jalefkowit

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

I will never understand why colleges sic cops on students who are protesting. Kids only go to college to do three things: have sex, take drugs and protest things. And if you try to stop them from doing any of them, they are just going to do it harder

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

If you work in a team or organization of any size, there is probably at least one person who is responsible for making sure your domains get renewed on time.

DO NOT ASSUME THAT THEY ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN THAT IS

DO NOT ASSUME THAT THEY ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO DO IT

DO NOT ASSUME THAT THEY HAVE THE EXPENSE ALREADY APPROVED

DO NOT ASSUME THAT THEY EVEN KNOW THEY HAVE THIS RESPONSIBILITY

ASSUME NOTHING
ASSUME NOTHING
ASSUME NOTHING

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

OK I know you NASA folks think you’re hot shit now just because you reprogrammed a 46-year-old satellite from 15 billion miles away, but I once kept a Windows server up for a whole week without having to reboot it so

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

Noping out so hard my mouse clicking finger breaks

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

Perfect headline, no notes

https://jalopnik.com/ford-bronco-sport-oj-simpson-recalled-on-same-day-1851403905

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

“This month Tesla switched Full Self Driving (FSD) on… as far as I can tell, every single car. It’s normally a five figure software-only upgrade. But usage of the feature has been low, perhaps in part because if you’ve spent $40-90,000 on a car, spending another five figure sum is annoying, and perhaps in part because people generally value their own lives and the lives of the people they love. So now, for this month only, it’s free, and Tesla can juice their numbers.

And, yes, I tried it.

And let me be clear: nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.

I’ve rarely been so frightened behind the wheel of my own car.”

https://werd.io/2024/i-tried-tesla-fsd

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

Doing my taxes as a self-employed person

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

There is an interesting essay to be written comparing P.T. Anderson’s MAGNOLIA and Kevin Smith’s DOGMA, which both came out in the incredible film year of 1999, as examples of young auteurs finally reaching the limit of where their original inspirations could take them, and the different ways those two men responded to hitting that wall — Anderson by becoming a chilly formalist, Smith by basically giving up.

vampiress , 2 months ago to random

Atari VCS 800s are going super cheap right now.

Trying to figure out if they're worth it at over half off…

They're quite gorgeous, and the wireless controllers look decent. Wonder if they can be hacked to emulate more than just what they already do…

Sounds like a yes? Basically a linux machine with a front-end. Not unlike a Steamdeck…

Anyone got one and have feeling about it they want to share?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_VCS_(2021_console)

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

The sequels will continue till morale improves

https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/disney-dates-mandalorian-grogu-toy-story-5-tron-ares-bumps-moana-live-action-remake-1234971568

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

The thing about being middle-aged in the 2020s is that you have spent your entire adult life watching serious, obvious problems get worse and worse because nobody is willing to sacrifice even a little bit to address them

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

I used to work in an office where one guy carried his own personal French press with him all day no matter where he was going or why, so I have absolutely no trouble believing that there are offices out there across the fruited plain that are rent in twain by endless guerrilla wars over coffee machine protocol

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/03/office-keurig-coffee-shop-maker-machine.html

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

The other DC airport has already been renamed for an infamous Republican villain, so this would at least have the virtue of consistency

https://reschenthaler.house.gov/media/press-releases/reschenthaler-introduces-bill-to-rename-the-washington-dulles-international-airport-as-the-donald-j-trump-international-airport

#uspol

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

Gen X Problems: Whenever a kid tells you their dream is to grow up to be an influencer, you have to physically restrain yourself from saying "so your dream is to lie to people for money"

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

If you ever wondered how to put an 80-year-old, 60,000 ton vehicle up on blocks, it turns out the answer is: extremely carefully

https://youtu.be/FaC7ubb6E1k?si=efQnzB0QEga4LTTs

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

Country music is popular across the United States because a quack doctor in Kansas in the 1920s who treated impotent men by surgically implanting goat testicles into their scrotum lost his medical license, so he ran for Governor of Kansas because that job would let him assign new members to the state medical board who would reinstate his license, and he only lost because the Republican and Democratic parties changed the election rules to throw out any votes for him that didn't write in his full name in a single approved way, so he moved to Texas and set up a million-watt radio station across the Mexican border that let him blast quack medical advice and sales pitches for patent medicines across the entire continent, and he needed something to fill airtime when he wasn't on selling joy juice, so he filled it with country music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

“Upon seeing videos in the news, I suddenly realized that I don’t know what to do if an earthquake hits while I’m driving. I’ve grown up in the Los Angeles area my whole life, and we had earthquake drills in school that taught us to duck and cover under a sturdy surface, but no mention was made about how to react if you’re behind the wheel.”

https://jalopnik.com/what-to-do-if-an-earthquake-hits-while-youre-driving-1851385095

jalefkowit , 2 months ago to random

My dishwasher stopped working the other day. Repair guy said the problem was that the motherboard had shorted out.

I'm so tired of fucking computers. Where can I go to get those appliances that Indiana Jones could ride through a nuclear blast

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

I never met @craigmaloney in person, but I wish I had.

He was one of my first follows on fedi, back when I first arrived in 2017. (As Octodonians, I think we found each other via the local timeline.) We interacted many, many times online over the years since, and those interactions were always among the best I had here, thoughtful and respectful. I looked forward to seeing him turn up in my timeline. I enjoyed reading what he had to say.

Wherever he is now, I hope it is free of pain, struggle and people who reply before reading the whole post.

https://octodon.social/@kattni/112202546947731897

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

What the Champagne region of France is to winemaking, the state of New Jersey is to political corruption

https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2024/03/op-ed-three-reasons-why-nj-ballot-designs-county-line-should-be-ditched/

#uspol

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

[ ten years ago ]

ME: Why do I need to use a module bundler?

JAVASCRIPT WORLD: Because we've invented too many ways to make modules, and there's no consistent way to interact with all of them, so you need a module bundler to abstract all that complexity away.

ME (sighing): OK, fine.

[ today ]

ME: Hey, it looks like everybody's finally standardized on ECMAScript modules. Does that mean I can finally stop using a module bundler and just work with modules directly?

JAVASCRIPT WORLD: Lol no

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

America is full of towns that will pay tech workers thousands of dollars to move there, the only caveat being that they are among the most boring places on earth

https://www.makemymove.com/

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

"In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar500k-dune-designed-to-protect-massachusetts-homes-last-just-3-days

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

It feels like the doors are coming off at Boeing. You know, metaphorically. And also literally. But also metaphorically

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

So far the main thing I appreciate about “Shōgun” is that they at least know how to properly light a scene, which instantly elevates it above 90% of modern prestige TV

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

Well this is the worst idea I have seen in a long time

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

If you read letters or memoirs from the Southern side of the American Civil War, there's one aspect of living through that era that people bring up over and over again: the lack of coffee.

Coffee had established the hold over American taste buds that it still enjoys today by the mid-1800s. But when the Civil War broke out, the North imposed a naval blockade on the South that lasted the duration of the war, blocking imports of all kinds. Coffee, which doesn't grow anywhere in North America, quickly became scarce. Every bean that came in had to be smuggled past the frowning cannons of Union ships.

As you might imagine, coffee-addicted Southerners began to come off the hinges. They roasted and ground pretty much anything that didn't move, looking for a filler ingredient they could use to stretch out their extremely limited coffee supplies. While many fillers were tried -- acorns, okra, chickpeas -- most settled on the root of the chicory plant.

It's important to note here that I have never seen a contemporary account of drinking chicory coffee where the person reported enjoying it. It's always recounted as a disappointment -- a sacrifice the person is making because, hey, there's a war on. Once the war was over and real coffee could be imported again, Southerners dropped their chicory and never looked back.

Except, it turns out, in New Orleans, where they kept right on drinking it for the next 160 years. They still drink it today.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chicory-coffee-mix-new-orleans-made-own-comes-180949950/

jalefkowit , 3 months ago to random

There are not many spies who can be said to have changed the course of history. But one who did was Richard Sorge.

Born in 1895, Sorge grew up in Germany, reaching adulthood just in time to serve in the First World War. Fighting on both fronts, he became disillusioned. Having gone into the army a nationalist, he came out a communist.

Moving in German communist circles in the early '20s, Sorge was recruited by the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence arm. He adopted the cover of a journalist, which gave him latitude to travel and ask questions.

The GRU sent him to Japan in 1933, with instructions to create a spy cell there. This was an important assignment. Japan had invaded Manchuria; they now shared a long, uneasy land border with the Soviets. Prominent Japanese voices were calling for war against the USSR. The Soviets kept a large army there to deter them. Sorge's task was to keep Moscow informed about Tokyo's intentions.

He accomplished this by building a broad network of spies and sources. One unwitting informant was the Nazi ambassador to Japan, General Eugen Ott, who came to rely on his counsel, sharing highly classified information with him. Another was Ott's wife, with whom Sorge was having an affair. Ott knew and let it pass. He valued Sorge too much to lose him.

Sorge discovered in 1941 that the Germans were planning to invade the USSR. He warned Moscow, which ignored him. Then, of course, the Germans struck.

Now locked in a life-or-death battle, Moscow worried whether the Japanese would take advantage and strike in Manchuria. Sorge told them not to worry. He had learned that Japan instead planned to push into the Pacific, against the old colonial powers and the United States. No Eastern invasion loomed.

This time, Stalin listened. The Soviet troops in the Far East were sent racing west, arriving just in time to meet the advancing Germans at the gates of Moscow. Their arrival saved the Soviet capital, and, possibly, the Soviet Union itself.

Sorge's reward was to be thrown to the winds. His spy ring was uncovered by the Japanese in late 1941. The Soviets offered nothing to get him back. He was hanged by his captors on November 7, 1944.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

"We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go 'there and back again,' and there is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill… So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry."

https://biblioklept.org/2017/12/30/commodified-fantasy-takes-no-risks-ursula-k-leguin/

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

Imagining working on a huge project in total secrecy for a decade with 2,000 other people, and then one day you come into work and the boss is like "you're all fired, we decided to spend your salaries on becoming more buzzword compliant"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/apple-cancels-work-on-electric-car-shifts-team-to-generative-ai

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

I've been struggling to work with this project I inherited that uses Tailwind CSS. I kept trying to use Tailwind styles that were clearly listed in the documentation, but most of them didn't work. When I checked the bundled CSS generated by Webpack, the styles that didn't work weren't present. Which seemed weird! Seeing as how they were official styles listed in the documentation.

It turns out that Tailwind "helps" you at the build stage by monitoring your source files, and only including styles in your output bundle that you actually used somewhere. So if you ever want to use a new Tailwind style, you have to put it in somewhere and then npm rebuild the whole bundle

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77775132/tailwind-missing-lots-of-styles

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

I see Ezra Klein has brought the subject of a brokered convention into The Discourse, so I thought I would re-up this thing I wrote on the subject back in 2016, both to help folks understand exactly what a "brokered convention" would be and to underline just how fantastically unrealistic the proposition is

https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/03/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-brokered-convention/

#uspol

jalefkowit , 4 months ago to random

It’s because you started listening to Jordan B. Peterson

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

Random thought upon the release of "Masters of the Air." (Which I haven't seen, I don't have Apple TV+.)

I was an Air Force brat. My best friend in junior high school was another Air Force brat. We'd both grown up on Air Force bases around Air Force people, and we both assumed that when we grew up, our careers would be in the Air Force too. (His was, mine wasn't.)

His dad had a board game that had been published by Avalon Hill in 1983, called "B-17: Queen of the Skies." It was a simulation of flying bombing missions over Europe in World War II. Being little Air Force nerds, we both played the heck out of that game.

It was a pretty typical wargame of its era, which means there was a lot of rolling dice and looking up results in printed tables. You started the game by rolling up a crew, with unique members for every station (pilot, bombardier, navigator, gunners, etc.). Then you could carry that crew from game to game, with members earning medals or being wounded or even killed depending on how the dice fell.

And a thing I discovered as we played the heck out of that game is that the crew you rolled up never made it out the other end of a 25 mission tour of duty alive. Never.

If you were lucky the attrition would be slow and partial; you'd lose a guy, and his place would be taken in the next mission. Then you'd lose another guy. And then another. By the end of 25 missions maybe half your original crew was still there. That was the lucky outcome.

The unlucky outcome was some catastrophic failure that killed the whole crew before they could even leave their seats. And there were so many catastrophic failures lurking in those results tables. Fuel fire. Engine explosion. Dead-on hit by flak, or shell, or rocket. So many.

The game wasn't making this stuff up. Only around 25% of U.S. bomber crewmen in 1943 completed their tour of duty. The rest were killed, wounded sufficiently to be taken off flight service, or captured. Everyone assumed they were going to get got; the only question was when, and how badly.

This was a story I knew well from history. But it took a game to teach me that those pages had been written in blood.

https://archive.org/details/b-17-queen-of-the-skies/

Home-printed versions of all the "B-17: Queen of the Skies" components.
"B-17: Queen of the Skies" game board, showing a B-17 with counters for all the crew members and damaged parts of the aircraft.

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

Since I'm in South Carolina, someone is spending an absolutely astonishing amount of money to plaster my YouTube feed with wall to wall ads saying Republicans should nominate Nikki Haley because she polls better against Biden than Donald Trump does. Which strikes me as an insane waste, because

1. I'm not a Republican; and

2. Nobody who supports Donald Trump in 2024 is doing so because they are making a rational political calculation.

#uspol

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

Pray we don't update it any further

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

YouMightNotNeedJQuery.com is a fascinating document, in that it makes the argument that you don't need jQuery while inadvertently suggesting that you might WANT jQuery even if you don't need it because so many of the listed tasks are one line in jQuery compared to 10 lines of vanilla JavaScript

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

jalefkowit , 5 months ago to random

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but pretty much the entire 1963-1989 run of classic “Doctor Who” episodes that still survive are now streaming free with ads on Tubi

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/classic-doctor-who-episodes-now-streaming-on-tubi/

[EDIT: I'm the United States and can confirm these episodes are available there. Availability in other regions may be different.]