I think about how far automation can go when it comes to my job. I'm not a tradesperson but I've employed a lot of them over the last 15 years. I do a lot of structural steel erection so it's been nearly all ironworkers but also electricians, pipefitters and sheet metal workers as subs. It's one thing to install i-beams in a brand new building with no obsticles and a solid set of 3-D models but to automate the ability to do it in an existing manufacturing plant with existing equipment and human beings in the way seems nearly impossible.
In terms of machines falling out of tolerance you also need to consider the inputs being out of tolerance as well. I had a project in an auto manufacturing plant where they wanted to set a pallet full of batteries on a motorized conveyor with a fork lift from the aisleway and move it to a location where a robotic arm would pick a battery off the pallet and place it in the engine bay. Thousands of times a day. The batteries had to be in the exact same spot the robot expected them to be every time. A couple millimeters off and the "gripper" that clamped on to the battery would bump into part of the housing it didn't expect and fault out. That meant no battery in that vehicle. They had a point down the assembly line with a pallet of batteries that would be manually installed in the car by a person. My task was making sure the pallet ended up in the exact same spot every single time. This is where the input side became impossible to control. The batteries were nested on a plastic pallet. On top of that first layer was another divider that could nest the second layer followed by a third layer. There was a lot of slop in those three layers which meant making sure that top layer landed in the same position every time. Fortunately for me my responsibility ended at the base pallet. I made sure it stopped in the exact same spot every time.
I have no doubt there's an army of engineers trying to replace every human in the building but so far they haven't made much progress.
If we have a lingering issue with a complex machine or process my boss asks why not make it do this instead? And I say, well, we're not aware of the technology available on the market to make it do that. And he says, well why don't you develop it?
My stock response is 'we'll get on it' and he forgets about the conversation in a few days
An equally (if not more) important reason we don't see 10 ft roaches is that they don't have lungs and their "blood" does not carry oxygen, so oxygen has to get to through their bodies by diffusion. The larger they get, the lower the surface to volume ratio gets, and the more difficult it becomes to get oxygen throughout. A potentially interesting aside (on a blog that seems to relish in them).
True... and presumably the "evolve lungs" path that worked for other creatures didn't produce desired results for them. Which is ALSO interesting: what about roaches prevent them from evolving? Or did they evolve into something too different to be seen as a roach?
There’s been news from the world of archaeology lately wherein it’s claimed that 50,000 year old stone tools found in the jungles of South America were in fact produced by capuchin monkeys.
These tools had previously been thought to have been produced by humans, thus upending the current theory of the way in which the Americas were populated.
This raises several questions:
A. How come capuchin monkeys evolved to be just smart enough to make the same kind of tools as ancient humans and then just cooled it with the whole evolving thing?
B. How many of the other archaeological sites taken to be human settlements based on stone tools were in fact those of apes? I’m looking at you here, Olduvai Gorge.
C. Did you know that apes are supposed to have settled South America from Africa on, get this, floating mats of vegetation. Twice.
I don't buy the ape theory for minute and neither should these hidebound idiots because eventually you compress modern humanity to the point where God or aliens MUST get involved.
Their social justice mission means that there can't be evidence of "Firster Peoples" before "First Peoples" because if there were you couldn't use the First Peoples as a cudgel with which to beat the living shit out of poor white people in everything from land rights to college admissions.
My favorite analogy is that evolution being the mechanism that produced man is less likely than a tornado ripping through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully-functional 747.
Nah. She just wanted a beachfront house that her female friends would envy her for. She was too dumb, and her male ape rather relieved when it turned out to be a floating mat of vegetation.
I spent a fair amount of my time in college around professors who were students of Wm Foxwell Allbright, pretty much the dean of biblical archeology. They seemed to be serious scholars, though some of them had kind of a thing for the Documentary Hypothesis. In the field, biblical archeology seems to be split between those who want to disprove the Bible and those who want to prove that it's historically accurate. A good example was a pottery fragment found with the phrase (in Hebrew, which is consonental) "bt dvd". Some said it should be read Beit David (the house of David) and cited it as proof that King David actually existed while skeptics said it is Beit Dod (uncle's house).
While camping in the UP Bat and I took the kids to an active dig at an abandoned town site. Archeologists apparently love outhouses and latrines.
Most archaeologists are serious scholars, you are correct. The problem is that they are working with miniscule sample sizes, the data is full of noise, the interpretation is very subjective (and subject to bias from whatever social science trend is prevailing), and it's not really science in the classical definition of being repeatable because excavating the site utterly destroys it. But its the only way to study human history beyond the written record so you do the best you can with it.
"Man is a spiritual being. He needs to believe in something larger than himself. Historically, that something has been a God or gods. But if man's faith in God is destroyed, he will replace it with something else. Too often, that something else has been a manmade god called the State, and untold crimes have been commited in its name."
Well put; I really learned something falling down the square-cube law rabbit hole. Those sorts of pearls in the narrative (and the ensuing discussions here) are what keeps me coming back.
The problem is, we've imported so many low IQ morons and turned our schools into conditioning and indoctrination centers, that few people are even equipped to notice the difference.
I ran across Rick Beato video this morning about how Auto-Tune ruined modern music and why that'll end up with no one recognizing AI created music because so many have already been trained to accept the suck.
Ah but I think the opposite will happen. You always have a larger group accepting "pop" music. But, once people recognize and understand that someone is a fake, it does have an effect and makes them less popular. Otherwise, why would lip syncing be so bad? I think we're going to see a huge turn away from what is considered to be fake art.
On the other hand, you have the Vocaloids in Japan who are completely fake "pop singers" who exist solely as pixels complete with computer voices who are popular (depressingly so) with younger audiences. They get an immense amount of views on youtube and, even though they're one of the few things in my life I desperately wish I could un-experience, for people who grow up with fakeness of this magnitude I don't know if it matters at all, especially when it seems to be the whole point. Milli Vanilli couldn't get away with it because they weren't supposed to be fake. But there's nothing real about the Vocaloids and they've found a substantial audience...
They've found an audience for now. I do not believe any of that stuff sticks. I grew up with tons of 90s stuff. Can't say I have an appreciation for boy bands any more now than I did in 1997. Doesn't mean there isn't a song here or there that anyone could like. It's just that fads such as these go through cycles where they burn out. It's not so different than capeshit where Marvel overdid every bit of CGI to the point of making something like Andor appear to be incredibly high art. Now, Andor uses CGI but it uses way, way more props and locations than what other lazier shows did. And, as such, it has a much more timeless look. (It was too long a show with tons of Disney Plus padding FYI)
The pendulum always swings back. Always. Things don't stay the same and that includes something like "oh look at this AI created painting I had made".
A good example of THAT is how quickly NFTs went from new hotness to absolute trash. They were always trash, but the perception changed nearly overnight.
I'll give the Japanese points for cultural superiority here. Their pop music has idol singers, which are obvious constructs that convey innocence and beauty.
Whereas we Americans idolize authentic practitioners of hideously destructive lifestyles.
The next wave of virtual singers are just idol groups in anime haha
I had this discussion with my friend the other day though, and we both agreed the Japanese do seem to cherish femininity much more than the west though
1) I cant wait to see Raydeen (or Raideen if you prefer to be more correctly Japanese in the spelling), come marching over the horizon to fight the forces of evil. Oddly, of all the comic books I had and got rid of, I still think I have pretty much my entire collection of 20, (+ 1 Fantastic Four crossover) Shogun Warriors comics. Likely not the prudent financial move, but hey. I'm also the guy who bought the only supercar that doesn't go up in value, so long term investing is probably not a skill I have.
2) Jack, the one thing I think you are missing is the absolute disdain that the upper classes, even if that's just McDonalds execs, have for the working folks. They will easily make piss poor financial decisions if they can distance themselves from the hoi polloi. As exhibit A, let me offer up the Rural Purge of 1971, where the networks cancelled many of their most successful programs, including Mayberry RFD, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Red Skelton, etc., because they just didn't like the audiences those shows attracted, and didn't want to be seen as catering to them.
Finally, it all brings to mind a quote from Orwell. The US elites, much like their British brethren for their own country, hate what America means to the working classes. As Orwell said about his own countrymen, "It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box."
David Brin has a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but he is quite correct that the failure mode of society is feudalism, and that that is a goal of many in American politics.
Not sure I track on this one in the following manner: the founders were generally wealthy and influential men before revolution; e.g., aristocrats/strivers.
I guess what I'm getting at is I should re-read the founders, Federalist Papers, letters, etc but I have no idea where I'm going to carve the time out from. I certainly recall that they were leery of direct democracy or broad enfranchisement; hence the limitation of the vote to landholding men at the outset (been a while since I've touched on any US history).
I recently read Ian Toll's Six Frigates (based off of a recommendation right here on ACF), and he had some amusing anecdotes of the early days of the US capital, with president Thomas Jefferson riding his horse around town, giving lifts to strangers across flooded streams on said horse, and meeting (often indignant) foreign dignitaries dressed in dirty gardening clothes. Make no mistake he was every bit an aristocrat in terms of his standing, his interests, and wealth. But it was this new very American flavor of mingling with the common-folk.
Perhaps, then why would Jackson be seen as the first popular president some thirty years after Washington was first elected?
As I said, it's been a long time since I've touched any US history. I think the last thing I read was McCullough's 1776.
I'll take your word for it the intent was to serve the common masses and not just the wealthy, I'm just not low uncertainty (what am I Karl Popper?) on the truth of the statement.
Those men were geniuses, and their intellect was coupled with a Christian faith that believed that God had made the universe as a self-regulating machine that required neither an aristocratic elite nor a democratic mob to function.
That, I believe, is America's contribution to Western Civilization: The idea that there is genius in every individual, and only liberty can unlock it.
I agree that they were intelligent and considered men who understood humanity better than the people in positions of power today.
I can state emphatically that the notion of a clockwork universe is orthogonal to Christianity (which posits a personal and active God) and more like Deism with Newtonian thinking (which Jefferson (?) was known for).
I would disagree on the idea that they believed genius in every man and more point toward: to unlock the potentiality of man, freedom from excessive constraints is necessary. They certainly understood that man totally unconstrained was an issue, same with government which is an extension of society which is an extension of man.
N E WAYZ: TL; DR you're arguing with an idiot (me) on the internet and getting into some weeds and while I cherish my most important fundamental American right, the right to bloviate, I'm not fully equipped to prove anything out since I'm out of touch on my primary sources.
As was All in the Family. But these were both the new "liberal" take on TV. No more Ward Cleavers or Father Knows Best. Other than perhaps Bill Cosby, was there ever another comedy show with a father who was a man to be respected?
The cast and crew knew exactly what they were doing. Robert Clary, who recently passed away, survived Buchenwald. John Banner was an Austrian Jew who was performing in Switzerland in 1938 when Germany took over Austria so he never went back. Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, was also an Austrian Jew who fled in 1940 - his parents were killed at Treblinka.
Carol actually predated the Rural Purge. And while the comedy was definitely not highbrow, it also didn't it have anything to do with small town America or country folks. Pat Butrum, who played Mr Haney on Green Acres was to have said:
CBS canceled everything with a tree in it — including Lassie.
I was going for the not highbrow humor. Taking the ability to laugh away from people has done a lot of harm to us all. Now, any TV comedy has to have THE MESSAGE.
The character Sam Drucker in Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres was named after a real person (my aunt's father-in-law, btw), a Los Angeles barber who figured out how to do trims neccessitated by continuity issues in filming that didn't look like the actor just stepped out of a barber's chair. If you were a male actor working in Hollywood in the 1950s or '60s, you probably had your hair cut by Sam Drucker.
I knew the Sam Drucker character crossed over from Petticoat Junction to Green Acres but didn't realize that he also appeared in The Beverly Hillbillies. Fascinating back story Ronnie!
As I was driving my 12 year old to Micro Center last night, we had this conversation about ChatGPT nearly verbatim. He was excitedly telling me about how he wrote a hook into the API to generate images from entering a query from a Python script, just as a proof on concept. I was trying very hard to convey to him how it was mostly smoke and mirrors bullshit, and really just a machine learning pattern-matching algo, without dampening his enthusiasm for tech in general. I want to hand him my phone to read this post, though I am considering perhaps copy/pasting it sans the blowjob bit. I like to maintain the illusion that we've preserved a bit of his innocence, even in the internet era.
It would be required reading around here. FWIW a separate URL would be preferable to just marking child safe articles so I can let them loose without having to worry about them coming across any ridiculous jargon, shocking sexual audacity, [or] repulsive images of the ghetto.
Does anyone work long term at your Micro Center? Even when I'm buying something cheap there, like a cable, I have a salesperson slap their commission sticker on it because I feel for them. That must be a terrible place to work. On the other hand, prices are pretty cheap there. I was picking up a couple of cables just before Christmas and they were selling Asus laptops for $100 and I needed something compact to operate my laser.
It's funny you should say that, I actually worked there 15 years ago or so, and as I was driving I was thinking it was kind of sad that there would no longer be anyone I know there. Lo and behold, I actually did run into an old coworker who still did it as a second job all these years later. It was not actually a bad gig, for retail - I made good money working in the Build Your Own dept, since I had a modicum of charisma and wasn't an autistic weirdo. Sell a gaming build or two a day and you were making a decent living. The real money was in the MC warranties they sold - at the time they would specifically cover damage from overclocking, which was insane and a very easy sell to most of the kids building PCs. I can't imagine they still do that - the moral hazard involved probably cost them a fortune. Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk on MC employment. I still miss that place sometimes, but alas, my then girlfriend of 4 months, now wife, ended up pregnant so I had to go find work more conducive to supporting a family. Got an office job, gained 40lbs over the last 15 years. 0/10, do not recommend.
So I have been thinking about some of the issues brought up since the first installment and after reading this I may want a Rodney bot. Well maybe not as it might go Hal 9000 and run away with my wife.
I think our rent seeking lowest common denominator McOverlords who know better than we do may have made it as far as possible with current technology. At least for a little while.
You are still going to need McPeople to cook for quite some time. Our dear McOverlords can’t even keep the ice cream machines running all the time. With the franchise model and franchises loosing money due to down time they have looked for ways to keep them operating and there are several good articles detailing the fight. This article does a good job of summarizing the bigger picture.
Which brings up side issues of right to repair ect.
This chase to the lowest operating costs with unskilled labor will always mean there is someone manning a grill. Could you imagine the number of machines needed to do what people presume is an easy job of a line cook (it is not and not saying you were making that comparison). Now even if it was one machine then like the ice cream machines if it stops you are sunk. We struggle for tradesmen and women now. No outsourcing to India or Whocaresastan for repairs. This puts “Bubba” in the position that he is not only needed but people are forced to recognize the problem solving skills needed to fix the machine. His pay goes up. If the employer pushes too hard then “Bubba” goes hunting for an extra day or calls in sick.
McOverlord can’t put all their eggs in that basket with all of the investment. Even if they can make the manual to fix the machine as simple as a Soviet era booklet given to uneducated draftees using pictograms to do basic repairs and re arm a MIG -15 (the manuals are so well done with the pictures I think I could do it) it would still be economically unviable and from a risk management perspective un advisable.
How we get back to living wages and having technology assist us and make us more productive rather than replace us I don’t know. Does not need to be zero sum. I think that assisting with tasks would be the way to go and more profitable while making for a more humane and enjoyable work environment but what would I know not being a McOverlord. Maybe a topic for the group meet up/think tank in the works.
I'm not sure how we get back to having tech simply help our lives either. While I didn't grow up in the rise of the IBM and all those scientific companies, it is my perception that their goal was to improve the lives of Americans by being helpful and useful. Dishwashers were so that house wives could tend more to other things rather than standing at a sink and such.
My how things have changed. The cad software I use is subscription. The art software I use is subscription. Everything is subscription! It's all about convincing people to use something and then having a consistent profit model for as long as they can keep people.
I'm not saying that's wrong, but maybe it's part of the problem. Companies are INTENTIONALLY LOSING MONEY ON PRODUCT only to get people hooked on subscriptions. It's gross. It's throw away. I'm thinking about continuing my slide into freezing what it is that I own and work on. This may include the kids' toys too.
Yes I belong to very few subscription services. This being an exception. I would actually pay more to read Jack’s work. I consider this a very nice coffee table book that talks back and responds and makes me think. Even if sometimes my brain hurts afterwards.
When I see a subscription service for an item that is in a physical object like a car it makes me sick.
My kid is aware of this trap as well.
I believe creative and thinking people will come up with answers around some of these issues. For every automated McDonald’s or automated service place there will be pop-up stores or restaurants or food trucks that have lines with people willing to pay them.
Are they afraid that if I subscribe to ACF that it is really a front for the the New Silk Road and with my subscription I will receive a package of MDMA to attend my next (and first) rave?
That your site, when I subscribe for 2.1 billion dollars, is actually a front for subsidizing Russia and for just dollars a day I can purchase tanks like Sally Struthers spoke about?
As a graphic designer who remembers looking forward to Adobe Illustrator 88 (guess what the 88 stood for) I now pay $52.99 a month for the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription since the company hasn't offered a purchase option in years. I also remember the gradual, then sudden, disappearance of shelves groaning with software titles at the Apple Stores where I worked.
In my line of work, large IP/MPLS network design, automation talk has taken over. We are using terms like netops to mimic devops on the compute side. I get in trouble by making a duh statement when automation comes up. You can only automate that which is automatable. The problem has to be bounded, definable, and repeatable. The challenge with autonomous driving is the problem space has nearly infinite variables.
My customers say they are going to automate the network to add connections or bandwidth in realtime on demand. My first question is “Can the network say no to those requests?”. If not, why don’t we simply over-build like we have been for the last 30 years? I get a lot of blank looks from those questions.
Think of all the additional process we'll be able to implement! Plus we get to deny people the ability to do stuff by themselves which really solidifies our necessity.
In my 25+ years of professional work experience, CTOs have become more and more dumb. Seriously. I mean, are they serving lead-laced cocktails somewhere, or what?
My previous job, CEO got booted because the company lost a *LARGE* contract, and the head sales guy got promoted. First all-hands he's talking cloud-this, cloud-that. "Uh-oh, time to update my resume," I thought. I was gone in two months. Company went under in nine.
in the early '50s the new turner turnpike tulsa-okc had the complete spread: howard johnson's restaurants, 2 on each side plus one in the middle, on this 88-mile stretch, where you could get a bone-in strip steak cooked to order. along with their 29?? flavors of ice cream. off the southern end of the turnpike, a mile or 2 away, was a coin-operated large selection of canned food, which you could heat in an oven on site. for fun i tried it 3 times; saw 1 other person there. it went away in about a year. the publicity for this futuristic idea was all over the newspapers. the hojos lasted for quite a few years but of course they're now mcds plus some other stuff. they were all gas stations too of course.
The odd social trajectory of Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn deserves some sort of book. Both of them are seriously expensive now to the point where you have to have Holiday Inn Express!
Hey Gabby Johnson tried to keep it traditional. Who can forget these words of wisdom:
I wash born here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an no sidewindin' bushwackin', hornswagglin' cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter.
My HoJo memory is staying at one in college, 25-ish years ago, having a small party on about the third floor. For some reason, the windows at this one opened. A homeless guy in the alley next to the hotel took issue with our noise level, and hurled a rock up at the widow and hit my buddy's girlfriend, who was standing at the window, in the arm.
My buddy, who was able to solve a problem and action it at about the rate of The Culture, in one move, swung his girlfriend out of the way, dropped his pants, hung his ass out the window, and took a dump. You see, he had noticed that there was a piece of plywood leaned up against the hotel, under our window, at a 45 degree angle. His turds hit the plywood and shot away at a right angle and hit the homeless guy right in the chest.
In a million years I'll never see anything like that again.
One of the best breakfasts I've ever had was at an on-site diner at an old HoJo's outside of Flagstaff Arizona. If all on-site diners could pump out chorizo and green chile omelettes like that, you'd see them come back into style faster than that omelette worked its way through my lower intestine.
I wish I had gotten into the handicap lift business whenever that scam was mandated. HoJo fun fact Howard (I think it was Bud, not the original) hired the great Jacques Pépin to design and scale the menu.
Would love to see stats on how frequently the lifts are used. I'm guessing the vast majority have never been touched since the day they were installed.
Hot tip for budget and convenience eaters, rotisserie chickens are loss leaders at the grocery store. Get a rice cooker and make yourself some rice to go with it (white only). Elite tier is making gravy from the chicken drippings. Fuck veggies
Another great installment, really too much here to comment on. I'm sure you know too well the number of IT products: endpoint protection, IDS/IPS, monitoring/alerting...all touting "AI" now...in most cases...it's rule set. I got a big chip on my shoulder from an Israeli firm using A/V with "deep learning" tech...I found ransomware that they missed, and their "fix" was add a hash signature to the agent, as they did for all the malware it failed to detect. WTF can you not fix the "learning" part?!?!
Anyways I always wondered about those booping and beeping fryers at Mc D's, they must pay good money for those compared to the simple fryers I used in my restaurant kitchen time. Must be worth it to reduce the level of labor expertise to run them. I wonder if those machines prevent operators, themselves baked not fried, from opening the drain valve releasing 500 deg oil on to the floor instead of turning the burner off like Dylan was supposed to!!
All of this security software is smoke and mirrors, McAffee from 1999 with a new skin. Why with all of this "AI" VM software can't we get an effective way to report on and prioritize findings?
A dashboard showing that we went from 1,500 vulnerabilities in April to 1,400 in May does nothing to highlight the 900 we fixed the previous month.
Hell, I still cannot get a vendor to provide a way to prioritize a vulnerability by whether the asset is internet-facing, the classification of the data/asset, and whether the vulnerability is being actively exploited. I just get a list of vulnerabilities and a CVSS score. We wrote a Python script to do the above, but that will be useless once someone on the global team decides to flip vendors.
I'm also shopping for a tool that can map our network (or take maps created by an EA tool) and use it as a basis for building threat models. You could easily automate 80% of threat modeling if someone cared to dedicate the horsepower to it.
More than a few vendors have claimed to be able to do the above. Zero have delivered.
One of my late mother's favorite dishes was King Oscar sardines (in oil) with butter and slices of raw onion on bakery challah bread. I'm surprised my father could kiss her.
Every Wendy's I can recall has been ran like absolute shit, sans one that is staffed entirely by suburban high school kids. The rest have staff plucked straight from the Methadone clinic.
Cookout and In-N-Out are my two favorites. The latter I've only visited in Texas, so YMMV. My girlfriend lived in LA for a while and said that all of the ones there are shit.
Tried Wendy’s today for a breakfast sandwich. Pretty good such as it is. Not like we have great choices in this realm.
Interestingly while I was there they filled a single door dash order. It was one sandwich. Eventually the door dash woman arrived in a brand new Lexus RX Something. Trying to figure the math on that..
And I forgot to mention every worker was not from here. The back room was chaos.
This is one area where I think mickey D's doesn't blow. Their breakfasts are good. Better than Wendy's. Where I live fast food joints are struggling to hire and are advertising $15 hr pay and are being staffed increasingly by Americans.
On the Lexus Rx, the math doesn't add up or won't in short order.
To the contrary. If you want to put 250k miles on something then sell it for 60% of what you paid, a Lexus RX is *exactly* the right vehicle. And the cost of operation is low as well.
I have to agree. I’m looking for the perfect breakfast sandwich and I think it’s in Australia. I’m in Colorado so it’s all south of the “border” folks.
I don’t think anyone is ahead door dashing unless it’s a very reliable paid for shitbox.
They were forever bitching about the amount of food we “stole” when I worked at Hardee’s. But there was no actual effort to curb it other than posted signs.
I've long believed that if you work in a restaurant and aren't given at least one free meal per shift that violates, at least in spirit, the biblical prohibition against muzzling draught animals to prevent them from eating the grain while they worked.
Oh just you wait... Sometime around the March or April timeframe, the US Army, as the anointed joint proponent for DoD, will be talking a lot about organizing and building a Civilian Harm Mitigation Center of Excellence. The DoD already issued a public press release regarding a Civilian Harm Mitigation Action Plan back in AUG. The planning is surprisingly level-headed at the moment, all things considered, but it can and probably will go off the rails real fucking quick. Probably after the civilian director is hired.
Waiting patiently for the RodneyGPT x a2m Repairman crossover
Better idea: Call it RodneyBot and have Netflix produce three seasons of it.
It would feature Black dudes nailing white girls which let's face it is 69% of Netflix content now
Jack, you know I’m sort of a “Digital Pimp” these days, so let’s make it happen and monetize it!
69%? I hear Beavis and Butt-Head laughing right now.
I'll take your word for it, I suspended Netflix circa 2020 and was not the primary consumer in any case.
Is Cinemax not a thing any more?
Skinemax.
"You taped over our wedding video with softcore CABLE PORN?!"
slightly scrambled softcore cable porn
Check the tracking!
Then the sons come upon the remains of the wedding video decades later after it had been converted to another format.
“Damn, Mom was a hottie!”
Talk about an Oedipus complex! 😬
I think about how far automation can go when it comes to my job. I'm not a tradesperson but I've employed a lot of them over the last 15 years. I do a lot of structural steel erection so it's been nearly all ironworkers but also electricians, pipefitters and sheet metal workers as subs. It's one thing to install i-beams in a brand new building with no obsticles and a solid set of 3-D models but to automate the ability to do it in an existing manufacturing plant with existing equipment and human beings in the way seems nearly impossible.
In terms of machines falling out of tolerance you also need to consider the inputs being out of tolerance as well. I had a project in an auto manufacturing plant where they wanted to set a pallet full of batteries on a motorized conveyor with a fork lift from the aisleway and move it to a location where a robotic arm would pick a battery off the pallet and place it in the engine bay. Thousands of times a day. The batteries had to be in the exact same spot the robot expected them to be every time. A couple millimeters off and the "gripper" that clamped on to the battery would bump into part of the housing it didn't expect and fault out. That meant no battery in that vehicle. They had a point down the assembly line with a pallet of batteries that would be manually installed in the car by a person. My task was making sure the pallet ended up in the exact same spot every single time. This is where the input side became impossible to control. The batteries were nested on a plastic pallet. On top of that first layer was another divider that could nest the second layer followed by a third layer. There was a lot of slop in those three layers which meant making sure that top layer landed in the same position every time. Fortunately for me my responsibility ended at the base pallet. I made sure it stopped in the exact same spot every time.
I have no doubt there's an army of engineers trying to replace every human in the building but so far they haven't made much progress.
This really hits home with me.
If we have a lingering issue with a complex machine or process my boss asks why not make it do this instead? And I say, well, we're not aware of the technology available on the market to make it do that. And he says, well why don't you develop it?
My stock response is 'we'll get on it' and he forgets about the conversation in a few days
An equally (if not more) important reason we don't see 10 ft roaches is that they don't have lungs and their "blood" does not carry oxygen, so oxygen has to get to through their bodies by diffusion. The larger they get, the lower the surface to volume ratio gets, and the more difficult it becomes to get oxygen throughout. A potentially interesting aside (on a blog that seems to relish in them).
True... and presumably the "evolve lungs" path that worked for other creatures didn't produce desired results for them. Which is ALSO interesting: what about roaches prevent them from evolving? Or did they evolve into something too different to be seen as a roach?
They wear suits and you refer to them as, "Representative or Senator."
Yeah, or "The Defendant."
No, it is your Honor.
You know what? You're right.
Unfortunately the grading expectations in law school went something like this but there were a few exceptions:
A - Big Law 150k out of school
B - Federal paper pusher job , state or federal legislative job or academia
C - Private practice or hanging out a shingle and after 5-7 years 200k plus hiring the A students after they burned out of Big Law to work for you.
D - Prosecutors and Public Defenders
F - Judge - elected official
Has proven pretty accurate
So accurate
Brilliant!
There’s been news from the world of archaeology lately wherein it’s claimed that 50,000 year old stone tools found in the jungles of South America were in fact produced by capuchin monkeys.
These tools had previously been thought to have been produced by humans, thus upending the current theory of the way in which the Americas were populated.
This raises several questions:
A. How come capuchin monkeys evolved to be just smart enough to make the same kind of tools as ancient humans and then just cooled it with the whole evolving thing?
B. How many of the other archaeological sites taken to be human settlements based on stone tools were in fact those of apes? I’m looking at you here, Olduvai Gorge.
C. Did you know that apes are supposed to have settled South America from Africa on, get this, floating mats of vegetation. Twice.
I don't buy the ape theory for minute and neither should these hidebound idiots because eventually you compress modern humanity to the point where God or aliens MUST get involved.
Their social justice mission means that there can't be evidence of "Firster Peoples" before "First Peoples" because if there were you couldn't use the First Peoples as a cudgel with which to beat the living shit out of poor white people in everything from land rights to college admissions.
My favorite analogy is that evolution being the mechanism that produced man is less likely than a tornado ripping through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully-functional 747.
You mean Siberian-Americans?
Holy fuck! Amen brother!
"Did you know that apes are supposed to have settled South America from Africa on, get this, floating mats of vegetation. Twice."
based monkeys
"FUCK AFRICA." -- the apes
Nah. She just wanted a beachfront house that her female friends would envy her for. She was too dumb, and her male ape rather relieved when it turned out to be a floating mat of vegetation.
Is that the same ape that figured out crabs were edible because his wife tried to feed him salad?
There is supposed to be some institutional conspiracy to deny any evidence of humans in the Americas earlier than 15000 years ago or so.
Undermines teaching the evil of manifest destiny, probably
Charlton Heston didn’t agree that the monkeys “just cooled it with the whole evolving thing”.
I’m hopeful that I have just used a reference that lots of folks reading this will have to look up. Ha! My turn!
By the way, “just cooled it with the whole evolving thing” is a wonderful turn of phrase.
Monsieur Boulle also wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai. No one trick pony, he.
Who ever he is, he probably wasn’t born at the time
Former archaeologist here (my career was in ruins!). You are 100% correct.
The record of archeology as a discipline vs. say Graham Hancock is 55/45 AT BEST.
When will the savings from free pyramid energy generation show up on my ComEd bill?
Savings? What savings? Al Gore needs all that free pyramid energy to fly his private jet.
I spent a fair amount of my time in college around professors who were students of Wm Foxwell Allbright, pretty much the dean of biblical archeology. They seemed to be serious scholars, though some of them had kind of a thing for the Documentary Hypothesis. In the field, biblical archeology seems to be split between those who want to disprove the Bible and those who want to prove that it's historically accurate. A good example was a pottery fragment found with the phrase (in Hebrew, which is consonental) "bt dvd". Some said it should be read Beit David (the house of David) and cited it as proof that King David actually existed while skeptics said it is Beit Dod (uncle's house).
While camping in the UP Bat and I took the kids to an active dig at an abandoned town site. Archeologists apparently love outhouses and latrines.
BTW, if anyone wants to volunteer on a dig: https://www.friendsofiaa.org/volunteer
Most archaeologists are serious scholars, you are correct. The problem is that they are working with miniscule sample sizes, the data is full of noise, the interpretation is very subjective (and subject to bias from whatever social science trend is prevailing), and it's not really science in the classical definition of being repeatable because excavating the site utterly destroys it. But its the only way to study human history beyond the written record so you do the best you can with it.
That being said, I'm fascinated by biblical archaeology. The fellow who discovered this often gives presentations at my church https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/mt_ebal_inscription/. It may be evidence of Joshua's altar.
That certainly makes it different from religion, which is 100% made up shit.
Fairly often the "why" is made up but the "what" is just an OS for a functional society.
It's not God with whom I have a problem, it's godmen.
Natural Law principles wrapped up in fables.
Flying Spaghetti Monster!
I always ask atheists “where are the atheist hospitals”?
"Man is a spiritual being. He needs to believe in something larger than himself. Historically, that something has been a God or gods. But if man's faith in God is destroyed, he will replace it with something else. Too often, that something else has been a manmade god called the State, and untold crimes have been commited in its name."
- Rush Limbaugh
I think we’re seeing that now!
Is that why the only tools you need to do it are a bullwhip and a revolver?
And the hat!
Yes, of course! How did I miss that?
roaches evolved into Keith Richards and Lemmy Kilmister. I mean, they are - well, were, in Lemmy's case - as hard to kill as roaches...
Maybe lungs are the inferior form of respiration?
Maybe not. With gills, we would have to deal with predators in three axes — versus predominantly two axes on terra firma.
Well put; I really learned something falling down the square-cube law rabbit hole. Those sorts of pearls in the narrative (and the ensuing discussions here) are what keeps me coming back.
Familiar with the square-cube law and he usually loses me immediately upon any cultural references outside of some small time slices.
Almost never get his musical references because I am a musical caveman.
I get most of the references but this big vocabulary kid has to look up about 1.7 words per post.
I’ve always had a well-developed vocabulary, and I’ve been stumped several times here and on RG.
The problem is, we've imported so many low IQ morons and turned our schools into conditioning and indoctrination centers, that few people are even equipped to notice the difference.
I ran across Rick Beato video this morning about how Auto-Tune ruined modern music and why that'll end up with no one recognizing AI created music because so many have already been trained to accept the suck.
Ah but I think the opposite will happen. You always have a larger group accepting "pop" music. But, once people recognize and understand that someone is a fake, it does have an effect and makes them less popular. Otherwise, why would lip syncing be so bad? I think we're going to see a huge turn away from what is considered to be fake art.
On the other hand, you have the Vocaloids in Japan who are completely fake "pop singers" who exist solely as pixels complete with computer voices who are popular (depressingly so) with younger audiences. They get an immense amount of views on youtube and, even though they're one of the few things in my life I desperately wish I could un-experience, for people who grow up with fakeness of this magnitude I don't know if it matters at all, especially when it seems to be the whole point. Milli Vanilli couldn't get away with it because they weren't supposed to be fake. But there's nothing real about the Vocaloids and they've found a substantial audience...
They've found an audience for now. I do not believe any of that stuff sticks. I grew up with tons of 90s stuff. Can't say I have an appreciation for boy bands any more now than I did in 1997. Doesn't mean there isn't a song here or there that anyone could like. It's just that fads such as these go through cycles where they burn out. It's not so different than capeshit where Marvel overdid every bit of CGI to the point of making something like Andor appear to be incredibly high art. Now, Andor uses CGI but it uses way, way more props and locations than what other lazier shows did. And, as such, it has a much more timeless look. (It was too long a show with tons of Disney Plus padding FYI)
The pendulum always swings back. Always. Things don't stay the same and that includes something like "oh look at this AI created painting I had made".
A good example of THAT is how quickly NFTs went from new hotness to absolute trash. They were always trash, but the perception changed nearly overnight.
I'll give the Japanese points for cultural superiority here. Their pop music has idol singers, which are obvious constructs that convey innocence and beauty.
Whereas we Americans idolize authentic practitioners of hideously destructive lifestyles.
I still can't listen to them, but they are cute.
The next wave of virtual singers are just idol groups in anime haha
I had this discussion with my friend the other day though, and we both agreed the Japanese do seem to cherish femininity much more than the west though
Isn't there one group that has like 50 girls in it? Like a Wu-Tang Clan for idol singers?
I'm not just HOPING you are right, I'm PRAYING you are right!
A couple of thoughts.
1) I cant wait to see Raydeen (or Raideen if you prefer to be more correctly Japanese in the spelling), come marching over the horizon to fight the forces of evil. Oddly, of all the comic books I had and got rid of, I still think I have pretty much my entire collection of 20, (+ 1 Fantastic Four crossover) Shogun Warriors comics. Likely not the prudent financial move, but hey. I'm also the guy who bought the only supercar that doesn't go up in value, so long term investing is probably not a skill I have.
2) Jack, the one thing I think you are missing is the absolute disdain that the upper classes, even if that's just McDonalds execs, have for the working folks. They will easily make piss poor financial decisions if they can distance themselves from the hoi polloi. As exhibit A, let me offer up the Rural Purge of 1971, where the networks cancelled many of their most successful programs, including Mayberry RFD, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Red Skelton, etc., because they just didn't like the audiences those shows attracted, and didn't want to be seen as catering to them.
Finally, it all brings to mind a quote from Orwell. The US elites, much like their British brethren for their own country, hate what America means to the working classes. As Orwell said about his own countrymen, "It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box."
The Founding Fathers made the very concept of aristocracy obsolete in 1776.
The aristocrats have bern trying to undo that accomplishment ever since.
David Brin has a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but he is quite correct that the failure mode of society is feudalism, and that that is a goal of many in American politics.
Under feudalism, the powerful don't have to justify their existence at the top of the heap, which is why they want it back.
Not sure I track on this one in the following manner: the founders were generally wealthy and influential men before revolution; e.g., aristocrats/strivers.
Additionally, this giant ass link should tell you that there have been sea-changes in how Americans thought of themselves and presumably their history over the past 100 years (driven by some other events): https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Meritocracy%2Cmeritocratic%2Cmelting+pot%2C+equality+of+opportunity&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3
I guess what I'm getting at is I should re-read the founders, Federalist Papers, letters, etc but I have no idea where I'm going to carve the time out from. I certainly recall that they were leery of direct democracy or broad enfranchisement; hence the limitation of the vote to landholding men at the outset (been a while since I've touched on any US history).
I recently read Ian Toll's Six Frigates (based off of a recommendation right here on ACF), and he had some amusing anecdotes of the early days of the US capital, with president Thomas Jefferson riding his horse around town, giving lifts to strangers across flooded streams on said horse, and meeting (often indignant) foreign dignitaries dressed in dirty gardening clothes. Make no mistake he was every bit an aristocrat in terms of his standing, his interests, and wealth. But it was this new very American flavor of mingling with the common-folk.
"Merry Christmas! The shitter's full!"
Yes, the Founding Fathers WERE aristocrats - who designed & implemented a nation for the entire population, not just the powerful.
Perhaps, then why would Jackson be seen as the first popular president some thirty years after Washington was first elected?
As I said, it's been a long time since I've touched any US history. I think the last thing I read was McCullough's 1776.
I'll take your word for it the intent was to serve the common masses and not just the wealthy, I'm just not low uncertainty (what am I Karl Popper?) on the truth of the statement.
Those men were geniuses, and their intellect was coupled with a Christian faith that believed that God had made the universe as a self-regulating machine that required neither an aristocratic elite nor a democratic mob to function.
That, I believe, is America's contribution to Western Civilization: The idea that there is genius in every individual, and only liberty can unlock it.
I agree that they were intelligent and considered men who understood humanity better than the people in positions of power today.
I can state emphatically that the notion of a clockwork universe is orthogonal to Christianity (which posits a personal and active God) and more like Deism with Newtonian thinking (which Jefferson (?) was known for).
I would disagree on the idea that they believed genius in every man and more point toward: to unlock the potentiality of man, freedom from excessive constraints is necessary. They certainly understood that man totally unconstrained was an issue, same with government which is an extension of society which is an extension of man.
N E WAYZ: TL; DR you're arguing with an idiot (me) on the internet and getting into some weeds and while I cherish my most important fundamental American right, the right to bloviate, I'm not fully equipped to prove anything out since I'm out of touch on my primary sources.
To be fair, Carol Burnett had a very good run after. Tim Conway was one of the funniest men alive.
And in syndication, The Benny Hill Show. The theme song, 15 years up, 38 million views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6TXMsvgQg
Neither of these shows would be greenlighted today. Everything was offensive.
Yackety Sax! Speaking of shows you could never make today, Sanford and Son was peak 1970s entertainment.
As was All in the Family. But these were both the new "liberal" take on TV. No more Ward Cleavers or Father Knows Best. Other than perhaps Bill Cosby, was there ever another comedy show with a father who was a man to be respected?
Block Watch Captain: "It's a fact Mr. Bunker, that Homo Sapiens is a killer."
Edith: "Oh. Homo Sapiens. Is he Arab?"
Archie: "Nah Edith, Homo Sapiens is a killer fag."
Add "Good Times" to that list.
Imagine trying to make Hogan’s Heroes today.
Believe it or not, I am watching this show right now (in the background) as I read through the comments! Hogan!
The cast and crew knew exactly what they were doing. Robert Clary, who recently passed away, survived Buchenwald. John Banner was an Austrian Jew who was performing in Switzerland in 1938 when Germany took over Austria so he never went back. Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, was also an Austrian Jew who fled in 1940 - his parents were killed at Treblinka.
Tablet republished an article on Robert Clary upon his death. Interesting story to say the least.
Klemperer was also born in Germany and he and his family left for the US in the early 30’s.
I doubt any of the woke entertainment industry would understand any of that and try to make clumsy illusions to red state America and Americans.
Or "F Troop."
Gorilla cookies.
Carol actually predated the Rural Purge. And while the comedy was definitely not highbrow, it also didn't it have anything to do with small town America or country folks. Pat Butrum, who played Mr Haney on Green Acres was to have said:
CBS canceled everything with a tree in it — including Lassie.
I was going for the not highbrow humor. Taking the ability to laugh away from people has done a lot of harm to us all. Now, any TV comedy has to have THE MESSAGE.
The character Sam Drucker in Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres was named after a real person (my aunt's father-in-law, btw), a Los Angeles barber who figured out how to do trims neccessitated by continuity issues in filming that didn't look like the actor just stepped out of a barber's chair. If you were a male actor working in Hollywood in the 1950s or '60s, you probably had your hair cut by Sam Drucker.
I knew the Sam Drucker character crossed over from Petticoat Junction to Green Acres but didn't realize that he also appeared in The Beverly Hillbillies. Fascinating back story Ronnie!
Great info!!!
Correction, Sam Drucker was named after Harry Drucker, inventor of the "invisible cut". Here's his obit: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-22-me-52434-story.html
The Green Acres episode, Our Son the Barber, might have been an inside joke.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4r4kex
I've long thought Green Acres was ahead of it's time. I still love watching it.
Great stuff!
I was pleasantly surprised to see Carol Burnett show up on the final season of Better Call Saul. She’s a helluva actress
Except, when is the final season finally making it to Netflix? It's the only reason I'm keeping my subscription alive.
Showing up at a corporate job every day at really any level doesn't make you "elite". Basically some degree of Winston Smith.
Very true but one thing we learn from 1984 is that the Outer Party is why INGSOC is eternal.
Especially in the top tax brackets.
As I was driving my 12 year old to Micro Center last night, we had this conversation about ChatGPT nearly verbatim. He was excitedly telling me about how he wrote a hook into the API to generate images from entering a query from a Python script, just as a proof on concept. I was trying very hard to convey to him how it was mostly smoke and mirrors bullshit, and really just a machine learning pattern-matching algo, without dampening his enthusiasm for tech in general. I want to hand him my phone to read this post, though I am considering perhaps copy/pasting it sans the blowjob bit. I like to maintain the illusion that we've preserved a bit of his innocence, even in the internet era.
I should publish a Children's Version of this site... that's not sarcasm.
The Dangerous Substack For Boys. I’ll do the SpudGun blueprints.
I can handle the tutorials on how to make ninja weapons out of broom handles and electrical tape.
Ah, my misspent youth.
You could call it, "For God's Sake, Do As I Say, Not As I Do!"
Or, "Don't tell your mother about this..."
This line is how you get your toddler to tell your wife about something.
LMAO
It would be required reading around here. FWIW a separate URL would be preferable to just marking child safe articles so I can let them loose without having to worry about them coming across any ridiculous jargon, shocking sexual audacity, [or] repulsive images of the ghetto.
My heart soared when I read that quote.
This is something I can probably do... along with First Principles, it will keep me busy in the months to come.
Hey now, this is ACF, not your public library!
It would be required reading in my household!
I like it. The wisdom of adults, in a form appropriate for children.
But how are you going to Bowdlerize the eternal truth that sometimes, you gotta throw a bitch down a flight of stairs?
Does anyone work long term at your Micro Center? Even when I'm buying something cheap there, like a cable, I have a salesperson slap their commission sticker on it because I feel for them. That must be a terrible place to work. On the other hand, prices are pretty cheap there. I was picking up a couple of cables just before Christmas and they were selling Asus laptops for $100 and I needed something compact to operate my laser.
It's funny you should say that, I actually worked there 15 years ago or so, and as I was driving I was thinking it was kind of sad that there would no longer be anyone I know there. Lo and behold, I actually did run into an old coworker who still did it as a second job all these years later. It was not actually a bad gig, for retail - I made good money working in the Build Your Own dept, since I had a modicum of charisma and wasn't an autistic weirdo. Sell a gaming build or two a day and you were making a decent living. The real money was in the MC warranties they sold - at the time they would specifically cover damage from overclocking, which was insane and a very easy sell to most of the kids building PCs. I can't imagine they still do that - the moral hazard involved probably cost them a fortune. Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk on MC employment. I still miss that place sometimes, but alas, my then girlfriend of 4 months, now wife, ended up pregnant so I had to go find work more conducive to supporting a family. Got an office job, gained 40lbs over the last 15 years. 0/10, do not recommend.
Hahaha!
So I have been thinking about some of the issues brought up since the first installment and after reading this I may want a Rodney bot. Well maybe not as it might go Hal 9000 and run away with my wife.
I think our rent seeking lowest common denominator McOverlords who know better than we do may have made it as far as possible with current technology. At least for a little while.
You are still going to need McPeople to cook for quite some time. Our dear McOverlords can’t even keep the ice cream machines running all the time. With the franchise model and franchises loosing money due to down time they have looked for ways to keep them operating and there are several good articles detailing the fight. This article does a good job of summarizing the bigger picture.
https://www.mashed.com/135144/the-real-reason-mcdonalds-ice-cream-machines-always-seem-to-be-broken/
Which brings up side issues of right to repair ect.
This chase to the lowest operating costs with unskilled labor will always mean there is someone manning a grill. Could you imagine the number of machines needed to do what people presume is an easy job of a line cook (it is not and not saying you were making that comparison). Now even if it was one machine then like the ice cream machines if it stops you are sunk. We struggle for tradesmen and women now. No outsourcing to India or Whocaresastan for repairs. This puts “Bubba” in the position that he is not only needed but people are forced to recognize the problem solving skills needed to fix the machine. His pay goes up. If the employer pushes too hard then “Bubba” goes hunting for an extra day or calls in sick.
McOverlord can’t put all their eggs in that basket with all of the investment. Even if they can make the manual to fix the machine as simple as a Soviet era booklet given to uneducated draftees using pictograms to do basic repairs and re arm a MIG -15 (the manuals are so well done with the pictures I think I could do it) it would still be economically unviable and from a risk management perspective un advisable.
How we get back to living wages and having technology assist us and make us more productive rather than replace us I don’t know. Does not need to be zero sum. I think that assisting with tasks would be the way to go and more profitable while making for a more humane and enjoyable work environment but what would I know not being a McOverlord. Maybe a topic for the group meet up/think tank in the works.
I'm not sure how we get back to having tech simply help our lives either. While I didn't grow up in the rise of the IBM and all those scientific companies, it is my perception that their goal was to improve the lives of Americans by being helpful and useful. Dishwashers were so that house wives could tend more to other things rather than standing at a sink and such.
My how things have changed. The cad software I use is subscription. The art software I use is subscription. Everything is subscription! It's all about convincing people to use something and then having a consistent profit model for as long as they can keep people.
I'm not saying that's wrong, but maybe it's part of the problem. Companies are INTENTIONALLY LOSING MONEY ON PRODUCT only to get people hooked on subscriptions. It's gross. It's throw away. I'm thinking about continuing my slide into freezing what it is that I own and work on. This may include the kids' toys too.
Yes I belong to very few subscription services. This being an exception. I would actually pay more to read Jack’s work. I consider this a very nice coffee table book that talks back and responds and makes me think. Even if sometimes my brain hurts afterwards.
When I see a subscription service for an item that is in a physical object like a car it makes me sick.
My kid is aware of this trap as well.
I believe creative and thinking people will come up with answers around some of these issues. For every automated McDonald’s or automated service place there will be pop-up stores or restaurants or food trucks that have lines with people willing to pay them.
It will force change eventually.
"I would actually pay more to read Jack’s work"
*furiously stabs at Substack pricing interface*
So do they limit what you can charge?
Are they afraid that if I subscribe to ACF that it is really a front for the the New Silk Road and with my subscription I will receive a package of MDMA to attend my next (and first) rave?
That your site, when I subscribe for 2.1 billion dollars, is actually a front for subsidizing Russia and for just dollars a day I can purchase tanks like Sally Struthers spoke about?
Wow.
There doesn't seem to be a limit, actually.
As a platform for money laundering, however, Substack is way behind classic-car lending.
Classic car lending: another article idea, perhaps.
I went out of my way to buy a full license for ON1 for processing my NEF files.
I think Adobe only had a subscription option and they can pound sand.
As a graphic designer who remembers looking forward to Adobe Illustrator 88 (guess what the 88 stood for) I now pay $52.99 a month for the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription since the company hasn't offered a purchase option in years. I also remember the gradual, then sudden, disappearance of shelves groaning with software titles at the Apple Stores where I worked.
In my line of work, large IP/MPLS network design, automation talk has taken over. We are using terms like netops to mimic devops on the compute side. I get in trouble by making a duh statement when automation comes up. You can only automate that which is automatable. The problem has to be bounded, definable, and repeatable. The challenge with autonomous driving is the problem space has nearly infinite variables.
My customers say they are going to automate the network to add connections or bandwidth in realtime on demand. My first question is “Can the network say no to those requests?”. If not, why don’t we simply over-build like we have been for the last 30 years? I get a lot of blank looks from those questions.
"Netops".
Just shoot me now.
Yeah, I gag every time I hear it.
The whole "x as code" thing is the dumbest make-work paradigm shift in human history. I can't believe anyone ever fell for it.
Think of all the additional process we'll be able to implement! Plus we get to deny people the ability to do stuff by themselves which really solidifies our necessity.
In my 25+ years of professional work experience, CTOs have become more and more dumb. Seriously. I mean, are they serving lead-laced cocktails somewhere, or what?
#1 complaint about me is a lack of tact.
They're not wrong.
My previous job, CEO got booted because the company lost a *LARGE* contract, and the head sales guy got promoted. First all-hands he's talking cloud-this, cloud-that. "Uh-oh, time to update my resume," I thought. I was gone in two months. Company went under in nine.
A wireless link is inherently insecure.
in the early '50s the new turner turnpike tulsa-okc had the complete spread: howard johnson's restaurants, 2 on each side plus one in the middle, on this 88-mile stretch, where you could get a bone-in strip steak cooked to order. along with their 29?? flavors of ice cream. off the southern end of the turnpike, a mile or 2 away, was a coin-operated large selection of canned food, which you could heat in an oven on site. for fun i tried it 3 times; saw 1 other person there. it went away in about a year. the publicity for this futuristic idea was all over the newspapers. the hojos lasted for quite a few years but of course they're now mcds plus some other stuff. they were all gas stations too of course.
The odd social trajectory of Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn deserves some sort of book. Both of them are seriously expensive now to the point where you have to have Holiday Inn Express!
Hey Gabby Johnson tried to keep it traditional. Who can forget these words of wisdom:
I wash born here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an no sidewindin' bushwackin', hornswagglin' cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter.
He said that too.
8 days inn and motel 6 were originally named after their prices...rather long ago
My HoJo memory is staying at one in college, 25-ish years ago, having a small party on about the third floor. For some reason, the windows at this one opened. A homeless guy in the alley next to the hotel took issue with our noise level, and hurled a rock up at the widow and hit my buddy's girlfriend, who was standing at the window, in the arm.
My buddy, who was able to solve a problem and action it at about the rate of The Culture, in one move, swung his girlfriend out of the way, dropped his pants, hung his ass out the window, and took a dump. You see, he had noticed that there was a piece of plywood leaned up against the hotel, under our window, at a 45 degree angle. His turds hit the plywood and shot away at a right angle and hit the homeless guy right in the chest.
In a million years I'll never see anything like that again.
Hahaha!
One of the best breakfasts I've ever had was at an on-site diner at an old HoJo's outside of Flagstaff Arizona. If all on-site diners could pump out chorizo and green chile omelettes like that, you'd see them come back into style faster than that omelette worked its way through my lower intestine.
I wish I had gotten into the handicap lift business whenever that scam was mandated. HoJo fun fact Howard (I think it was Bud, not the original) hired the great Jacques Pépin to design and scale the menu.
Would love to see stats on how frequently the lifts are used. I'm guessing the vast majority have never been touched since the day they were installed.
28.
Hot tip for budget and convenience eaters, rotisserie chickens are loss leaders at the grocery store. Get a rice cooker and make yourself some rice to go with it (white only). Elite tier is making gravy from the chicken drippings. Fuck veggies
You are a man speaking direct to my heart with your last sentence.
Depends on where you get it, because the quality can vary from "sublime" to "serves 4-6 desperate people or one fat slob."
The wife once brought home the last one on the shelf. It was the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of rotisserie chickens.
Carcass/bones in the slow cooker overnight for broth FTW. Break the long bones open with pliers for extra marrowy goodness.
You can pretend you're a wolverine while you're eating it. Not the superhero, the animal.
Who just fought off both a bear AND a wolf pack so it can feast on what's left of a caribou carcass frozen underneath a fallen tree.
My dad fed it to our family plenty of times.
A whole rot chicken is around 2000 calories. So that’s not a bad plan for larger active man.
Another great installment, really too much here to comment on. I'm sure you know too well the number of IT products: endpoint protection, IDS/IPS, monitoring/alerting...all touting "AI" now...in most cases...it's rule set. I got a big chip on my shoulder from an Israeli firm using A/V with "deep learning" tech...I found ransomware that they missed, and their "fix" was add a hash signature to the agent, as they did for all the malware it failed to detect. WTF can you not fix the "learning" part?!?!
Anyways I always wondered about those booping and beeping fryers at Mc D's, they must pay good money for those compared to the simple fryers I used in my restaurant kitchen time. Must be worth it to reduce the level of labor expertise to run them. I wonder if those machines prevent operators, themselves baked not fried, from opening the drain valve releasing 500 deg oil on to the floor instead of turning the burner off like Dylan was supposed to!!
All of this security software is smoke and mirrors, McAffee from 1999 with a new skin. Why with all of this "AI" VM software can't we get an effective way to report on and prioritize findings?
A dashboard showing that we went from 1,500 vulnerabilities in April to 1,400 in May does nothing to highlight the 900 we fixed the previous month.
Hell, I still cannot get a vendor to provide a way to prioritize a vulnerability by whether the asset is internet-facing, the classification of the data/asset, and whether the vulnerability is being actively exploited. I just get a list of vulnerabilities and a CVSS score. We wrote a Python script to do the above, but that will be useless once someone on the global team decides to flip vendors.
I'm also shopping for a tool that can map our network (or take maps created by an EA tool) and use it as a basis for building threat models. You could easily automate 80% of threat modeling if someone cared to dedicate the horsepower to it.
More than a few vendors have claimed to be able to do the above. Zero have delivered.
Inane comment warning: I think Wendy's is solid. Mickey D's blows.
Cookout is the best fast food. Wendy's is the best of the national chains, but I'd rather have a gas station hot dog or just go hungry
I've definitely chosen 2 cans of sardines over mcds recently.
One of my late mother's favorite dishes was King Oscar sardines (in oil) with butter and slices of raw onion on bakery challah bread. I'm surprised my father could kiss her.
Every Wendy's I can recall has been ran like absolute shit, sans one that is staffed entirely by suburban high school kids. The rest have staff plucked straight from the Methadone clinic.
Cookout and In-N-Out are my two favorites. The latter I've only visited in Texas, so YMMV. My girlfriend lived in LA for a while and said that all of the ones there are shit.
Tried Wendy’s today for a breakfast sandwich. Pretty good such as it is. Not like we have great choices in this realm.
Interestingly while I was there they filled a single door dash order. It was one sandwich. Eventually the door dash woman arrived in a brand new Lexus RX Something. Trying to figure the math on that..
And I forgot to mention every worker was not from here. The back room was chaos.
I love how they sell bacon cheeseburgers as breakfast food.
Murica.
I don’t like to bash our country but yeah
I wasn't bashing it. The bacon cheeseburger is on par with electricity and the wheel.
I'm sure it tastes good but a bacon cheeseburger at a US fast food joint is not kosher at least three different ways so I'll have to pass.
When he's right he's right
This is one area where I think mickey D's doesn't blow. Their breakfasts are good. Better than Wendy's. Where I live fast food joints are struggling to hire and are advertising $15 hr pay and are being staffed increasingly by Americans.
On the Lexus Rx, the math doesn't add up or won't in short order.
To the contrary. If you want to put 250k miles on something then sell it for 60% of what you paid, a Lexus RX is *exactly* the right vehicle. And the cost of operation is low as well.
I have to agree. I’m looking for the perfect breakfast sandwich and I think it’s in Australia. I’m in Colorado so it’s all south of the “border” folks.
I don’t think anyone is ahead door dashing unless it’s a very reliable paid for shitbox.
15 dollars barely buys you a meal most fast food restaurants these days. Can you imagine getting paid that much an hour to work at one?
They were forever bitching about the amount of food we “stole” when I worked at Hardee’s. But there was no actual effort to curb it other than posted signs.
I've long believed that if you work in a restaurant and aren't given at least one free meal per shift that violates, at least in spirit, the biblical prohibition against muzzling draught animals to prevent them from eating the grain while they worked.
Introduction of fresh, cooked-to-order beef for quarter pounders a few years ago was a big improvement, IMO. Spicy fried chicken not bad, either.
In Real People news, In-N-Out just announced today that they will be adding an eastern regional office in Williamson County, TN.
I for one, welcome our new Tay.ai overlords.
Apparently there are places you can't "follow the science"
The usual miscreants were testing GPT the same way and it's been 'corrected'.
Maybe the the real correction was the friends (and screenshots) we made along the way.
I blame a lifelong carpal tunnel issue on my college-years excellence at Centipede. Totally worth it.
Well back in 2003, a combat first lieutenant made $2515/month base pay. Tax free, aw yeah.
Much more than my father earned in Vietnam but I get the impression he had a slightly freer hand in stacking bodies.
"...I learned a thing or two from Charlie (Haji), don't you know?"
Copperhead Road!
The great Steve Earle.
Yeah, that was back before "professionalism" became a zero-defect mentality.
You can't keep your hands clean in war and expect to win.
Oh just you wait... Sometime around the March or April timeframe, the US Army, as the anointed joint proponent for DoD, will be talking a lot about organizing and building a Civilian Harm Mitigation Center of Excellence. The DoD already issued a public press release regarding a Civilian Harm Mitigation Action Plan back in AUG. The planning is surprisingly level-headed at the moment, all things considered, but it can and probably will go off the rails real fucking quick. Probably after the civilian director is hired.
I think you told me your dad as a FAO. Not many assignments in Vietnam were more dangerous than that, perhaps Wild Weasels and Tunnel Rats.
He was ALSO a tunnel rat!
And he applied to be a medevac chopper pilot for another tour, but that's when he found out he was too color-blind to fly.
But he could tell the difference between a VC and a well-disciplined VC, right?