Yesterday, for the first time, I got google search results that were entirely useless. I don’t remember what I searched, but it was a relatively simple question and I was kind of in a hurry. The only results I got were video thumbnails and sponsored products… Also presented as thumbnails. Barely any text anywhere to tell me what the thumbnails were supposed to be. They even removed the choices across the top so I couldn’t select “all”.

It’s been getting worse for years, but that was the last straw for me. I don’t want to search the web on “large thumbnails”, I want “detail view”. Sometimes I’m searching for a product, but mostly I need information in the form of text written by a real human. If a search engine can’t give me that, then it’s not useful anymore.

Really frustrating. I guess I better get around to using duckduckgo everywhere.

I think certain places (reddit?) Have been using algorithms to find and stamp out bots/vote manipulation for quite a while. I remember at least one major wave of bans for smurfed accounts participating in manipulation.

Ok but elite:dangerous on VR with a HOTAS is pretty cool. As is the sculpting software that’s out there.

Agreed. I have more hours in DCSS than any other game. I started playing when it was Linley’s Dungeon Crawl.

I don’t think it’s totally fair to call it ugly either. It’s a masterpiece of efficiency. The ASCII looks messy to some people, but after a while you just see right through it; purple Y = catlobe gtfo etc. Plus the upside is that it’s extremely clear at a glance what is going on because you don’t have complicated sprites everywhere. And the handmade vaults that get rolled into the procgen are often really nice looking and give the world a lot of character.

Hardy har.

The only problem there is that the count also determines how federal money is distributed. Undocumented/illegal immigrants still use interstates and water mains and disaster money and national parks and federal buildings. Unless we want funding cut, we still have to count them.

*Edit: I’m embarrassed that I got all that written before 3/5 hit me. “The only problem” 😬

Oh shit, I never even thought about that. It’s another level of insidious. 1. Be republican 2. Get a huge prison in your district “for the jobs”, 3. Get more positions guaranteed to be republican, since the voters in your district still are. Would work for a democrat too, they don’t care about criminal justice reform either :(

Might work slightly better for republicans because they can work the identity politics angle more easily.

If you have a little technical skill, you can set up your own raspberry pi ads-b receiver really easily. Just need the raspi, and SDR dongle, and an antenna. Floghtaware provides a flash image for the OS. If you feed them data, you get a free premium subscription. I used to use it to get alerts when the state patrol speed trap aircraft were taking off so I knew not to speed on a long interstate commute.

There are a few kinds of steam!

Wet (unsaturated) steam: this is probably what’s coming out of the instant pot. It’s gasified water mixed with tiny particles of liquid water. Industrial processes do not want wet steam in their systems. They have machinery to separate the liquid out. If that liquid water settles out inside a pipe and blocks it, it’ll go shooting down the pipe like a bullet and cause damage to whatever is at the end of the line. If the droplets get into turbomachinery, they’ll tear up the turbines. Adding additional heat will not increase the temperature, but will get consumed by the phase change to evaporate the remaining water and change the wet steam into…

Dry (saturated) steam: this is precisely the point when all the water has been evaporated. If you remove heat, it will start to condense without changing temperature. If you add additional heat, it will increase the temperature of the steam, because there is no water left to evaporate. This is useful because changing phase between liquid and gas consumes/yields a ton of energy, and that happens at a constant temperature. So if you need to transfer heat from one place to another, then saturated steam is what you want. Adding heat to saturated steam gets you…

Superheated steam: at this point you can conceptualize water as a gas. Intuitively, it works just like air or nitrogen or whatever. Pressure/temp relationships act like you’d expect from your everyday experience, because you’re far enough above the gas-liquid phase change temperature that you don’t have to worry about condensation getting into your equipment. If you want to use steam as a working fluid in turbomachinery or something, then you want superheated steam.

All three can hurt you badly, but inadvertent contact with superheated steam will fuck you up or cause irreversible death.

Yeah, but then they go and open all the windows to “change the air” no matter the weather.

I used to work with a bunch of Germans in the US. I came in to the office one time at about 4:30am in February. One of the guys had all the windows open when the outdoor temperature was something like -20F.

Like Moritz, I think that avoiding the draft is more important than changing the air at that point. 🙄

I also had an old manufacturing guy tell me that drinking cold water in the summer would kill you because of the shock to your system.

Pushing the metaphor even further, all my stuff isn’t even moved out of the ex’s house yet, so I’ll probably want to keep talking about them until the situation is over. It’s just going to take a little time.

Yes, thank you. Excessive prudishness and self censoring is always an indicator to me that a community is going a weird direction.

Eventually your computer chair and counterstrike posture give you chronic shoulder pain. Then you have to migrate back to the couch and the gamepad. It’s the circle of life.