This weirdly took me back to a chance conversation I had in the late 90s with the development manager for Internet Explorer. I asked him a technical question about a new feature I thought IE might be getting. He had no idea what I was talking about, and said (almost verbatim), “Now that Netscape is essentially dead, we really have no motivation to innovate in the browser space.” This was about at the end of the transition period when the money people took over MS from the geeks, and I remember thinking yeahhh, this is the end. The feature I was asking about was “back channel requests” - later known as AJAX. I believe it was first implemented natively by Firefox and then Microsoft (who could have done it like 5 years sooner) scrambled to play catch-up - which by then was their standard pattern.

Those baby on board stickers were so helpful, you’d see one and think okay, I’ll be extra careful not to crash into that particular car.

Note the reference to Kristi Noem - South Dakota’s former governor, who decided to handle COVID with “freedom and personal responsibility,” spending $5 million of her state’s federal COVID money on a tourism campaign. Like the line from Steve Martin’s King Tut song, “He gave his life for tourism” - thanks to her, some South Dakotans probably did.

I guess that’s why we call helicopters helicopters and not spiracopters. But in many medieval buildings, whose stone walls are normally thicker at the base and get thinner toward the top, the stairwell cavity would get wider as it went up, making the stairs a spiral.

Staircases are so cool! My personal favorite thing to photograph in old buildings is doors.

That’s why I was careful to say, “speak with dead,” (after the D&D spell) implying a conversation.

oops thanks, fixed.

At first glance it looks like the cat is hanging off a balcony on a really tall building.

Post this message at least nine times or you will have bad luck!

Søren Sørensen, who came up with the concept of pH, wasn’t clear on what the letter “p” meant. It does involve powers of 10 and can be measured using electrical potentials, so the best guesses are “potential” or “power”, or several words that mean “power” in other languages and also happen to start with “p”. Bottom line, we don’t know, and unless somebody discovers more of Sørensen’s notes or a way to speak with the dead, we never will.

The 9-10 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t bother voting in 2024.

edit: fixed date typo

And that’s why some people object to polygamy. Others object because of the multiple sex partners. I could imagine people even thinking of it as some kind of tax dodge, or socialism, or reasons I couldn’t fathom.

Thanks, I got the humor, what I’m wondering about is what’s the predominant reason people in general object to polygamy, regardless of whether it’s Islam or Mormons or whatever.

Lines that intersect a circle like that aren’t “right angles” tho, they’re called “normal” to the circle - in other words pointing directly toward the center. A normal line is at right angles to a tangent line, but not to a curve.

Excuse me? If you want one find her yourself.

Wouldn’t surprise me if an LLM trained on records of chess moves made good chess moves. I just wouldn’t expect the deployed version of ChatGPT to generate coherent chess moves based on the general text it’s been trained on.

How about a whimsical little vampire finger puppet? Grrr… arrrg…

Developing some home automation using NodeRed and a bunch of cheap ESP32s I got on aliexpress. Been studying up on it lately. All I really want to do is turn lights on and off, but wirelessly. Also doing more 3d design & printing, and making some kind of impressive Halloween thing - I kind of want a large floating eyeball, maybe suspended from a dark pole up on the roof so it’s out in the air like it’s levitating. The bigger the better. It would be cool to detect motion and have the eye move like it’s following people, and of course blink. And fog. There must be fog.

Is the main objection to polygamy that having multiple sex partners is immoral or that the whole arrangement is subjugation of women (because usually it’s multiple wives not husbands), or some other reason?

Apples and web pundits are basically the same plant, we’ve just bred apples to have worse typing skills.