grues-dinner

7 ms·

61.
by grues-dinner 1y ago
Once upon a time, 1 pence was one point (I don't recall which supermarket). Now you get 2 Nectar points per pound. I do remember my parents grumbling when it went to 1 point per two pence. The supermarkets have gotten wise to people re
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
One more step in the long road forecast by the prophet Stross to singularity via deconstructing the solar system for computronium in which to run financial transactions.
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
> not crazy or conspiratorial to look at these giant lines in the sky and think "those things must be doing something" I think more accurately it's not crazy to think they might be doing something. I could equally be con
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Yes indeed. Apparently some of the carbon will come along with hydrogen as methane when you bake it out of the rock. Separating straight to carbon and hydrogen is a hassle, though, as the carbon clogs the catalyst. Perhaps crashing a carbon
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
"It might be useful some day" If it's iron or aluminium, someone probably will pay silly (Earth) money for it on the Moon during early colonisation, but maybe not right at the start when there's no bandwidth it facilitie
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
I don't think it's nihilism as much as the realisation the vaunted capital-letters Free Market Economy isn't run by level-headed experts who while maybe not benevolent, work within a framework that produces long-term benevole
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
I also wonder if there's a element of tools and training. Modern CAD tools have been horrible at "fiddly" ornamentation for decades compared to a hand drawn decoration. There was once an article about this but I can't fi
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more si
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
I'm sure airports will really appreciate half-mile tethers, or whatever length you need for full-sized cargo planes, flopping about the runways (I assume they're aiming for full size because their little graphics doesn't show
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
The first synthetic biological attack will be a very bad trip, whatever way it happens. Even at the more fanciful end, The Moral Virologist https://gregegan.net/MISC/MORAL/Moral.html actually seems like it could
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
> They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings. If anything it feels like the second CSR who actually told you the truth was acting more in defiance of the system than the first one.
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
The other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on ou
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
That's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hamme
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Then I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!). Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
How likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Whether it's drifting through space or hammering through at dozens of kilometres a second is rather a matter of perspective. Perhaps as far as it's concerned, its sedate drift has been interrupted by a very ill-mannered solar syst
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
> Even if AI dies off, I imagine there are tons of uses for those same farms Are there tons of uses for 2023 crypto farm hardware? A trillion dollars of GPUs in various stages of obsolescence and/or shagged-outness in data centres m
78.
by grues-dinner 1y ago
Cars add all this software and soft-button shit and then angle to lock it all behind subscriptions anyway. What's the point when you can just use a phone anyway? Just rip it all out, save a packet on software development and partner wi
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
I see Hénon and I think of Tarbell, and yep, there it is. Fractals are due a resurgence, as I recall the Internet used to be about 5% fractals by volume.
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
"So you see if the chance of pregnancy is constant per..uh..encounter, and given that the condom just broke, we're on a spectrum from the chance of a second round roughly doubling the odds but the overall chance is still small, or
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Fittingly this is roughly the same vintage as your relationship then: https://youtu.be/BipvGD-LCjU
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Good human customer service may be a turn off for VCs hoping for a unicorn. It doesn't scale infinitely, so if you need customer service to make your thing go - and presumably you do otherwise you wouldn't have a rep for good serv
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
> The department said that it had alerted Waymo of the glitch, and that “hopefully the reprogramming will keep it from making any more illegal moves”. Company breaks law: you cheeky little scamp, just don't let me catch you again, e
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
For many years it actually did work like this in the US. You had to register the copyright and then renew it after 28 years within a certain window. You can even see at the scans of the old registration indexes - they're still relevant
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
To be fair, looking at a lot of financial analysis, there's a lot of vibes going on. Lots of significant figures are shown in reports and graphs and so on, but it strongly feels like everyone is stacking 5-20% tolerances everywhere and
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
And if you explain in detail about how it works, a lot of people (not all, but quite of few of the more obstreperous types who raise these as CRITICAL BUGS with solutions apparently SO SIMPLE MY DOG COULD IMPLEMENT IT) will then say "I
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
In a good modern implementation, it should be extremely hard to produce a physical card with an authenticated pointer to the database, because that would be also signed. But considering that they've been retiring things like biometric
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
The accounts generally aren't linked together. Everything about the UK government IT is a huge group of independent systems all pretty much isolated from each other. You can argue over whether that's down to incompetence, organisa
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
That's basically how the existing share code system works for non-citizens. You the worker ask the government for a share code. You provide that to the prospective employer and they can check that it is valid. The same or similar syste
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by grues-dinner 1y ago
Not only that but also farmland is heavily industrialised. It's not Farmer Jenkins on a horse or a 1800cc Ferguson tractor any more.

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