My younger wine is at college and doesn’t drink (good for him). Since the drinking age here is 21, most college kids can’t legally drink. Of course they do anyway, and I can’t be too judgemental since I did at that age as well.

However my son abandoned his initial group of friends because that’s all they wanted to do, socially. There’s a game, and students get free tickets: nope, I’d be late to the frat parties. There’s this cool trail: nope, the parties are then. Let’s go to this movie: I’ll be drinking then.

I realize I’m only hearing half the story, but it really seems like not just excessive drinking but drinking as a problem, interfering with normal life.

That sodium is pretty obscene too

2 mugs of 10 oz dark coffee, black, extra strong. I’m currently moderating, trying to stick to that.

I’ve found that k-cups have a similar advantage to soda cans when you want to moderate. You can’t fill up a super-mug and there is no pot/2L bottle to finish. Portion control is crucial

Looks like we have some in Iowa or Montana also

I’m not sure sail is even viable, as in not compatible with modern capitalism. Most shipping has some sort of schedule or deadline, and you can’t just take an extra month “ because we were becalmed”

Although I was also going to object based on more complex harbors, but that leads right to battery power. Right where all the shipping, all the emissions, all the pollution comes together where it can harm people ……. Why not battery-only, while in harbor?

That all sounds like a nightmare. I use curl api calls from DevOps where I’m not really doing much and time isn’t usually a concern. But I can’t imagine our product developers using it, it just doesn’t seem scalable, maintainable or performant

It’s the size creep if anything

I don’t know. My brother works for a legacy manufacturer and claims the difference in material cost between small and large vehicles is minimal. Assembly cost is far more than material cost. He used this to justify why they couldn’t make a small truck: it’s equally complex to assemble and the materials cost difference is minimal so they couldn’t make it enough cheaper that anyone would buy it.

Up to you whether to buy the company line but that’s the claim

Slate promises to be analog

The problem is this is the way it’s being pushed. This is how it’s being sold. There are no guardrails.

…… and that’s the biggest problem. I’m frustrated as hell on the commits I’ve had to unwind because someone doesn’t know how to check the changes before committing, then has it try to fix itself, again without checking on the changes , then again. It’s horrible.

…… and I’ve seen it too. Trying to have it do only code reviews - the ai points out useful things but then wants to commit a crapload of changes without going over it with me first.

…… and people are playing with mcp agents, which are really great for letting the ai get data from systems and integrate with those systems . But with few to no guardrails. There’s no no review, the user doesn’t necessarily follow what’s changing, it just gets done. Sometime badly very badly

We’re all focused on whether the ai works, and it does do a pretty good job with coding but the tools don’t keep the human in the loop, or humans don’t know how to stay on the loop

I do wonder if pop tarts have been enshittified over the years. Over the last couple years I’ve tried them a few times, as a comfort food from my childhood. While I wasnt fooling myself about them being good, were they always this bad?

You have to get frosted, so it’s not all cardboard. I rarely bothered toasting - it’s an improvement to the jelly filling but then you burn your tongue. But it’s still all cardboard and the filling is generally flavorless. I mean I always liked “blueberry” because it never tasted like blueberries but I remember it as having some generic jelly taste and it really doesn’t. There was never much filling but did they cut it back? Did the jelly used to have actual fruit that is now just hfcs and food coloring?

They’re a source of healthy fats and

• guacamole!!!
• good contrast in taste and texture on a salad
• similar role to sour cream on top of black bean soup or certain Tex-Mex foods
• yes, Avocado toast, but it’s the seasoning that has the flavor

So they’re responding by making more affordable, efficient vehicles, right? Adopting new technology, right? Right?

I agree here. During the Cold War, the doomsday clock was literally doomsday. It measured how close we appeared to be for society-ending, humanity destroying all out war between two nuclear powers, each with several times the nuclear weapons needed to end us all.

Now we’re in constant war, threat of constant war, endless instability, and yes, the American government is one of the biggest factors in recent reductions to global stability. We’re actively making things worst, from at least trying to do the right thing. It’s surely a catastrophe to the people affected, we’re talking hundreds of thousands to millions of unnecessary deaths, we can’t minimize that …. But it’s not an end of humanity level threat.

I don’t know what would be more effective imagery, but we’re closer while at the same time farther from catastrophe, so maybe it’s time to move on

Huh, the battery only has one radar and there are only 8 worldwide? That seems like a self-own

I wonder if ai can actually help here. As the industry abandons consumer hardware in favor of datacenter equipment to profit from the ai bubble, perhaps ecc memory will become cheaper

Going back to sails is a cool idea, but I don’t see how it’s viable, nor will batteries be. We’re going to need to settle on some sort of sustainable liquid fuel for a few uses like shipping and aviation.

Maybe this is even some good that can be driven by militaries

Once per installation per x years. While battery and solar replacement seem like a long time, the massive scale needed for a global buildout will require a continuous stream of shipping. It’s not free and will never be locally produced everywhere. Obviously a couple orders of magnitude less shipping, but energy related shipping is not disappearing entirely.

Actually I’d like to see someone do that math, out of curiosity. In a world with all renewables, does energy related shipping drop from 40% to 1%? 0.1%?

For sure, any longer term presence outside orbit will hinge on finding resources. And i don’t think it even matters if we’re able to harvest helium-3 or something that might be worth bringing back, but to be able to use enough resources to make it affordable. Every pound lifted from earth to outside orbit will always be too expensive and local resources much much more affordable. While it starts with shelter and radiation shielding (ie live underground), we’ll need to generate bulk consumables like water, oxygen, fuel, and we’ll need to grow at least some of our own food

But we don’t even know if we can live on the moon. Microgravity has bad long term health effects such that we really don’t want to spend more than a year there. Does the moon have enough gravity to be substantially better?

If we do establish a larger off earth presence, we’ll have to compromise on enough gravity for long term health and livability vs as little gravity as necessary to keep space accessible

That opinion definitely fits this thread …. But I wanted to add that the college I went to is one of the few that still requires passing a swimming test for all incoming freshmen. It used to be considered an important life skill to at least not die if you end up in the water, but I guess most people don’t think that’s important anymore

Do you ever click in to see more details? We used to have memes about stack overflow always having the answer to tech questions. Now we have ai summarizing stack overflow for us, but stack overflow no longer gets the activity to generate new answers, or even stay open.