Welcome to The Black Parade.

After restoring a vintage reciever, it was the first song thst made me feel, unprompted, that I had gotten it right.

Let me stop at the Sunoco and pick up eught gallons of CHIN.

Is it pronounced like the blood thinner/rat poison (warfarin)?

Cobalt 60 has a half life of 5.27 years.

If the 7-1-63 is a date stamp of original manufacture, it’s gone through over 11 half-lives. There’s less than .05% of the original flavour.

I don’t know about the decay products, but I’d wonder how far we are from legitimately edible.

If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.

I sort of wonder if the next generation will still romanticize Japan in quite the same way. We’re past the peak trendy-products era of Weird Sony and the Toyota MR2, anime is no longer a secret exotic thing, and it feels like if you want “15 years ahead of us optimistic techno future”, you could easily slide in Chongqing or Seoul instead of Tokyo.

Y’know what? I don’t care. Maybe it’s happening, even in the dramatic worst-case way it’s portrayed here, but is that the biggest/only story in China? It feels sort of credibility-stretching that a country of 1.4 billion people and a top-two global economy is entirely cantilevered around the idea of oppressing a tiny minority in the rural corner of the country. I’m fairly certain there are at least nine people in China who can go an entire workday without contemplating how to wipe the Uighyurs off the map. Maybe as many as twelve!

The US is no longer in any sort of moral leadership position to point fingers on human rights, if not for the last few decades, then certainly in its El Salvador phase. The only reason Western media remotely give a damn here is because they’re desperate to slap an asterisk next to the growth and real economic advancement of a country that promises to outpace them imminently.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.

Have you tried Johnson’s Spray Crab?

There’s a huge shift in male role models over the past few decades, and it always felt to me like the people who could never fit into the old militaristic, athletic “conqueror”-style mould saying “we’ll invent our own definition of masculinity” than a direct, fully-bought-in progression.

This will leave people behind-- the ones who can’t find new “appropriate” idols or aren’t impressed by their achievements. The Linus Torvalds version of conquering the world is hardly the Genghis Khan version.

Maybe we need to find a way to broaden the modern pantheon to figures that can resonate with a traditional audience.

What the hell is with the “Thank you for your attention to this matter?”

You’re shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.

It feels like we’re being delivered the sort of stuff we’d consider flim-flam if a human did it, but lapping it up bevause the machine did it.

“Sure, boss, let me write this code (wrong) or outline this article (in a way that loses key meaning)!” If you hired a human who acted like that, we’d have them on an improvement plan in days and sacked in weeks.

Stop selling it a loss.

When each ugly picture costs $1.75, and every needless summary or expansion costs 59 cents, nobody’s going to want it.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

I suspect it could be seen as a proper noun.

If Acme and FooCorp create a bridge between their private network spaces, it’s an internet (common noun) but not the Internet (proper noun, referring to the one with Goatse).

Let’s find an English teacher. And yell at them for forcing us to read the same terrible novel in both 10th and 12th grades. Maybe after that, return to this subject.

I’d say it’s a bad thing because it’s the wrong threat model as a default.

More home users are in scenarios like “I spilled a can of Diet Sprite into my laptop, can someone yank the SSD and recover my cat pictures” than “Someone stole my laptop and has physical access to state secrets that Hegseth has yet to blurt on Twitch chat”. Encryption makes the first scenario a lot harder to easily recover from, and people with explicit high security needs should opt into it or have organization-managed configs.

There is the technical argument that PoS was more energy efficient than running data centres full of ASICs or sometimes GPUs solely to produce proof-of-work.

It’s still different flavours of Let’s Prentend We’re Finance Except Without Grownup Boring Rules, but if we can avoid burning gigawatts and puffing the cost of GPUs, there’s a case for it.