For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.

If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.

I can literally feel myself deflating when I get these, like it’s a huge involuntary sigh accompanied by the classic heart-sinking…

…followed by a deep breath and a “Sure! 👍”

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

It drives me nuts that I can’t quite tell if that piece of tongue-in-groove (LOL) flooring is white oak, possibly varnished, or some sort of tight-grained pine.

Also, apparently Professor Hoadley was a really nice guy and very well respected.

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

“Hotel,” nothin’. That’s clearly the Selina Meyer Presidential Library.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UO_whAN302s

I bought Alibre Design, as it was a less oppressive situation license-wise, but these days I find I’m using it less than I might simply because I prefer staying in Linux for literally anything else. It was a bit pricy, but at least it was a perpetual license. I am hearing that while they don’t intend to support Linux, they’re moving away from some of the libraries that have prevented Proton from working.

The rest are varying degrees of oppressive lock-in and feature erosion. PTC/OnShape in particular has a huge “Fuck-You” attitude towards anybody who wants to consider throwing a design up on Etsy or selling a few trinkets without paying out the ass for a professional-grade subscription, and being the only fully mature web-based tool, it’s the only one that works properly in Linux.

Every single major commercial 3D CAD suite is still better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is not the unusable beast it used to be, in fact it’s very much better, but it has technical debt and structural limitations that just keep it worse.

Very little has been tested yet, but the general thinking is that there’s probably no longer any generation cap, except for babies born since the new change went into effect a couple of weeks ago. The real trick is in proving it. From what I have read, the Canadian bureaucracy that processes these has usually asked for primary documentation, so actual birth certificates or centrally maintained religious records, and only once those have been exhaustively searched and the relevant local offices throw up their hands (via an official “we tried” letter) will they consider things like census forms and border-crossing logs.

“I’m telling you Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem I threw a Molotov cocktail and Boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”

I believe it’s a dedicated parking garage, which admittedly only helps a little.

Yup, but it also might be lightly photoshopped. The Street View has a window right where the portajohn is sitting that looks pretty permanent, but this pic or the street view could be old.

Ain’t no torque on a Dremel. Gotta find the hammer drill.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.