It got worse.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/elon-musk-vs-organic-farmers-bastrop/
As it turns out, Elon Musk had a bunch of farms + horses from all the land he bought in the 2022-era. Elon Musk was actively trying to get rid of horses on his new property.
Its not that Elon Musk was going to “buy her a horse”. He had tons of spare horses and was looking to dump them onto someone else.
Dual SIM (2 physical cards)
With the dawn of eSIM, I’m not sure if Dual physical-SIM is very useful.
Last time I went on a trip, I just downloaded an eSIM + kept my physical SIM slot.
https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-motor-north-america-reports-march-first-quarter-2024-u-s-sales/
PLANO, Texas (April 2, 2024) – Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) today reported March 2024 U.S. sales of 214,894 vehicles, up 21.8 percent on a volume and daily selling rate (DSR) basis versus March 2023. Sales of electrified vehicles for the month totaled 78,157, representing 36.4 percent of total sales volume.
US new vehicles sales set to rise in March, report shows
Ummmmm… no. Everyone else is actually doing quite good. Overall sales are up. Its just EV specifically that are doing bad. But even PHEVs and Hybrids are seeing record growth and record sales in USA, so there’s still a substantial environmental / economic car drive right now.
that they would have excess inventory in the near future
They made 4X,000+ extra vehicles in Q1 2024 than they sold. (I think 46,000? But I don’t quite remember the number).
They don’t need pre-orders to see the literally tens-of-thousands of excess inventory that piled up in the past few weeks alone.
Boooo.
Have my upvote.
Lol, sometimes this cringe humor is the kind that I like the most. I can see why this topic is being ratio’d, very much a controversial thing if you like (or dislike) the limerick.
I’ve added a new placement based on a few more heuristics.
The newest placement is theoretically possible in 5 rounds, creates the maximum 113 score, and is biased to have as many placements as “high” up as possible (row1 favored most, row2 next favored, etc. etc.)
I didn’t try very hard to find the best sequence yet, but this is much more playable.
I’m currently estimating about 62-million sequences that are optimal. I’ll likely have to search all 62 million of them to find the “most playable” optimal 113-score game.
This is still small enough to brute force on a single-core in a few seconds. But I’m too tired to keep programming today.
This above sequence is theoretically possible in 6-rounds of play.
Its theoretically playable. But 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 is basically never going to happen. I’m trying to figure out how to optimize my program for “more playable” sequences.
Surprisingly: the sequence 1 2 5 6 8, 3, 4, 7, 9 is playable and score-wise optimal still. So with a few reorderings / better search, I probably can find a “reasonably looking” sequence for a real game.
Still, solving this “subproblem” is likely news for many Azul players. I believe I’m the first one to find a provably optimal sequence of plays for a given target number of placements.
The Chu Ko Nu was more of a party-trick than a real weapon though. The amount of power behind each bolt was miniscule.
The actual “rapid-fire warbow” the Chinese used was the lol rocket-launcher. (Or really, Koreans did it first, strapping Chinese rockets to a bunch of arrows and lighting all of them at the same time, causing devastating effects on the battlefield). See Hwacha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha
Zhuge Liang’s biggest battlefield contribution in practice was probably the popularization of the “Ox Cart”, aka the Wheelbarrow. The Shu’s army could march further since they had such contraptions powering their logistics. Kinda funny to think that things like Wheelbarrows were still the stuff of sci-fi in the year 200 AD, but that’s where technology was in practice.
EDIT: The fact that Zhuge Liang’s lanterns (aka: hot air balloons) got practical usage back then is incredible though.
Honestly, if it doesn’t end with people getting impaled on spikes in front of his castle, I have a tough time believing it was Vlad, lol. Pretty much everything ended with “And then they were impaled to serve as a warning to everyone else” like every damn time.
Alibaba in some ways.
My understanding of Alibaba (and the 1001 Arabian Nights) is that they’re closer to Arabic “Duck Tales”. Fantastical stories more designed to woo children with crazy powers and nearly illogical plot structures. However, 1001 Arabian Nights became absurdly popular in Europe, far more popular than well-respected Arabic Heroes. (Much like how Duck Tales is a children’s story in American culture, but way more popular in Europe for some reason). Or for the American equivalent: us importing young-adult shows from Japan (lots of anime) and the American adults consuming it.
For someone “like King Arthur”, an adventuring Hero that’s well respected in the culture that they’re from (ex: English respect King Arthur and see him as high-culture), Arabic Heroes are closer to Sinbad the Sailor instead, rather than Alibaba, Aladdin, or Scheherazade.
Unfortunately, if an Arabic tale came to Europe in the 1500s to 1800s, it would be called “Arabic Nights”, because the original 1001 Arabian Nights was just so popular, every translator in Europe would basically add it as one of Scheherazade’s sub-stories. So its difficult from a Western / English-speaking lens to see what is, or isn’t, respected high-culture stories.
I’m looking through Wikipedia and have come across Antarah ibn Shaddad, a Guardian of the Nativity (Yes, “that” Nativity, Jesus’s birthplace). Such a hero sounds far more similar to King Arthur as a heroic figure to look up towards. (A lot of 1001 Arabian Nights are filled with rather disgusting and backstabby characters and aren’t really “Heroes”).
Its hard to overstate how “legendary” the names are of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The Sun family who controls Wu (one of the Three Kingdoms), is the same Sun family who wrote Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
There is this legend / history from Romania called Vlad Dracula. He was a Voivod (would be roughly a Count in Western nobility, but with more military powers) who brutally murdered the rich and corrupt Boyars and gave order and safety to the poor.
If you ignored the hundreds of impaled men, women and children in front of his Castles… Legend says he kept gold at the center of his towns to prove that all thieves were dead. If anyone openly stole the gold at the center of town, they’d be impaled.
Perhaps Vlad Dracula was too brutal by Western European standards. But IMO, there seems to be overarching tales of someone who stood up to the corrupt Nobility and actually enacted a sense of justice between both Robin Hood and Vlad.
Obviously, it’s 100% myth by the time people are telling stories of the Count Dracula who drinks your blood. But as a nobleman of the years 1400s or so, his true story is so difficult to separate out from the myths and legends. Whoever was for real, he was clearly brutal to have caused so many myths to be written about him.
Going further East, there are the many Tales of Baba Yaga. A powerful and brutal witch of Siberia. There’s all kinds of stories of Baba Yaga, but she usually has Twins or Triplets form, a Dancing Hut and powerful and brutal (but ironically fair) Magicks.
I wouldn’t say that Baba Yaga is like King Arthur… But Baba Yaga very similar to the evil and brutal Morgana of Arthurian lore. But Baba Yaga has no peer or equal. There is no King Arthur or other set of knights to save society from Baba Yaga wrath.
Even further East are the Fables from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms of China.
The TL;DR is that China had a massive civil war at the fall of the Han Empire in the year 200AD or so. This Civil War lasted three generations.
As the Han Emperor was stolen by the evil Dung Zhou, the 12-way Coalition army tried to save the emperor. It was too late however, China fell into a war and the 12 warlords soon entered a period of free-for-all, vying to control all of China.
The armies kill and or subsume each other until the rise of Shu, Wu and Wei. The ‘winners’ of that period of chaos. And then the real crazy shit starts happening.
They utilized Magicks to create battlefield conditions: unlikely wind that spread fires through enemy camps. They find legendary weapons. Single men fight against armies of a thousand or more.
This crazy Wizard/Inventor named Zhuge Liang invented hot air balloons and used them as communication between troop formations. No wait, this one is actually true and not a legend.
Lots of Chinese Magic and History here as the three-way free for all causes a natural set of alliance (Shu and Wu were weak early on) but then later when Shu grew more powerful, Wu and Wei staged a careful betrayal killing the God of War: Guan Yu (one of the main generals of the Shu. This is “That long-beard Guy riding the Red Horse” you keep seeing in every Chinese Restaraunt)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is somewhere between King Arthur and the Bible in terms of importance to Chinese Culture. Even modern Chinese understand that whoever wrote the book was a Liu Bei fanboy (aka: obviously biased / favors Shu in every situation). But the book is incredibly influential to Chinese Philosophy. Many sayings and parables about the importance of scholarship and science (Zhuge Liang and Sima Yis inventions to change the course of battle), the importance of order and fairness (even the brutal warlord Cao Cao of Wei was well known and well-regarded as a fair king). The importance of recruitment efforts, and other such parables / philosophy regarding how societies can gain advantage over each other. Not just battle, but through economic power, legends, and more.
That’s not what storage engineers mean when they say “bitrot”.
“Bitrot”, in the scope of ZFS and BTFS means the situation where a hard-drive’s “0” gets randomly flipped to “1” (or vice versa) during storage. It is a well known problem and can happen within “months”. Especially as a 20-TB drive these days is a collection of 160 Trillion bits, there’s a high chance that at least some of those bits malfunction over a period of ~double-digit months.
Each problem has a solution. In this case, Bitrot is “solved” by the above procedure because:
Bitrot usually doesn’t happen within single-digit months. So ~6 month regular scrubs nearly guarantees that any bitrot problems you find will be limited in scope, just a few bits at the most.
Filesystems like ZFS or BTFS, are designed to handle many many bits of bitrot safely.
Scrubbing is a process where you read, and if necessary restore, any files where bitrot has been detected.
Of course, if hard drives are of noticeably worse quality than expected (ex: if you do have a large number of failures in a shorter time frame), or if you’re not using the right filesystem, or if you go too long between your checks (ex: taking 25 months to scrub for bitrot instead of just 6 months), then you might lose data. But we can only plan for the “expected” kinds of bitrot. The kinds that happen within 25 months, or 50 months, or so.
If you’ve gotten screwed by a hard drive (or SSD) that bitrots away in like 5 days or something awful (maybe someone dropped the hard drive and the head scratched a ton of the data away), then there’s nothing you can really do about that.
If you have a NAS, then just put iSCSI disks on the NAS, and network-share those iSCSI fake-disks to your mini-PCs.
iSCSI is “pretend to be a hard-drive over the network”. iSCSI can exist “after” ZFS or BTRFS, meaning your scrubs / scans will fix any issues. So your mini-PC can have a small C: drive, but then be configured so that iSCSI is mostly over the D: iSCSI / Network drive.
iSCSI is very low-level. Windows literally thinks its dealing with a (slow) hard drive over the network. As such, it works even in complex situations like Steam installations, albeit at slower network-speeds (it gotta talk to the NAS before the data comes in) rather than faster direct connection to hard drive (or SSD) speeds.
Bitrot is a solved problem. It is solved by using bitrot-resilient filesystems with regular scans / scrubs. You build everything on top of solved problems, so that you never have to worry about the problem ever again.
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Wait, what’s wrong with issuing “ZFS Scan” every 3 to 6 months or so? If it detects bitrot, it immediately fixes it. As long as the bitrot wasn’t too much, most of your data should be fixed. EDIT: I’m a dumb-dumb. The term was “ZFS scrub”, not scan.
If you’re playing with multiple computers, “choosing” one to be a NAS and being extremely careful with its data that its storing makes sense. Regularly scanning all files and attempting repairs (which is just a few clicks with most NAS software) is incredibly easy, and probably could be automated.
76F to 78F in the summer.
68F in the winter.
My Dad does 85F summer and 65F winter though. I though I was being luxurious with my settings lol.
I do run a dehumidifier in the summer and a humidifier in the winter though. Humidity control is almost more important IMO for comfort.
I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.
I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.
I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.
Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.