But my passion is clubbing baby seals…

Ok, so y’all is covered, but what about the plural plural “all y’all”?

One of the most useless coworkers I ever had got a job at Canonical. He also seemed like just the guy to be hyped to take about his high school friends despite being in his late thirties at the time.

He was one of three people I ever knew to actually get fired from that company, and that was only after he just casually stole about 20 thousand dollars of equipment from work. He returned most of it and they agreed to not call the cops just fire him.

Anyway, guess I’m just saying I don’t trust their ability to correctly select good employees. Also some of their work is amateur hour.

The main two things they got right:

• Debian testing was a better basis for a good balance of current yet workable software.
• Making it super easy to install Nvidia drivers, ultimately making then the favored choice of the Nvidia centric ai market.

Their actual technical developments have been underwhelming or actively against what I would want to see.

Look at the timestamps, the conversation is from top to bottom. So technically I guess he tried to answer, but he probably missed the answer and instead had a tone that happened to match exactly how a scammy email would sound.

If legitimate, it’s probably better that they didn’t get to successfully automating spamming the support system. Nothing screams legitimate requests like bot spamming… Don’t know the tone of his follow ups, but best to take a breath and reset their tone and try again, asking what other details aside from nickname can be used, given their steam access.

Toe hooks huh… Must be some big feet…

But even with or without hitches, their rear ends are intruding beyond their parking spots. I know that’s also a challenge with these long ass trucks, but if it were a lot designed specifically for this demographic, it should have the spots appropriate.

Knew someone who deliberately left it out because they thought it would help mitigate someone nudging into their backend.

To their credit, it actually worked once, someone got a hitch sized hole in their front bumper for a low speed collision.

On the other hand, this person also kept banging their own shin on their tow hitch… But they thought it was worth it anyway…

Ok, make i should have said single trips. Multi year expeditions involved many stops, a trip to Mars would be non stop.

I just don’t see any of that leading to a ‘scifi’ image. None of those steps would change the sheer time it takes to get to Mars in a practical way, and that’s just a deal breaker for manned flight.

On the flip side, we have had great advances in technology that makes unmanned science better, which in a way even more reduces the chances of scifi vision of ‘manned’ space flight to far places, because it just doesn’t make sense.

Well, we haven’t sent a crewed mission to the moon in a while, because we don’t really have any particular benefit from it, and even if that had continued, that wouldn’t have fit with the scifi vision of how things should be. A Mars trip is theoretically possible, but that’s a multi-year mission for a single trip. That’s a lot for what would mostly a vanity project of a manned mission compared to sending probes.

On the concept of a Venusian research station, the question would be… why? Staff would be in practical terms in no better position to study Venus than they would from Earth. All they could do would be supervise instruments in ways that could be done remotely.

The point is while advancements are possible, none that would even tickle the more tame sci-fi visions of expansion within the solar system. The larger impediments to a Mars mission are just “why” not technical impediments, unless a technical improvement could cut that trip down by 10-fold, but nothing even vaguely hints at that being a possibility.

I think repeatedly hitting the moon would have had the world shrugging, none of the sci fi was ‘hey we made it to the moon and… stayed there’.

A mission to the moon was a little under 2 weeks, a similar mission to mars would be well over two years. Sure, we could, but even the most adventurous human adventures in history have been measured in months, we’ve never displayed the will to commit to years for what would be a token mission.

Yes, the tech could be improved with more investment, but the sci-fi results of even settling mars is just unreasonably far out.

The rapid progress and then stalling is not caused by lack of investment, it’s the harsh reality of physics.

We cracked how to have machines fly like birds and then it’s low hanging fruit to achieve amazing things in atmosphere.

While exploring that, rocketry makes nearby space possible, and the moon is “right there”.

But then things are exponentially farther away, and many of them bigger gravity wells, making the trips too long and difficult to make two way trips.

In a very very short time we got heavier than air flight, rocketry, fission, mass production, and all sorts of robotics and computing. But reach breakthrough has a point where we scratch our heads trying to do better. A ton has been spent and will continue to be spent trying to crack controlled fusion. Someone that lived through us managing to split an atom for the first time to fairly widespread deployment naturally assumed fusion would be next and maybe not too long after something that would extract energy directly according to Einstein’s most famous formula.

The dotcom bubble pop took out a lot of funds and a lot of businesses. A lot of things you could buy on the Internet stopped being available online for a bit as so many vendors tanked. Ultimately the equivalent of almost everything you would have remembered came back, but there was a retreat.

They were in 2001 and then again in 2008, and then a lot of then got cleared in a big crypto bust…

It doesn’t seem to take too long for them to be back in the saddle. A key ingredient is they get to play with other people’s retirement money, and when things get too scary and they might actually be bankrupt, the government floods them with money to keep them happy.

Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).

Oh we were similarly “rudderless” when a major executive left.

Adding to the amusement of the constant panic of missing leadership, was when someone asked about simply promoting one of the interim executives to full time and just getting on with it. This was in a town hall with the CEO and the interim executive in question and in front of everyone the CEO said simply that the interim executive wasn’t competent enough to do the job.

Yeah, that explains more big screens for lower income, it doesn’t explain so much why higher income folks would eschew the big screens.

It’s funny when a big exec leaves and other execs are rushing to reassure us they are to to the challenge of dealing with such a key person departing…

We do not care at all. We have zero confidence in any of them and do not care about any of them

Today just got an email to connect with McKinsey about something… My company likes to occasionally piss money away on McKinsey and it always just sucks…

When they want to Netflix and chill, they hire live actors to perform on stage in their house.

Forget using his phone screen, all an important CEO needs is wireless earbuds