Badabinski

oh my God it’s like you’re in my head get out of my head. I’m reading this because I’m trying to catch up on sleep and need to distract myself from the dread, so this hits way too close to home lol

Yeah, hypercapnia is fucked. I’m actually testing a small CO2 gas generator (literally just citric acid added dropwise to sodium bicarb with an acid trap and a dehumidifying stage) as a means to kill pests on houseplants and did some reading on the symptoms to be safe. It is unpleasant. It’s not the worst death I could imagine, but it’s shit.

As an aside, the way that CO2 kills bugs is interesting. Basically, the excess CO2 (in the range of 10-80,000 ppm) causes their spiracules (i.e. the little holes in their exoskeletons they use to breath) to stay open. This causes them to lose moisture until they die of dehydration (usually in a matter of hours). All this happens long before they asphyxiate or suffer from any sort of acidification from the CO2. It’s a bit fucked up, but all other means of getting rid of the pests on my partner’s houseplants have failed.

It’s a shame that nobody has produced a molecular test cheaply enough for free distribution yet. The fact that you can get PCR quality tests entirely at home makes the antigen tests a non-option for me and mine. They’re too expensive to recommend to most people, however. The ones I’ve been using are $25 per test, and you also have to pay $50 for the reusable test reader. That’s way cheaper than they used to be (Lucira COVID tests were like $75 a pop, and the fact that the entire unit was single use was terrible from a waste perspective), but it’s still just not good enough.

EDIT: lmao, Pfizer bought Lucira and is now selling combo COVID+flu tests with the same single-use tester. I wish they had converted to a reusable central unit with disposable tests like most other molecular COVID testers…

EDIT: yikes, the Lucira combo tester might be giving false positive results for the flu. Dunno if this Amazon review is accurate, but it’s certainly concerning:

The article says that he refused the prize because he felt that he hadn’t earned it. He felt that the prize should be awarded to Richard Hamilton who developed the theory Perelman used to fully solve the Poincaré Conjecture. I’m not saying it was the wisest or easiest solution. I was only trying to express my opinion that I find his adherence to his strong principles admirable.

I’m absolutely not advocating for anyone to turn down a million dollars. For anyone in a position where they can just, like, get a million bucks, take that shit and live a happier life!

Also from the article:

The writer Brett Forrest briefly interacted with Perelman in 2012. A reporter who had called him was told: “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”

I enjoy this man’s focus and determination. I feel like the world probably missed out on good things when he left academia, but I can’t blame the dude when I saw why he refused a million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. He seems like a person with very strong principles.

oh fuck I did misread it. Man, now I sound like a big ol’ asshole. Sorry, OP :/ I had a bad week thanks to some ChatGPT code and just kinda jumped out when I saw the word “ChatGPT” next to Bash.

Ugh, I hate ChatGPT. If this is Bash (which it is, because it’s literally looking for files in a directory called ~/.bashrc.d), then it should god damned well be using syntax and language features that we’ve had for at least twenty fucking years. Specifically, if you’re writing for Bash (and not POSIX shell), you better be using [[ ]] rather than [ ]. This wiki is my holy book I use to keep the demons away when writing Bash, and it does a simply fantastic job of explaining why you should use God damned double square brackets.

ChatGPT writes shitty, horrible, buggy ass Bash. This is relatively decent for ChatGPT (it even makes sure the files are real files and not symlinks), but I’ve had to fix enough terrible fucking shitty AI Bash to have no tolerance for even the smallest misstep from it.

Sincerely, A senior developer who is known as the Bash wizard at work.

EDIT: Sorry, OP. ChatGPT did not, in fact, write this code, and I am going to leave my comment here as a testament to what a big smelly dick I was here.

My partner and I have this thing where we ask each other if we are the other person’s x, where x is something ridiculous, cute, grotesque, or profane. For example, I once asked my partner if I was her gutter-bloated corpse, to which she, of course, answered in the affirmative.

I’ll soon find out if I am actually a tasselled wobbegong carpet shark in the eyes of my partner.

As an aside, I asked the corpse thing after reading this delightful line from one of my very favorite books:

“Body found floating by the docks,” Glokta breathed, “bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated… far… far beyond recognition.”

I played so many games on my Palm Pilot back in middle school. My Palm Tungsten T3 was great, and there were a shitload of freeware or shareware games released over the years.

Same here. Like, there has to be some kind of specific vulnerability in these pagers, right? You can’t just “heat up the battery,” you need something that will actually use the power. If the pagers weren’t compromised between the manufacturer and the recipients, then there’s some major fuckery afoot.

Yeah, I’ve been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

I’ve heard that batteries (can’t remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

what the fuck

What is it with this fucking man and disgusting dead animals‽ Like, this was before the brain worm started driving ffs! I really thought the brain worm was the reason this dude was so fucking crazy, but apparently not! It must be Rosemary Kennedy’s ghost, tormenting the family for what they did.

EDIT: Jesus I just can’t get over this. They’re dead man you don’t have to fuck with them just leave them alone and enjoy your time on the beach with your family or in Central Park throwing dirt clods at the drifters like you want to

just don’t fucking touch the dead animals anymore

EDIT: I’ve done some more research and have learned a few things

1. the US education system sucks at telling recent history because i just learned about RFK’s assassination
2. maybe he’s all crazy and fucked up because his uncle and dad were assassinated when he was 9 and 14
3. maybe he’s all crazy and fucked up because he was doing fucking heroin from the age of 15 (jesus what does that do to a developing brain)
4. maybe he’s all crazy and fucked up because his family was probably neglectful (and possibly abusive) as hell because he certainly acted like a neglected and spoiled teenager (he was suspected of committing a bunch of crimes and shit with other kids)

like, I just want to understand what his fucking problem is. It was easy when it was the brain worm. I view him as a bit dangerous which is probably why I’m latching onto this and trying to understand his motivations. Dangerous people are easier to handle emotionally if you know why they’re dangerous and what they want.

oh hey cool another reason to think Reagan was a horrible fucking ghoul

I wonder if there have been any studies done on how this decision impacted ATC suicide rates.

EDIT: huh, well I’m not actually finding data on suicide rates among ATCs. I wonder if I’m repeating a myth? Or if it’s just not well publicized or studied.

Ditto. Like, I think it’ll become iconic in the same way the LLV is ugly-iconic. I just like it when government stuff so obviously prioritizes function over form.

Don’t forget fully automated!

I’d guess there’s a bit of MIC lobbying and chicanery afoot here. Like, it does seem like Oshkosh makes some good vehicles, but there’s always pressure to support defense companies when government bidding happens.

Please note that this is completely baseless speculation on my part. I’m an idiot on the internet that knows fuck-all about shit.

I’ll second this, I think it’s impressive that you were able to get any sort of photo. I am decidedly not a birder, but I’ve tried taking long distance pictures of moving objects with a fairly extreme telephoto lens and I was dreadful at it. I’m even more amazed that you weren’t using burst mode.

I was going to ask what your aperture was, but I’m guessing it’s f/11 after looking up the lens. Canon made a crazy thing! I like it, and I hope other manufacturers take note. I’d especially like it if Sigma or Tamron made a compact 800mm prime lens.

No worries. Mustelids aren’t very well understood by the general populace, so I don’t hold it against anyone.

Nah, the slow hop-hop-hop is like a jog. Mustelids can fucking zoom if they’re in danger or after prey. Like, even dopey-ass domesticated ferrets can get going pretty damn quick when they’ve been hurt or feel threatened. Nobody has posted what species of otter attacked this lady, but river otters can reach speeds of 47 kph (29 mph) on land. Sea otters are slow and fat, but these weren’t sea otters.

You aren’t outrunning a pack of otters in a sprint. It’s no question that you could outrun them over a long distance, but mustelids are zoomy little fuckers.

(note that I like mustelids and had 4 ferrets, so please don’t mistake my tone as being sour on them)

EDIT: holy shit, ferrets can be bred and trained to run at like 22 mph. That’s insane!

Wow, I had just assumed that life insurance was included in all of the genetic discrimination laws that were passed after the Human Genome Project got underway. It looks like Australia was ahead of the curve by passing legislation in 1992 (for comparison, the US passed GINA in 2008), but it’s very odd to me that both of those laws excluded life insurance. I understand that insurance companies need to be able to mitigate risk, but it’s a huge “fuck you” to anyone born with risky genes. It might result in slightly higher premiums for everyone, but it’s a good move imo.