One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they’re absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don’t think a single disk survived that year.

I also remember when my school got a fancy new “computer lab” that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.

Congrats! Check hop water if you haven’t already!

Thousands of military drones have been remotely piloted for decades. This news isn’t as ground breaking as it might seem. Some of these drones are large: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk

I know a military drone isn’t the same as a passenger carrying airplane, but for cargo I think the only reason this isn’t already a thing is because drones are military tech and most governments don’t want that falling into the wrong hands.

I got LASIK earlier this year. It’s an expensive solution to the many small inconveniences that glasses have, but totally worth it imo.

I went from -5.25 with mild astigmatism to 20/15 eagle vision basically overnight.

Ah, for some reason I thought you were referring to a Roku stick/box, not a smart TV, my mistake 👍.

How does it stream things/what’s the point of a Roku if it’s not connected to the Internet?

I like this sentiment, but giving the US intelligence apparatus what amounts to a veto for elected/appointed officials feels like a recipe for disaster.

The only way I see that being workable is if the clearance grantors are transparently beholden to elected officials or the people directly. Which are essentially what elections and the congressional confirmation process are supposed to be. But both of those processes feel like they’ve been subverted. (Elections by the two-party system and the fact that half the population seems intent on electing a dictator, and the other by the senators/representatives that come out of that electoral system).

Not trying to defend Jeff here, but generally these kind of space megaprojects rely on manufacturing materials in space. I.e. capture an asteroid and use its material as the radiation shielding. Not that that’s currently anywhere near feasible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Panera stopped being good when it stopped being bread co

In 2021 there was some planning/writing done for a prequel, but I don’t think anything came of it.

That film is having a bit of a cultural comeback, so there’s still hope.

The Grand Canyon! Must seem even grander to an ant

Is “research chemicals” a euphemism or are you literally referring to chemical substances/precursors purchased and used by laboratories that are also available to the public?

Power cut

Yeah I had convinced myself that I would only do it for a year and be able to retire much much sooner.

I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)

In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.

Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.

I used to work for a startup that laid claim to all “ideas” that I had, in or out of working hours, during my period of employment with them.

This article is worth reading if only for this line:

However, though drug companies have had some success targeting the Death Receptor-5, no Fas agonists have made it into clinical trials.

Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.

Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.

I’m thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don’t know if that’s common with any crops where the seed itself isn’t the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor’s non-gmo status).

Finally, this could be useful if it can be “switched on” i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant’s gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive’s population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.

I at least had the cathartic experience of being told “hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that’s when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all.” And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.

K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.

It was actually kinda fun.