You mean I can’t have my new plastic in a particular shape for a WHOLE WEEK? I knew the commies were up to no good when they said technology could make the world a better place.

The town I grew up in, and the next town are connected by a road (shocking, unusual, I know). There was an 8 month period where the police departments and politicians all agreed that there should be a way to pass high urgency alerts back and forth, in case there’s someone fleeing along that road, or anything like that.

It was eventually decided that the viable ways were:

1. a desk agent would fax over a document and call to notify/confirm about the event.

2. one department would have to replace some substantial portion of their IT system so it could work with the other system.

3. they could pay for a custom solution, maybe.

They settled on option 1, and it worked. Every time I hear politicians talk about sharing information across organizations, I think back to a working meeting with two vendors going down a list of protocols and standards, eventually deciding there was no common ground. It’s been made difficult, and no one in the industry appears to want to fix that.

My dorm building in college had exit doors that were undersized for the fire codes. They fixed this by moving the exit/entrance door to one side of the hallway, and adding an emergency exit door on the other side. The emergency exit door had a single red sticker on the push bar that said “Emergency exit - Alarm will sound”, and it really would. It happened at least 75 times in the first month after everyone moving in.

They fixed this by sending everyone 75 angry emails about it. The same thing happened the next year, and also every year since then. I heard (but could never confirm) that putting double doors for the entry/exit doors would have cost a total of $3,000 more, for the multiple exits.

I’m about to go to sleep. I’ll sleep better knowing I have $19, but probably wouldn’t sleep at all knowing $7 billion is showing up tomorrow. I don’t think I’m cut out for the billionaire life, but I’m prepared to try.

Oh boy… So, they took off from a test facility adjacent to Plattsburgh International Airport. I don’t see it stated, but I give it 98% they landed where they took off. Plattsburgh has some of the lowest residential and commercial electricity costs in the country, so that $5 nets them about 110kWh of juice.

They also reached a maximum altitude of 1,100 feet with a plane that weighs in excess of 25,000 pounds. Lifting 25,000 pounds up to 1,100 feet takes 37 million joules of added potential energy, or a bit above 10 kWh.

The entire remaining 100kWh of energy budget is the equivalent of accelerating the 25,000 pound aircraft up to 252 meters/second at perfect efficiency in a vacuum. This flight was not going very high, and it was not going very fast.

If the economics of their hybrid idea work out, it’ll be fantastic, but the attempt at marketing over transparency here doesn’t fill me with optimism.

By using the degree of force suitable to something inconsequential. Occasional public mockery (“This guy things a watermelon is a berry!”) or miffed letters to the editor come to mind.

My level of involvement is to continue to talk about it occasionally when the opportunity presents itself, and hope that someone that isn’t yoked by the field of computer science (and therefore incapable of naming anything) will propose a name for at least one of these things.

We surrender language to scientific/other detail oriented pursuits too easily.

According to some, a raspberry is not a berry, but a pumpkin is. That’s dumb. The word berry existed before botanists tried (and failed) to determine exactly what it meant, and the original meaning is still way better/more useful than the botany one.

So here it is: a berry is a small fruit, which is usually sweet, and usually edible. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, grapes, gooseberries, currants, and blueberries are all berries. Pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes, zucchini and bananas are not.

Other terms that have been co-opted this way include “work”, “salt”, and “rock”. I believe the fields stealing these terms should be forced to come up with their own, different words.

Processing all the text as tokens is too much work, so the AI will just read the headline and the first 3 paragraphs, then hallucinate the rest of the details.