Well, it was yes.

What we’re all seeing now is that the Constitution ultimately depends on our willingness to agree to collectively abide by it.

It was always just a story, but while we all agreed to believe in it, it was a true story.

I managed to logic my parents out of one thing.

My parents actually asked me if it was possible that the vaccines contained 5G micro robots.

After taking a moment to maintain my composure and put on my “pretend I wasn’t asked a stupid question and answer seriously” face, I asked them to take out their phone.

When the phone was in their hand, I asked them to consider the fact that it must be charged every day to keep working, and that the vast majority of the size of the phone was taken up by the battery. Then I pointed out that a device small enough to be injected wouldn’t have enough power to still be on when it left the needle.

Luckily I didn’t have to go further than that.

I think that’s the only time I’ve had any success pounding logic into them. I think the problem is they can’t think of me as anything but a child, except where computers are concerned.

They paid for my computer science degree, and they know I’ve been working in IT for 32 years, and I answer all their computer questions. So, if the subject is computer-related, I’m their expert. Anything else and I’m just a deluded child.

I haven’t tried talking to my mom about the SSA COBOL AI rewrite yet. I’m not sure if she heard about it or if she did whether she understood enough to even be concerned enough to ask me.

I found this to be an interesting question.

I don’t think of myself in terms like that. I’m American (as in United States of). If people ask where I’m from, I’d say Pennsylvania.

If asked what I am, in terms of what countries my ancestors came from, I would typically just list my four grandparents. Since that encompasses four different European countries, it’s too complicated to think of myself as a hyphenated American. Maybe you’re in that situation.

Ultimately, the label is yours, so you get to decide. No one else’s opinion matters. It’s your identity. Just say what feels right to you.

Ah, but is a chicken egg a chicken egg because it came out of a chicken or because a chicken comes out of it?

That is the real question.

I believe that computer just attracts people who are outcasts

I think you’re right, but I’ve also read that there might be some correlation between being trans and being on the autism spectrum. If that’s true, then it is reasonable to expect a higher than average percentage of IT people would be trans.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9014767/#%3A~%3Atext=(2020)+found+that+that+transgender%2Cand+sex+assigned+at+birth).

“You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”

I guess I’d recommend watching Banshee.

In the years before the US existed, when the land was colonized by European powers, Europe had a lot of really annoying, prudish types who were a major downer.

Someone had the bright idea to encourage them to move to the colonies where they could live their prudish existence free from the naked bodies of Europe.

We ended up with all of Europe’s biggest prudes. Europe’s prudes have been trying to reestablish themselves, but they are at a serious disadvantage. Meanwhile, we in America have to deal with an overwhelming population of prudes that we’ve struggled for centuries to extinguish​.

While we’re on the subject, Europe also found it convenient to dump their criminals here. So we end up with a culture in which full frontal nudity is unacceptable, but gun violence is just fun entertainment.

I say that as someone who loves some good violence. Nothing quite so enjoyable as living vicariously through some bad ass beating the snot out of the bad guys in a movie.

I never would have thought of myself as a prude, but recently stopped watching the series Banshee because the amount of gratuitous sex in the show was exceeding the amount of gratuitous violence to such a degree that I began to feel uncomfortable.

Also you need to love licorice and sauna, that’s a rule

TIL I’m Finnish.

Your concern seems strange to me.

Looking at “British” for example, you’re taking about four culturally diverse groups (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish). “Ethnically British” doesn’t really make sense.

That doesn’t even consider the multitude of people from everywhere around the world who are British and perfectly comfortable identifying as such.

Why would anyone bother with sanctions? Nothing a foreign government could do would be worse than what our own is doing.

Just wait it out and hope you manage to find a way to secure our nukes after everything disintegrates.

I’m aware of an effort to get LLM AI to summarize medical reports for doctors.

Very disturbing.

The people driving it where I work tend to be the people who know the least about how computers work.

We’re monkeys with COMPUTERS!!!

You’ve got it backwards. Once every interaction is like that, you stop showing error codes.

I have trouble with my colleagues in IT doing the same crap. They come to me to ask me to help them with a problem, and they don’t have the errors!

Parrot

You are correct. It relates to the torque (rotational force) that can be produced at different RPM.

Diesel engines have a narrow range of RPM where the torque is highest. At low RPM, the torque of a diesel engine is low. That’s why trucks have to shift into a low gear to start moving and shift multiple times to get up to speed. The driver uses the different gears to keep the engine running within the optimal range of RPM.

Electric motors have high torque at low RPM, so they can start a heavy load moving without having to have any complicated gearbox between the motors and drive wheels.

In a diesel-electric locomotive, the diesel generator can be designed to run at an efficient speed without being affected by the mass of the train. The electricity it generates powers the electric motors which have the necessary torque to handle moving the train.

You now have to lug around a LOT of both fuel and water, instead of just water and dry coal. Water and oil are both heavy by comparison to coal when lugging a train car of it around.

I think you’re making an assumption there. You would need to consider energy density of the fuel. Diesel fuel has almost twice the energy density of coal. For the same trip, the weight of the diesel fuel you would need for an oil-fired steam engine would be just a little more than half the weight of coal needed for a coal-fired steam engine.

Also, delivering the diesel fuel to the boiler would require a less complex mechanism and/or less workers than coal.

I wasn’t saying it was a solution, I was just offering a possible explanation. I understand why someone wouldn’t bother telling the user what’s happening. For my code, I log everything that happens, and tell the user to call me. When I get the call, I check the log and use that to figure out what went wrong.

Distressingly typical user communication:

User: There was an error message.

Me: What did the error say?

User: I don’t know. Something about the problem.

Users ignore error messages.

I have seen my users request support, proceed to demonstrate the issue they’re having, and click through error messages so fast there isn’t even enough time for me to say “WAIT!” Forget about being able to actually read even one word of the message before it’s dismissed from the screen.

They treat the error messages like they are just an annoying mosquito to be swatted away as quickly as possible. This despite the fact that the whole reason I’m standing behind them is so I can see what it’s going wrong and, you know, read the error messages.

Obedience and conformity.

Same as always.