Viewing profile — simplicio

I always find it kind of funny that after Cyberpunk was coined "X-punk" (steam-punk, diseal-punk, etc) became a construction to denote a particular type of "retro-future", sci-fi a…

Yea, I have a couple of early memories that I can date from ~1-2 years old (early bday party, birth of sibling). And presumably a few more early memories are from that period but d…

Both shows were filmed around the same time and place in WA state and, as you note, had a kinda similar surrealist vibe. Which made watching them togeather kind of strange. Like Jo…

Extra strength tylenol is 500mg a tablet, so 20 pills. Think most of the accidental ODs are due to people not realizing its included in other cold meds, and also being loopy from w…

The fix seems kind of crazy though, adding so much traffic overhead to every ssh session. I assume there's a reason they didn't go that route, but on a first pass seems weird they …

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don…

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidi…

Think the best argument against it is that it makes advertising less valuable, which in turn limits the how many "paid for with advertising" services will be available and how good…

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage o…

Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.…

Assuming it wasn't just luck, it seems impressive they managed to maximize their (landing attempts/fuel reserves) ratio like that.

I think there have been about 5 different contexts over the years where I've been surprised by how good an insulator a pile of dirt is.

Bilbo doesn't see him wear it, but he's described as having put it on to steal goblin children for food. So he does wear it in the books. Its on such an expedition that the ring "s…

Also the ring fits both Gollum and Bilbo, which limits how different in size they could be. (LOTR says the ring can change size, but this wasn't discussed in the Hobbit, and presum…

The $ argument in favor of this seems a little silly. The $ brought in a millionth of the US military budget. Think the best argument presented in the piece is just that some non-t…

Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes see…

RIP one of my favorite trivia facts

FWIW, think 3-4 is kind of the low-point for this. After that, they're in school more, can independently play by themselves or with friends more and your time (very) gradually star…

I mean, if the devices exist, I'm skeptical its that hard to just give them to whomever you want to use them and give them all DoD accounts or whatever. The people involved being i…

Think the qualification is to get into the training program, presumably air traffic controllers who develop near nearsightedness later in life aren't summarily fired. Still, seems …

Im kinda skeptical these folks were following some hyper-logical process from flawed axioms that led them to the rigorous solution: "I should go stab our land-lord with a samurai s…

Yea, was reading a biography of (JPL founder) Jack Parsons a few weeks ago, and was struck how similar the Zizian patter sounded to a lot of the Golden Dawn/proto-Scientology stuff…

Eh? There's a ton of Native American place-names on the East Coast? Including at least three States.

I don't really get the revenue angle though. The AI posts don't seem to be trying to drive traffic to ads or anything. I really don't understand the point of auto-generating a bunc…

I'm generally pretty open to the idea that the NRC is bad and needs to be reformed, but a year and a half doesn't seem that unreasonable? Especially for a new reactor design.