from 20 years ago

NOAA should also be tasked with enforcing food safety laws to protect the public from stuff like listeria in deli meat.

‘Here’s some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,’ cut, paste, and something comes out, and it’s often very good.

For extra delicious pizza add glue!

NYT - live updates

The fucking Times passive construction headline is “Wireless Devices Explode Across Lebanon After Israel Warns Hezbollah”.

Current stats: 8 people killed and at least ~2,800 injured.

Three officials briefed on the attack said that it had targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted.

[…]

Lebanon’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said in a press conference that eight people were killed by exploding paging devices and at least 2,780 were wounded, including about 200 in serious condition.

I am sure we will learn that the body cams malfunctioned or were turned off next.

I don’t want to say “I will eat my shoe” the cams were actually on and working and the evidence makes it to trial. You guys might demand evidence that ate my shoe. But I’m 99.9% of the way to saying - I will eat my shoe if that happens. My money is that the NYPD will use another trick. The cams were working but somehow the footage later got corrupted. Gee, I wonder how that happened! Like in the movie “The Big Easy” the cops sneak a powerful magnet into the evidence room and they put it right next to something (a VCR? I don’t remember) that has recorded evidence that was damning and damaging to a cop who is going on trial. The evidence is erased and the charges against the cop are dropped.

But to blend in - you have to wear golf clothes.

I hope it was a riding mower.

a hand-made weapon

Anime Taylor Special

The Anime Taylor Special
Got a barrel that’s shiney and bold
It ain’t good for nothing but puttin’ men six feet in a hole

Song

That was so weird for me. I expected angry and bombastic Trump who maybe was even ranting like a disturbed person. Instead - it’s standup Trump doing a “lemme tell ya something” aside. His voice even gets thin at the end because he’s amused himself and he’s almost chuckling.

News from the future

“Trump was uninjured after Secret Service agents pushed him to the ground for safety after a loud ‘explosions’ were heard.” Sometime later “It has been determined that children were setting off fireworks in the vicinity…” And they interview some MAGA doofus. “They say it was fireworks like bottle rockets. I know what I heard. It wasn’t fffffffttt it was fffffffgrtt. It was Iran.”

Imagine if somebody actually shoots at Trump and says “I did it for Taylor.”

The New York Post said it was an AK-47. I don’t know why that makes it funnier for me but it does.

I guess it’s the tech bro conception of being creative.

It’s truly amazing how mind-numbingly stupid people will act if you offer them one simple thing - convenience.

The future will get very strange. Some guys will prefer the company of their AI sexbot to anybody or anything else.

I’d never listen to a typical by-the-numbers podcast. I think it’s sad that anybody does. But some people like the worst slop. It’s reality tv without the visuals. But I’m having a hard time trying to imagine anybody listening to an AI podcast. It’s not reality tv or reality. It’s an sour uncanny valley of humanish slop. If a typical podcast is junk food - an AI podcast is like the steak in “The Fly”. Why would anybody choose to consume that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eeWNovXmdE

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

“You ready to talk about the 14 words to-day?”

“The 14 words??? Hit me. As I like to say kay-know no-ledge is power!”

“Some people don’t like 'em and say theeeeeeeere racist. Let’s dig in.”

“In the end, it’s actually a story about teamwork, making the dream work.”

Google isn’t making things up when it says the AI hosts will “banter” with each other, either. When trying out Audio Overview for myself, I plugged in one of the sample notebooks about the invention of the lightbulb, and the results were… a bit uncanny. During the 10-minute-long overview, the two hosts had a lighthearted discussion about how Thomas Edison wasn’t the only person behind the lightbulb and that “in the end, it’s actually a story about teamwork, making the dream work.”

Reagan got a hearing aid in his first term. At that time - I thought nothing of it. I was young (ah) and he was old as fuck. But during his second term I must have watched or read something to make me wonder if it was actually an earpiece. Maybe I saw an SNL skit with that theme or I read some jokey article that mentioned the idea that he was being fed information because he was already losing his marbles. In any case - after he got his “hearing aid” I must have made an effort to watch one or two of his press conferences. That was a super-pain in the ass back in the day. No Youtube. No google. Even the Internet wasn’t a thing yet.

Even though he was skilled at using humor for misdirection and reporters can be dumber than rocks - I was surprised that at times he really did look a bit lost. I had to wonder if the “hearing aid” was actually an earpiece and they were coaching him through the rough patches.

Edit - I found a better thread. r/boston thread

A comment from elsewhere

He self immolated outside the israeli consulate, it just happens to be across the street from the back of the four seasons.

Well, kids - have a taste of what it was like to be a child of the Cold War. A few months ago I watched “The Day After (1983)”. Here’s the sequence of the bombs going off - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy9n8r16hs&t=3454s

A comment

I think this movie needs to be re-aired by every major network * NOW * so America can be reminded. 2 generations later - people forget.

Here’s some stuff about Reagan and the movie.

The Day After

US President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was “very effective and left me greatly depressed” and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war”. The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer, told him: “If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone.”

In 1987, Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan’s memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a telegram after the summit: “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did.”

During an interview in 2010, Meyer said that the telegram was a myth and that the sentiment stemmed from a friend’s letter to Meyer. He suggested the story had origins in editing notes received from the White House during the production, which “may have been a joke, but it wouldn’t surprise me, him being an old Hollywood guy.” There is also an apocryphal story which claims that, after seeing the film, Ronald Reagan said: “That will not happen on my watch.”