But what if we tried more power?

You might be thinking of the Ramada (now a Hilton) in Innsbruck, Austria. That’s not this one.

Nothing in life really prepares you for meeting such an unfathomable being…

Ok, obviously merging while you merge is super dangerous. Almost as dangerous as using light mode on your phone. The rider should’ve known he was a sociopath just from that.

Pull Request. You don’t merge a peer review.

“When in Rome” is the first half of an old adage: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” It means that when you’re in an unfamiliar location, take your cues on what to do from the people who live there. It doesn’t mean that they’re literally in Rome.

It’s being used somewhat incorrectly in this title; to say that the Uber driver is just doing what’s normal for Bay Area people, I guess.

It’s fine. It’s probably the weakest of the modern Trek shows, but only because SNW and LDS are so good.

Isn’t he married? So does he mean that his wife has a real thing for short Austrian painters, or like…is he admitting something else?

Bro they designed and sewed a screen-accurate Monster Maroon uniform for Anson Mount to wear in a thirty second scene where he meets himself from an alternate future. They established, then sidelined the Recreation Room so that they could do a holodeck episode without breaking continuity. They wrote an entire episode that explained why the 1990s changed between TOS and reality. I don’t know what kind of continuity you’re looking for, but they’re doing a lot of hard work to keep the continuity rock-solid.

And why use a swordfish when the narwhal exists?

Brennan, Lily, and Tao each have a moment during that episode where they’re reading a thing and their brains turn back on in emergency mode and they realize to their astonishment what they’re reading. I usually don’t like cringe humor, but those looks are the reason I can still watch True Facts About Grant Anthony O’Brien.

Man, I don’t recognize this at all. At work I’m currently in the middle of a two-month project that I think will end up producing about ten lines of code. It’s all about tracking a bunch of stuff down in a gigantic code base and then trial-and-erroring all of it until it works.

So, my mother-in-law’s phone keyboard switches to French-Canadian? Yeah, I can definitely fix that! My dad wants a mesh network in his house so he can listen to music in the garage? Can do! My kid’s audio player breaks and I need to transplant in a new part? Give it to me! My wife’s computer won’t print suddenly? These little wins (and sometimes medium sized wins!) are euphoric. They keep me from feeling like I’ve wasted an entire day switching one variable, running a build, and then switching it back.

Sure, it gets annoying when they don’t try anything before they ask, or they keep having the same problem over and over again. But that’s by far the minority.

That’s amazing. Definitely one of those Chaotic neighbors you want to be on the good side of.

If you go up to one of those covers and look at it, you’ll probably find that the meter well is using a nonstandard bolt head (often five-sided) in an effort to prevent tampering. I bet that used to work a lot better before people could just buy any weird tool they wanted on Amazon (though I wonder if anyone cares now that water is such a tiny fraction of most people’s monthly budgets).

Yep. My dad used to manage a water utility in the 90s, right around the time that they were experimenting with different means of monitoring flow for billing.

The way they had been doing it for decades was by sending a person to literally, physically open every meter well (using a special wrench that opened the five-sided nut closing the well, in an effort to prevent homeowners from tampering with it) and reading the meter usage visually each month, writing the amount down on a paper sheet that would then be manually entered into a billing program on the computer later.

That was supplanted by a version with a very short range radio transmitter. The reader would tap the cover with a probe, and the probe handle would display the value, which was again written on a paper sheet. This got rid of the need to physically open every well, but as I remember it never actually rolled out to every customer even in the entire company before the next version: a slightly longer range transmitter that the reader could scan without leaving the truck. But again, the value was written on paper and input manually.

My dad changed jobs before they upgraded that one so that it saved the value to internal memory, allowing a reader to just drive past every customer’s house and read every meter without stopping. My understanding is that that version was eventually replaced with something more like the one in OP’s image, which would transmit the value back to the billing office and generate a bill automatically without needing anyone to even come within range of it or see the number at all.

Though, that said, once I became a homeowner, I’ve noticed meter readers physically opening the meter well and visually inspecting it. I don’t see any way they could possibly be actually recording the number (they don’t get nearly close enough), so I have to assume they’re using a different method to get the number and just performing visual checks to make sure the meter isn’t tampered with.

On the one hand, it seems slightly less ideal to have the same organization that develops mastodon also providing hosting for it. On the other hand, they probably have a better chance of doing it well.

Yeah, I could see it going two ways. On one hand, they could devote too much time to their for-profit arm and neglect the FOSS branch, or worse, make the .com a favored child over the .org, like WordPress does. But on the other hand, they could be like Canonical which, while they’ve made some questionable decisions with Ubuntu over the years, has pretty staunchly put open-sourced all of their improvements and opened up their improvements to everyone downstream.

And I too miss moz.soc.

Honestly, the fact that NASA and the NPS need budgets, and are subject to the whims and leverage of politicians without a shred of care for what they do, has always seemed insane to me. Sure, these organizations are literally preserving our past (in the case of the NPS) and forging our future (in the case of NASA); they’re some of the biggest and most meaningful things we reach for as a society, but they still have to serve at the whims of this idiocracy that took over after they were set up, and deal with a “looming budget shutdown” every fall.

It’s like if the warp core on the Starship Enterprise was powered by two squirrels bickering over the same nut. There’s just such a mismatch between the goals of the organizations and the people responsible for keeping them funded.

Trump insiders claim

Suuuuuuure. I’ll believe it when I…actually probably never.

I was added to a moderation list on Bluesky for following someone on Twitter and subsequently muting them, and then forgetting I had followed them when I used a tool to migrate all of my follows to Bluesky. Which is just a stupid mistake, but what about people who are following notable bigots because they’re journalists and have to keep tabs on what they say?

Being banned for upvoting someone’s comment seems similarly tunnel-visioned. If you’re upvoting their pun about the moon or their helpful cooking suggestion or their computer build tip, getting banned because you didn’t check their entire post history before upvoting is absolutely insane to me.

Guilt by association is only a thing if it’s actually association.

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