I had to do a lot for my dog that could be considered gross in an abstract sense but it never bothered me much. I suppose that was because he was my cute dog and not just because he was a cute dog, but being a cute dog certainly helped. It’s notable that I did not feel that same way about my little sister when I was 11 and she was born. She’s a great person now but I didn’t like helping take care of her even though I didn’t have to do it much; I think that’s a big reason why I don’t have my own children.

A friend of mine has a baby and he’s certainly in that joy category. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me because it was essential for the survival of the species, but I’m still surprised that people like babies. Kids can be cute when they’re old enough to talk and use the toilet, and even then they’re only cute if they’re the charming kids-say-the-darnest-things sort and not the tantrum-throwing sort. Meanwhile puppies and kittens are cute from the moment they’re born.

(Why do humans babies make such horrible sounds when they need something? A puppy whimpering makes me want to give it whatever it’s asking for. A baby crying makes me angry. I suppose the crying is harder to simply ignore.)

My theory is that psychosis due to self-imposed sleep deprivation causes some of the crazier things Elon Musk does.

When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

Dibs on being the palm tree.

…and why do kids these days say ooh-wooh?

People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.

That’s just from the debris of all the drones they shot down, duh.

(Sarcasm, just in case.)

A man my ex-wife dated after I divorced her contacted me on Facebook once, calling her a “horrible psychopath”. Apparently he knew my name because she had told him awful things about me. I feel really sorry for him, but I also feel validated in a sense. I get a nagging thought sometimes that I could have prevented the failure of my marriage and made the relationship work somehow. (I don’t miss my ex at all but I’m ashamed of being divorced.) Knowing that another guy also had the experience I did with her reassures me that it really wasn’t my fault.

I thought the army gave recruits an IQ test and then trained them for what it thought they were good for.

The cluster B people can be really alluring. I met a gorgeous woman once who was extremely enthusiastic about dating me. She couldn’t get enough of me. I was an awkward nerd who had never experienced anything like that before, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. After six months of dating, she asked me to marry her. I foolishly said “yes” - I knew it was crazy but here was this sexy, smart, funny woman literally begging me to accept her as my wife.

Accepting her proposal flipped a switch. She had been high-strung before, but now completely random things would set her off and she would start yelling at me. She would yell at me in front of my family. She would even call me at work to yell at me because she remembered something and it made her angry at me. She was extremely jealous - I stopped talking to any of my female friends because even mentioning them made her flip out, but she still got mad that I wanted to spend time with my grandmother and my dog. She also started sending weird text messages to my relatives. For example, she kept telling my father that she wished she was not married to me.

The thing is, she wasn’t always awful or else it would have been easy to leave. In between her angry outbursts she was still as affectionate as she had been before, but now I was constantly afraid that something would set her off. She was tiny and never physically violent but I was scared of her. I decided to divorce her after she yelled at me for wanting to include my family in my birthday celebration; the marriage had lasted six months.

Anyway, where was I going with this… Men have to watch out too. Usually we imagine abuse as something a man does to a woman, but that’s not the only form it can take.

Would a local mechanic train a stranger who had zero knowledge?

The hacker known as Four Chan would never lie to us!

Sometimes when I open my mouth really wide, I somehow spray a little stream of saliva, like from a squirt gun. It makes me feel like the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, but so far I haven’t been able to do it on purpose.

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.

This whole time I was pronouncing it “vodzhak” rather than “voyak”. (Analogous to Russian воин?)

buying bottled water

perfectly good pond in background

Too bad I’m not a celebrity, because my shirts now don’t just look like my shirts from twenty years ago, they are my shirts from twenty years ago.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why would Ukraine target a minesweeper?

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