Thank you for this explanation. I got as far as an example that highlights the difference (“I made sure he died.” vs. “I made sure he was dead.”), but couldn’t nail down why there is a difference between those things.

What, you just go through life not daring people to try it? His long hair says: “See what happens. I dare you.”

The text on a Twix wrapper runs in the same direction as the Twix inside, so it’s better to say they’re top and bottom Twix - otherwise it’s ambiguous based on the direction of the packaging.

Also, for double blind experimentation, she shouldn’t know whether it’s a left or a right.

It takes way longer than that for me to share my opinions. The Earth should be rotated at least 30-40 degrees.

I once forgot to install the Linux package when I was installing Arch on a system. Linux even let’s you not use Linux, if you like.

It didn’t boot.

If I were a government, I’d be afraid of French traditions, too.

Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It’s impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.

Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it’s far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.

Firewood drying in the sun appeals to me, but it’s generally a quite mild smell. If there’s a breeze, it probably is undetectable.

We used to have good, strong open source tools made out of C (which is a lot like steel - it can only be worked by blue collar computer nerds with muscly brains). Now that steel core is corroding because of the influence of hackers and other white collar computer sorts with their creative problem solving, and unintended uses of memory.

That new corrosion is called rust, and it eventually appears on every C project that’s left outside, unless someone comes along to brush it off occasionally.

Pretty sure stones have to weigh 14 pounds…

You may be a paid agent, but not for long. I’m reporting screenshots of this straight to DOGE.

Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that’s impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.

That’s my favorite kind of conservation.

They don’t do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.

They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don’t mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that’s only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow’s milk produced.

I’m under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren’t as profitable as almonds.

A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn’t find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.

I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.

Releases should be fast and rare.

My situation might be unique there (and I realize describing this that calling them “my meetings” might be deceptively inaccurate). I support tools used by multiple teams, so when they’re upgrading or planning, I should be there, but the rest of the time I have nothing to add to their efforts. The result is I’m invited to roughly 20 hours of meetings per week, and attend closer to 8.

I’m super unproductive when I work remote. I don’t attend all my meetings, I average about 0.4 MRs per day, and probably only 10 lines of code. I make lazy post-development tickets just to check the box. I sometimes take hours to respond to messages, and I frequently end my day at only 5-7 hours worked.

Mysteriously, none of those things is a good way to measure productivity for software development, and mandating that everyone look like they’re working hard does not ensure optimal creative problem solving.

Delete Ass Master volume 7 to make room - that one wasn’t any good anyways.

Anyone born to an American citizen is an American citizen, regardless of where it happens. Most foreign countries don’t grant citizenship based on place of birth the way the US does, so if you go to Afroeurasia expecting to get a dual citizenship for your child, it’s likely to fail, but they would still be an American.

The actual question asked was “Do you think if you were playing your very best tennis, you could win a point off Serena Williams?”

This leaves huge ambiguity. How many points are we playing? What’s the setting? Does it count if she double faults, or only if I win the point by something I do?

If it’s a full set, and any point I get regardless of why I get it counts, I think 12% is probably low. Consider the huge advantages most amateurs have of doing very confusing things, and possibly getting some mercy after its clear there’s no true competition to be had, I would give quite high odds that she loses at least one point.

If this is more like a sudden death, “I’ll bust out my secret serve, and get a point off her in one shot”, 12% is stupid high.

I have no idea which of those (or the myriad middle options…) People thought they were answering, but for a male with typical bone density, a 120mph serve wouldn’t be enough to drive through your skull, but it will give her a point if it hits you in the face. You have nearly 500 milliseconds to dip out of the way, and let it go sailing over your head for that single fault.