Viewing profile — tolciho

Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be diffi…

25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.

And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.

LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed d…

AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what…

One might wonder whether the Late Bronze Age collapse had similar (copper, finance, tin) reasons for going the way it did.

The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel. “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote. “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the histor…

printf 'silent data loss' | while read l; do printf '%s\n' "$l"; done though at the point I need to write while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf '%s\n' "$line" done I…

for name in `ls`; do echo "$name"; done is an unportable and expensive way to write for name in *; do printf '%s\n' "$name"; done but you could also just printf '%s\n' *

Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and …

The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in add…

Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).

Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecd…

(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somew…

> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says. Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the littl…

I wore the rsa-dolphin t-shirt all over the place and nobody batted an eye back then, but a dolphin made up of ASCII characters is quite a bit less obvious than the one you linked.…

But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Sam…

Why would "money" be necessary? https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.

OpenBSD used to have sqlite in base, but the code churn rate was too high to review. This was well before the recent LLM craze, so a human (perhaps not a normal one, though) alread…

Or the management all read the same article in PC Magazine and lo! the next day did orders come down to implement said article, regardless. Waterworld, rowing the Valdez. Some year…

Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.

There is also a distinction between "has a bus system" and "the bus system is actually usuable". Say you want to take the bus to jury duty, but calculate that you would need to wak…

There has been some internal stife in Japan, such as the Taira and Minamoto clans having a bit of a falling out, or that time when the Tokugawa somehow ended up on top, or tussles …

"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while th…