Why do they need half that data for a derivative of a distro? Fuck off. I don’t care if someone collects the model number of my GPU or whatever but that sounds like personally identifiable tracking data, not basic “telemetry” data to set development priorities or whatever.

The federal government doesn’t run the elections so you’d have to check the 51 Secretary of State (or equivalent) sites to actually get live results.

For just the results. Decision Desk HQ gets updated quickly, as they provide data to media outlets and others. I don’t think they require a subscription just for results. The AP does the same and generally “calls” states anyway. (As in, the networks will call the results when the AP does, though some have extra requirements like their own data team agreeing.)

Stuff from different decades just to confuse whomever finds it. Like get a Five Stairsteps album from a used record store, a Blue Oyster Cult 8 track, a Tecmo Bowl cartridge, a Boyz II Men CD, and a newspaper from yesterday.

You think open source project maintainers should move to different countries because of temporary sanctions? What if they have a wife with a job and kids in school? Or delicate Lego collections that are impossible to pack? Or a side-piece?

Take issue with the sanctions if you want but don’t take issue with people who don’t want to move their family, LEGO collections, and side-pieces.

My ancestors came from the sea.

I love it but even in high school, I knew I didn’t want kids. People told me seeing my friends have kids would cause me to change my mind but it only reinforced my preference. Having kids is a huge amount of work and commitment (not to mention the expense). I love to travel and I’ve been able to go to places and do things you can’t (or just wouldn’t want to) do with kids. I also like that I was able to take risks with my career. It’s much easier to start a business or join an early stage company or whatever if you don’t need the stability kids need.

So, for me, it’s amazing. I feel for people who want kids but never had them, though. I know a few and they’re happy — freedom is a nice consolation prize — but it wasn’t their dream.

I usually just use an email draft for cross platform transfers. MacOS/iOS handle this pretty much automatically and Linux has a good option (KDE Connect) but it sounds like you’re on Windows.

Does Phone Link (built into Windows) work for your needs? I don’t use Windows often but I know they’re trying to make something sort of like the other OS’s syncing systems. Not sure how good it is.

Can you use pyenv for the script?

Ditka vs. a Hurricane? Who would win?

Hold on! Hold on! Hold on! The name of the hurricane is Hurricane Ditka.

Scam attempts. This may be better elsewhere but in the U.S., every phone call I get is either a scam attempt or my mom (who is old enough that I worry about her getting elder scammed like when my grandma paid a stupid amount for silver coins).

I’ve never gotten scammed (except small stuff like carnival games or whatever) but if I were president I’d make ending scams — even false advertising ones — my top priority. You’ll be able to pick up a call from and unknown number after my first 100 days: that’s my promise to the people of America.

I like to watch sports and, other than soccer, the ads are relentless and so repetitive. When there’s a tournament or playoff, companies will make one annoying ad and show it seemingly every commercial break. Currently, in the U.S. we have a major election so there’s the most vile political ads shown hundreds of times. Those are definitely the worst but online sports betting also recently became legal in many states and their ads are the 2nd worst after political ones in terms of being so dishonest, they should be illegal.

In terms of other type of ads, I hate 99% of outdoor ads. Billboards are literally made to distract you while driving and now they have electronic ones that change even at busy interchanges. If they didn’t already exist and you proposed the idea of putting distracting shit next to busy highways, people would think you were a sociopath.

I relentlessly avoid ads on the web and on streaming services. If I find a service useful, I don’t mind paying to get rid of them. But you can’t really avoid the ones during live TV events or on a road to where you have to drive. (A long time ago, I had a TiVo where the remote had a skip 30 seconds button. That was amazing. Internet wasn’t ubiquitous yet so I could record something live, start watching in the middle, and skip all the ads. I was like a kung fu master with that button. I learned exactly how many times to tap for each type of commercial break.)

I definitely did at a BBQ place near my old office. If you give me a bite of good BBQ, I’m buying what you’re selling.

It might be as close to a perfect game as it gets. I love that you can turn off the HUD and it’s still completely playable. Nintendo is one of the few companies that puts so much care into their open world that you can just explore and talk to people and get all the information you need to complete the game.

For modern games, I also love Nier: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn for the complex stories and creativity but Breath of the Wild is just so perfectly executed. It’s sort of like classic Pixar movies where it might be rated G but still manages to appeal to adults.

We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.

Yeah, I’ve lived in New Orleans or on the East Coast my whole life and don’t recall that sort of movement speed. Usually, you want a fast moving storm so no one area takes on all the rain but Helene was going so fast and was so massive that it’s probably unprecedented.

Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.

To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)

Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.

I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.

For those curious, even the Wikipedia page for “perverse incentive” has a picture of a cobra and that story. It’s something most Econ professors and textbooks will use as the classic example. It’s not the same as the Bengal famine. I just mentioned it as something we learned about India besides “Gandhi was like their MLK” or whatever.

I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.

I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)

A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.

Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.

Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.