My personal desktop machine is a Linux box I assembled from $500 worth of parts about 14 years ago. I’ve increased RAM and added about 8TB of storage for an Emby instance.

It still manages to get the job done, but it is obviously way, way, WAY overdue for replacement. We’ve been struggling financially for about 25 years.

Now I’m thinking I need to finally pull the trigger and get it done before January.

Don’t forget all the American lives yet to be sacrificed!

If the electoral college had worked as intended, Trump would not have won in 2016*.

So, yeah, get rid of it. It’s not working anyway.

• You could, of course, consider the attitudes and biases of the founding fathers and come to the conclusion that they would have preferred to see a man win instead of a woman. However, I don’t think that’s fair. Even in their lifetimes they were shifting their views based on their experiences. If you are going to ask them what they would do today, then you have to give them the benefit of having experienced the events of the last 248 years. You have to assume they would have continued to grow.

If you don’t have a car that can drive in snow, don’t drive in snow.

Last blizzard I was in, I had to pull over to try to help two people get up a small hill.

The first woman was afraid to steer while me and and a tow truck driver pushed her up. She wanted one of us to steer her car, but that just couldn’t happen. She ended up paying the tow truck driver more than $300 to tow her.

While that was going on, a Honda Civic ended up sliding backwards down the hill. I pushed that one about 100ft along the road until it leveled out enough to move on its own.

We have a Civic, but it sits in the driveway for blizzards.

If you get serious snow where you’re moving, and you have to drive, get something with all wheel drive. Just remember that all wheel drive doesn’t mean you can stop. You still need to drive like a Granny in Sunday church traffic.

Yes, just what we need! Finally there’s one source of news without that left wing bias!

/s

So, one more item in the “Pro” column for voting against Trump.

Then maybe we can work on fixing the problems here.

Wear gloves when they hand you that guideline because they might be pulling it out of their ass.

I’ve often thought LLMs could replace all of the C-suites and upper and middle management.

Funny how no companies push that as a possibility.

Not really related to the post, but I feel like sharing.

Big boss where I work wanted all managers to read a book. He had staff scour the Internet looking for copies of this book so that they could give every manager their own copy.

He said we were going to have meetings with the entire management team to review chapters of the book one at a time.

The gist of the book was: take the time to make sure you hire the right people for the job, retain the good ones, and get rid of the people who don’t work out.

I think we covered two chapters in meetings.

After that, an upcoming hiring freeze was announced, and everyone was told to fill all their open positions within two weeks or the position would be cancelled.

I refer to this as companies wanting to hire the person who just quit.

If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it’s happening to me too.

I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.

Many, many years ago, the hospital where I work had a medical transcription company to transcribe dictated radiology results.

At the time, users would access the server via DEC terminals or a terminal application on their computer.

One radiologist set up a script in the terminal application to sign off all his reports with one click. Another radiologist liked it so the first let the second copy it.

Later, the second radiologist opened a ticket with IT because all his reports were being signed by the first radiologist. Yeah, because he didn’t update the script to change the username and password being used to sign the reports.

That’s an amusing anecdote, but the terror comes from the fact that NEITHER RADIOLOGIST WAS READING THEIR REPORTS. BEFORE SIGNING THEM.

The reason they are supposed to sign the report is to confirm that they reviewed the work of the transcriptionist and verified that the report was correct.

No matter what the tool is, doctors will assume the results are correct and sign off on them without checking.

The Trumpublicans in the U.S. have access to independent reporting, yet they choose instead to limit themselves to lies that make them feel like they’re better than everyone else.

We have a 2020 Honda Civic, and the automatic breaking in that is absolutely fantastic. The closest I would say it gets to a false positive is when you’re following a car on the highway that takes an exit. When the car in front starts to slow after taking the exit, the Civic will sometimes slow a bit even though the other car isn’t right in front of us anymore. It’s a simple matter to push the accelerator to override.

Why would they care? The whole world is witnessing it and no one is doing anything to stop them.

Hopefully.

not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack

As we’ve discovered, both can be true.

On Friday, as we were running around the hospital where we work trying to get every computer working again, we were following the work-around to rename the Crowdstrike folder under C:\Windows\system32\drivers to “bad-CrowdStrike”.

When my coworker was typing the rename command, instead of typing “cro TAB”, he started typing “clo TAB”. He’d ask me why it wasn’t finding it, and I’d point out the typo.

I started saying, it’s not “CloudStrike”, it’s “CrowdStrike”.

By the end of the day, we were both a little loopy. I started typing “CloudStrike”, and cursing him out for screwing with my head. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure what it was either.

CloudStrike

CrownStrike

ClownStrike

It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

Maybe not a pine tree, but I love birch beer. My parents cut down an old birch tree years ago, and it smelled AWESOME!