I would bet there are still a few old pieces of industrial machinery around that I duct taped together by imaging an ancient PC and transferring it to a Virtual Box VM.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that when your country is run by a murderous tyrant who has his own mother arrested on [presumably] fabricated corruption charges, human rights are of little concern.

If they could detain him indefinitely, that would be great.

According to data from the world’s largest job board, Indeed, demand for IT jobs is rapidly declining. Backend development, testing, technical analysis — all of this is being automated faster than education systems can adapt. Since the end of 2022, global tech corporations have laid off more than 635,000 employees. Behind this figure are engineers, designers, analysts, UX specialists — people who, until recently, were considered the elite of the digital world.

This is not because of “AI.” This is because the river of dirt cheap debt dried up and corporations ran out of gambling money to blow in pursuit of the next big thing. I’ve spent a lot of my career working for non-tech companies who have this idea that they have a massive treasure trove of data which they are sure can be monotized. So, they set out creating solutions in search of problems. Every project I’ve worked on in the last 5 years has failed for this exact reason. Rising interest rates brought most of the gambling screeching to a halt.

“In the criminal justice system, offenses involving Tesla’s are considered especially heinous.”

It seems like the singular benefit is that DuckDB (or similar OLAP models) can quickly handle lots of expensive read queries on large datasets.

It’s not a replacement for a traditional RDBMS. I’ve never used it so I don’t know if it’s worth the effort to maintain instead of just using a Postgres read-only instance to run analytics queries but somehow I doubt it.

My guess would be that it has a few very specific use cases where it can provide some added benefit. So, I fully expect it to be crammed forcefully into software projects where it provides no tangible benefit for the foreseeable future. Just like cough MongoDB cough.

Canadians: Burn the White House to the ground

Me: “Oh no! Anyway…”

Buying a Buick == Domestic Terrorism

I worked at a place where basically every other department would stand in the lobby at 4:58 PM, waiting for accounting (which was on the other side of the building) to leave. If you didn’t wait, the CEO would likely see you from his office window and you’d be getting a “talking to” by your supervisor the next day. I have never before or since worked anywhere where I’ve seen so much collective time wasting, trying to keep up the appearance of being busy.

This was an American company. I don’t miss that shit hole in the slightest.

Sounds like a lot of these people either have an undiagnosed mental illness or they are really, reeeeaaaaalllyy gullible.

For shit’s sake, it’s a computer. No matter how sentient the glorified chatbot being sold as “AI” appears to be, it’s essentially a bunch of rocks that humans figured out how to jet electricity through in such a way that it can do math. Impressive? I mean, yeah. It is. But it’s not a human, much less a living being of any kind. You cannot have a relationship with it beyond that of a user.

If a computer starts talking to you as though you’re some sort of God incarnate, you should probably take that with a dump truck full of salt rather then just letting your crazy latch on to that fantasy and run wild.

Hamas. It’s always Hamas. Even when it’s not Hamas, it’s Hamas. And they’re definitely hiding in an elementary school in Gaza. Oh, and the kids at the elementary school? Also Hamas.

/s

I had to come back here specifically to thank you.

We have a “rainfall” showerhead that has been a huge disappointment since we installed it. Your comment popped into my head today as I was about to jump in the shower. All I had to do was remove a little o-ring and now it works fantastic! It also cut my shower time in half.

Cook’s Venture (an Arkansas poultry processor) went bankrupt practically overnight. Then the state came in and killed all the chickens at each farm, leaving the farmers to deal with all the dead and rotting corpses.

What did our wonderful governor do? Well, as I recall, her administration refused to declare a state of emergency and pretty much told all the poultry farmers to go fuck themselves because it’s “not the government’s job to bail out private businesses” or some bullshit like that.

Doesn’t feel so good when you’re the one getting told to fuck off. I hope all the people who voted for Trump and Sarah Sanders are happy since this is exactly what they voted for.

Shit. I didn’t even think about that. That’s only for the first one though. After that the months just kind of blend together.

Have kids. You’ll be so busy you’ll forget what day of the week it is until 5 minutes before you’re supposed to go pick your new car up.

…I’m kidding. Don’t do that. Kids are very expensive.

You know what’s funnier? I mean, it’s not funny, but it also kind of is. At the same time, the Trump administration is pushing coal burning power plants. Aside from the high levels of pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions that coal plants produce, no one in the US is building new coal fired power plants. Twenty years ago, coal generated over 50% of the electric power in the US. Now it’s less than 20%.

Even if they were, it takes years and a huge investment, including getting rail access to the plant, to even bring one online. Electric utilities spread their capital outlays over decades rather than years. So I would expect that convincing the industry to switch back to coal, with the understanding that they’ll have to maintain new coal fired plants for the next 40 years, is going to be a nonstarter.

All tarrifing solar panels will do is push power utilities toward natural gas and exacerbate the (actually legitimate) issue of insufficient base load generation capacity that they’ve been whining about for years. Oh, and also kill residential solar projects.

Long way of saying this action will continue to weaken our already strained energy infrastructure. You could try to incentivise domestically produced solar panels. But this is not how you would do that.

And the President of the United States is a steaming pile of shit.