I spent those years in dll hell.

For journalists, it raises a question: Should a public official’s family be held to the same standards as that official themselves?

Bullshit. It raises the question: Should a Supreme Court Justice be believed unconditionally when he offers an excuse for what really looks like inappropriate bias? The discovery that another flag associated with the January 6 attack flew in front of Alito’s beach house has shown that the NYT was correct not to accept his story about his wife. I’m honestly surprised by the discussion of how a judge’s family is expected to behave - it’s as if a dead body was found in Alito’s house, he said that he had no idea how it got there, and the press started talking about whether or not he had a responsibility to monitor access to his property more closely.

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

buying bottled water

perfectly good pond in background

The dolphin was diagnosed only a few weeks ago, but it died over two years ago in March 2022.

This claim that the frozen embryos should be considered children according to Texas law has been thrown out repeatedly by Texas courts. It’s almost certainly not going anywhere.

Are you claiming that Batman wears spandex because originally he was supposed to be naked but the CCA wouldn’t allow that?

over 2/3 being civilians by their own count

People often bring this up without noting that such a ratio would not be unusual in urban warfare against a well-prepared enemy even when the attacking army is doing what it reasonably can to reduce civilian casualties. Compare it to Mariupol, an example of what happens of the attacking army is unconcerned about civilian casualties: 25/26 of Ukrainians killed were civilians according to Ukrainian estimates. (8/9 were civilians if we use the Ukrainian numbers for how many of their soldiers were killed but the more conservative Human Rights Watch numbers for civilian deaths.)

Wait, what? If you’re hungry, nutritious food (canned beans and such) will cost less than $5 a day. And that’s without cooking. If you can boil water, you can save some money and increase the variety of food available to you.

There’s not going to be a moment when the world suddenly goes from having oil to having no oil. Some oil reserves are relatively cheap and easy to extract. Other, very large reserves are currently so difficult and expensive to extract that doing so isn’t profitable. As the easy oil gradually runs out, the supply drops, the price rises, and sources of oil that were not profitable at the old price become profitable. This maintains the supply of oil and stabilizes the price.

Eventually oil will become so expensive that alternative technologies will be cheaper than it. This will happen with plenty of hard-to-reach oil left. So it’s true that the amount of oil is in principle finite, but that limitation isn’t really relevant.

Any sort of formal decision-making process is an algorithm. Are landlords supposed to just have a hunch about what the rent ought to be? Or would it be like a “no calculators” test in school, where you’re still allowed to do the same thing but with pencil and paper?

Guilt.

Uh, how common do you think mail-order brides are?

This is really disappointing. The violence by the counter-protestors is:

• morally wrong
• terrible for publicity
• pointless, since the police have been breaking up these protests anyway

Who did this and why?

I wish Biden would make the following announcement:

It has come to my attention that Mr. Trump’s lawyers are currently attempting to convince the Supreme Court that it would be legal for me, the President of the United States, to have Mr. Trump killed. I imagine that this is a source of concern for Mr. Trump and so I want to reassure him and the American public that I believe doing so would, in fact, be a crime.

I find it strange that this is being announced publicly. Obviously Israel could have been told in private. Is the announcement simply meant to reassure the American public or is there something else to it?

I’m not saying that the US will attack Iran - I’m saying that the US will send ships to patrol the waters where this happened. There won’t be violence unless Iran messes with them, but I don’t see what Iran has to gain either from capturing a single freighter or from an increased buildup of American forces in the region.

This move keeps the U.S. out of the conflict

I’m not sure why you think so. The US usually treats freedom of the seas as a pretty big deal. I don’t think that there will be violent retaliation solely for seizing this ship, but I do expect American naval patrols in the region with authorization to fire on Iranians that try something like this again.

Places with traditions of mummification have dry climates in which bodies may mummify naturally, so it’s not something the people just came up with out of nowhere.

I was just a kid when I came to the USA so most of my memories are in the context of how different things were after we came to America.

One particularly vivid memory for me is of bananas. My grandma would go on business trips to Moscow sometimes and she would bring bananas back for us. Otherwise the fruits we had were the ones that grew locally, and you had to preserve them if you wanted them out of season. It blew my mind when I came to the USA and I could just go to a grocery store and buy bananas at any time.

There were a few foods there that are harder to find here.

• Buckwheat, which is my favorite grain.

• Fresh peas, not the kind that people eat along with the pod but rather the kind with an inedible pod and big seeds, like canned peas but raw.

• Russian-style rye bread. My family was so surprised that Americans had such an abundance of food but still ate Wonder Bread.

• Kvas, a sweet beverage made out of fermented bread. I think it tastes way better than soft drinks so I’m not sure why everyone isn’t drinking it. Maybe it’s an acquired taste?

Also American cakes are usually terrible and American deep-fried french fries are inferior to Russian pan-fried potatoes.

Edit: one more thing, crepes. They’re not exclusively Russian, of course, but they’ve very common in Russian cooking with a variety of sweet or savory fillings - applesauce, jam, cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, ground meat, etc. Sometimes they’re fried after being filled.