Sometimes people will say “That person’s name!” or “Those group of people!” in anger. “That Donald Trump! How dare he claim immigrants are eating pets?” to give you a current example.

When spoken of a family member or mutual acquaintance with a chuckle, it means more like “That person has some strange quirk but what can you do? We still love him.”

For example, you might hear “That dog! Always chasing his own tail.” So I think this is likely what you were getting from that conversation? It’s certainly not a criticism of your use of the word “people”.

I am not deaf, but this is triggering a pet peeve.

It seems a pretty common occurrence that I will be walking into a restaurant, bar, airport, doctor’s office, or whatever, and there will be a TV on a news channel with the sound muted or very low. For F’s sake, put the captioning on! What’s wrong with you?!?

Was it red by any chance? The only red car I have ever owned got rear-ended 3 times.

Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!

Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

So it’s not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

They’re going to keep making more powerful hardware either way, since parallel processing capability supports graphics and AI just fine.

It’s not quite as simple as that. AI needs less precision than regular graphics, so chips developed with AI in mind do not necessarily translate into higher performance for other things.

In science/engineering, people want more—not less—precision. So we look for GPUs with capable 64-bit processing, while AI is driving the industry in the other direction, from 32 down to 16.

Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.

But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.

That’s an odd comment. It smells like fear. Is he worried she will overtake him in net worth?

Right now, it is southwestern-style Indian upma with eggs and salsa. My wife invented that after randomly picking up a package of instant upma from a nearby Indian grocery and noting that it reminded her a bit of grits. We are afraid to tell anyone of south Asian background of this no doubt sacrilegious interpretation.

Years ago I watched a documentary about Trump’s shenanigans in Atlantic City. Basically, he stiffs the contractors who build his casino. They sue, and so he hires some big shot lawyers to defend him. They get him off for the most part, but then he then turns around and stiffs the law firm itself! Like what even?!?

I posted this because it gave me a hint as to why conservative propaganda has shifted in recent years. It’s mostly personal attacks on the man at the top now. “F#ck Trudeau” and all that.

While this might make some sense in the US where the presidency is an institution unto itself, it makes a lot less sense in Canada where we have a parliamentary system in which running the country is a group effort by the dominant political party.

And Trudeau is not even a power-trippy type of leader. He’s always been more of a delegator. So while I believe there is plenty of reason to be critical of the current federal government, pinning it all on the prime minister just seems weird and off. Like something a foreign influence campaign would be trying to do, in other words.

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

I suppose the regolith itself could be used as a heat sink. I don’t know what its thermal properties are like?

But yeah, I imagine heat dissipation is a limiting factor. Everything I’ve read suggests the 1st gen reactors will put out something on the order of 10s of kilowatts, so rather modest by nuclear standards but still plenty for a nascent Moon base I imagine?

The trouble with solar on the moon is that the day-night cycle is a month long. You have to figure out what to do during the 2 Earth weeks worth of night.

I suppose with a polar base, you could have several solar farms strategically placed so that at least one of them is operational at any given time, but that’s a lot of infrastructure and this is early days.

I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.

I understand the concept of riding a bus being free time to read or use the phone, but my experience for my commute has been standing room only for an hour.

Well at least that speaks to good ridership numbers where you are. I guess they need to add more buses, bus priority lanes, or other higher-capacity transit options.

I would love to be able to use an e bike to get to work, but I don’t like biking next to cars on anything more than a 30 mph road.

It’s worth investigating what possible routes you can take to get from A to B, as there are generally more options with a bike than a car but they are not necessarily obvious. For example, after having a close look at a satellite view, I realized that what I had assumed was a railway track was actually a decommissioned rail line that had been converted into a trail, and it actually cuts some distance off of the car route I had been taking to work.

Last night, I actually discovered a new route for getting home from band practice. I used to cut through a cemetery, but with the nights getting longer, it was starting to creep me out going through there in pitch black conditions, even though the bike has a headlight. (Cemeteries in the day time can be quite a pleasant ride though.) But I carefully surveyed an apartment complex that looked impassable. In fact, it had a foot path leading through it and beyond. This one was hard to spot on satellite since it runs through a tree tunnel.

The biggest problems are typically bridges, where you really have no other choice but to cross with the traffic. I am frequently advocating to city officials to improve cycling infrastructure along any such traffic choke points.

Cool! I can see how optical media could, in theory, be very long-lasting as long as you don’t use materials that oxidize or otherwise degrade over time.

Well I guess I’m picturing DNA encoding like a RAID billion in terms of redundancy, so with some checksumming, you ought be able to sort out any mutations? But I’m no geneticist.

That’s why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you’d want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?