since the 1930s.…
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Sounds good…
As I’ve observed a trillion times, England’s system works. It worked in 1776 and it still works. We replaced it with a system that was EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO FAIL, solely to benefit the richest fuckheads and tax evaders. In the parliamentary system a PM is more like a foreman than a CEO. He is elevated…
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Reward crime, punish honesty.
Rewarding crime and punishing honesty is COOL now. Cities and states refuse to jail thieves, so stores turn into prisons for honest people. Companies reward hackers and punish honest users. Canvas was expertly hacked by an organized gang who worked through Canvas’s private Github area to locate user data, then captured millions of users and…
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Just because all the cool kids…
Classic story of faddish stupidity. The Australian stock market had a smoothly functioning computer system. This means it was written in COBOL. Smoothly functioning == COBOL. So they decided to make it COOL instead of COBOL. What’s really really cool? Bitcoin! They spent 7 years and untold millions of dollars fucking around, trying to develop…
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Updater, update thyself
I’ve heard that Microsoft is planning the first HELPFUL Windows update in several decades. Supposedly it’s scheduled around today’s date, so I checked the WindowsCentral website to see whether it’s available and what’s in it. I think the text on this page is saying that Windows Search will be free of annoying ads and popups?…
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Answered two questions
On this morning’s walk I took the south loop, passing the Champion Hoarder House. There are other half-baked or temporary hoarders. This one has been packed for as long as I’ve been looking, at least 20 years. He seems to have good taste in cars. For a long time a ’65 Lincoln was parked in…
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Why do they join?
Latest stupid news: The usual D team is suing the Ellison monsters for trying to merge Warner and Paramount. The Ellisons were fine when they wore the D team shirt. Now they’ve joined the R team so they’re not fine. This is a constant rule. Why did the Ellisons put themselves into this position? They…
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Are grammar toxic?
Substack has started carrying ads after claiming that it would never have ads. You’d think that an ad for PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, appearing in Onlyfans For Librarians, would be edited more carefully. I don’t expect or want the Upon whom shall one rely level of grammar, but I do expect basic noun-verb stuff.
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