Geez don’t give him any ideas!

I’m wondering how far I can get learning to play the cajon from YouTube tutorials?

I’d say I kind of suck at this point, but I’m having a good time and it’s early days still.

I’ve actually been having more trouble with Apple Maps lately.

My last trip was to perform at a country fair type thing and it couldn’t locate the venue. So I thought maybe if I put on the satellite view, I could spot it and drop a pin? But the whole area was behind a cloud. Wow.

Then later, when we were returning, it tried to send me on a shortcut through a mall parking into an overgrown field.

Thought for a moment there the dude on the right was Emperor Palpatine?

One problem I have with this idea is that the cooling profile from releasing sulphates into the atmosphere looks very different from the greenhouse gas warming profile. For example, the latter has a more pronounced effect at higher latitudes, since GHG are insulators. The arctic is getting hit harder than the tropics. The former, I would expect, would affect the places in the world that get the most sun, since it is effectively a solar filter. So, the lower latitudes, in other words.

If we have a baseline scenario A of what would have happened without the GHGs and B with what is currently happening, this would make for a scenario C that is neither of the others. I would submit that C would likely be as far from A as B is. Yes, you might get global warming under control in an accountant-looking-at-only-the-bottom-line sort of way, but this would still represent a massive climate change into uncharted territory. Would scenario C still be preferable to B is the question I guess?

When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I’m guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There’s a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.

This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)

Was it red by any chance? The only red car I have ever owned got rear-ended 3 times.

Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!

Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

So it’s not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

They’re going to keep making more powerful hardware either way, since parallel processing capability supports graphics and AI just fine.

It’s not quite as simple as that. AI needs less precision than regular graphics, so chips developed with AI in mind do not necessarily translate into higher performance for other things.

In science/engineering, people want more—not less—precision. So we look for GPUs with capable 64-bit processing, while AI is driving the industry in the other direction, from 32 down to 16.

Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.

But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.

That’s an odd comment. It smells like fear. Is he worried she will overtake him in net worth?

Years ago I watched a documentary about Trump’s shenanigans in Atlantic City. Basically, he stiffs the contractors who build his casino. They sue, and so he hires some big shot lawyers to defend him. They get him off for the most part, but then he then turns around and stiffs the law firm itself! Like what even?!?

I posted this because it gave me a hint as to why conservative propaganda has shifted in recent years. It’s mostly personal attacks on the man at the top now. “F#ck Trudeau” and all that.

While this might make some sense in the US where the presidency is an institution unto itself, it makes a lot less sense in Canada where we have a parliamentary system in which running the country is a group effort by the dominant political party.

And Trudeau is not even a power-trippy type of leader. He’s always been more of a delegator. So while I believe there is plenty of reason to be critical of the current federal government, pinning it all on the prime minister just seems weird and off. Like something a foreign influence campaign would be trying to do, in other words.

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.

I understand the concept of riding a bus being free time to read or use the phone, but my experience for my commute has been standing room only for an hour.

Well at least that speaks to good ridership numbers where you are. I guess they need to add more buses, bus priority lanes, or other higher-capacity transit options.

I would love to be able to use an e bike to get to work, but I don’t like biking next to cars on anything more than a 30 mph road.

It’s worth investigating what possible routes you can take to get from A to B, as there are generally more options with a bike than a car but they are not necessarily obvious. For example, after having a close look at a satellite view, I realized that what I had assumed was a railway track was actually a decommissioned rail line that had been converted into a trail, and it actually cuts some distance off of the car route I had been taking to work.

Last night, I actually discovered a new route for getting home from band practice. I used to cut through a cemetery, but with the nights getting longer, it was starting to creep me out going through there in pitch black conditions, even though the bike has a headlight. (Cemeteries in the day time can be quite a pleasant ride though.) But I carefully surveyed an apartment complex that looked impassable. In fact, it had a foot path leading through it and beyond. This one was hard to spot on satellite since it runs through a tree tunnel.

The biggest problems are typically bridges, where you really have no other choice but to cross with the traffic. I am frequently advocating to city officials to improve cycling infrastructure along any such traffic choke points.

The time cost is certainly an important factor to consider. It’s interesting to me that my Gen Z kids have a markedly different perspective on transit vs driving in that regard. They say if you’re driving, that’s time lost, while if you are on the bus, you can be doing all sorts of things on your phone or what have you.

For me, a car commute works out to around 15-20 min if there is no traffic (a big if). The ebike is more like 25-30, but it is generally far more pleasant—at least in good weather—as I can cut through parks and trails. The bus is perhaps 45 min if I catch it right, but unlike the bike, it feels longer than it is.

One factor to consider is that if your work is of a sedentary nature, both transit and cycling factor in some exercise into your daily routine which I would say is not wasted time in that case. People who take transit are generally in better shape than people who drive everywhere, since there is an element of walking around, sometimes carrying stuff.

I wasn’t sure an ebike would give me any exercise, but I think it’s safe to say it does. In the video, they say free transit translates to 2x usage per individual. For me, that ratio coincidentally also describes the regular bike vs ebike experience. So while my old bike provided more intense workouts, the ebike provides more consistent (albeit lighter) exercise since it is really my primary transportation at this point with exception to the months of Jan and Feb when the car admittedly takes over again for the most part.