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Nash wasn’t first
Continuing snippets from Curt McConnell’s book Great Cars of the Great Plains. One of his five featured cars is the Spaulding, built in Grinnell. Like most early automakers, Spaulding was a carriagemaker first, and wisely returned to carriages and furniture after his car faded out. His car wasn’t technically interesting like the Great Smith; it…
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Good analogy
In the Programmer Humor section of Reddit, a smart metaphor from India: Bangalore as a city seems to be like an application that was coded entirely on production. And different releases were attached later on through adhoc APIs. To some extent this describes every city, but the global/modular distinction is valid. I’ve made this analogy…
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A craft that adapted
Looking for more info on old trucks and such, came across the American Blacksmith journal from 1917. Real work and real creativity adapt smoothly to changed circumstances. The evil Innovative Disrupters cackle at the “obsolescence” of buggy whips and blacksmiths, because the evil Innovative Disrupters are demonic genocidal murderers. In fact blacksmiths simply broadened their…
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What’s the purpose?
The D party here in Wash is proposing mandatory “voting”, like Australia. I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish. No state has ever done this, and it’s a safe bet that some “court” will eventually block it, which won’t make any difference and won’t be obeyed. Government does what it wants. Do they think…
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Way beyond Shannon!
THIS goes way beyond Shannon info. This is world-overturning info, and I’m not kidding. A 9-volt battery is simply a package containing six AAAA cells wired in series. A 6-volt lantern battery is simply a package containing 4 D cells wired in series. This is like learning that wheels are really ice cubes painted black,…
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Repayoleth
Via Coindesk, an interesting consequence of obscure bankruptcy laws. Sammy’s NGO posing as a “bitcoin bank” owned about 1/3 of current congresscritters. There’s an interesting difference in how the slaves treated their wages after Sammy’s NGO went into bankruptcy. Under bankruptcy law, all outstanding payments from a bankrupt company can be clawed back to repay…
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Jesus H Christ /// Edit: No, fuck it.
China sends a perfectly visible balloon over US, and another one over Canada. Pentagon claims to have known about it all along, but decides not to shoot it down because environmentalism or something. Remind me again why we have a “defense” “department” and a TSA and NORAD and all this other shit? Oh, now I…
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Good point, best point
Pretty good point from Kirn: AI Chatbots simply formalize & make explicit the profoundly inert nature of collective thinking that made real artists & writers attractive in the first place. They are more important than ever now, in fact, as second-rate pseudo-creativity has consolidated itself as never before. Vastly stronger point from one of his…
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Best hard answer
Haven’t done one of these in a while. Question at EnidBuzz: What tastes better a little burnt? Most of the answers were marshmallows and bacon. The last one hits the mark.
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What makes Sammy run candidates?
My considered conclusion is that Sammy’s outfit (FTX + Alameda + 100 shell companies) is a Democrat NGO. Sammy is following in his mother’s demonic footstomps. The whole outfit is decked out to look like a finance firm, but all of its PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITIES are designed to influence politicians and policies. Dem NGOs have a…
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Great Smith footnote
Bought a coffee-table book on Great Cars of the Great Plains by Curt McConnell. It features five notable and fairly successful early autos, including the Great Smith of Topeka. One of them, Moon in St Louis, became a mid-sized company and lasted till 1929. Most auto histories mention the Moon, if only because its factory…
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Shannon at last!
Been halfway watching the Elon/Twitter crap, waiting for Shannon info, and vowing to wake up if any real facts appear. Well, I’ll have to pay my implicit bet. We finally have a fact that genuinely couldn’t have been predicted from existing knowledge. In Taibbi’s coverage of the ‘Hamilton 68’ anti-Russian fakery, it’s clear that Twitter…
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Reprint on superhet
Linked in previous, worth bringing out on its own. This 2015 piece fits nicely with the newly found Carver quote: Start where you are. Work with what you have. Make something of it. Never be satisfied. The latter part of the piece also applies to this year’s AI cheating trend. Now that cheating is undetectable,…
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Multi-factor Sucker Filter
Double-locked doors are an old technique. Multi-factor identification is an electronic version, doubling the certainty that the entrant is authorized. Clever scammers have developed a multi-factor Sucker Filter. A UK court has branded a dark web site advertising bitcoin-for-hire hitmen an “absolute sham” and “palpable nonsense” after a woman, who allegedly tried to have a…
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