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"microdose cocaine"

I like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago.

It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.


That must be what inspired them to approach San Francisco's Central Subway in a similar fashion!


We can't see software.

You can see if a motherboard has twice the necessary components, or if a robot arm just looks wrong, but if your algorithm to process 1000 records takes a thousand times longer than it should (but still finishes in 100 milliseconds) no one notices.


Until it has to process stuff in real-time that is.

A robot arm is exactly the place you see software acting up. If your algorithm is consistently slow it's fine, the moment it's inconsistent things dont line up and problems happen.


I just got back from backwoods camping, each site has a wooden chest/thunderbox/toilet out in the open woods near the site. I'm not sure if the thunder is the heavy wooden lid closing or the noises that come from it. Some are out of sight of the campsite but ours was only 75ft away, fortunately the lid blocked your view if it was in use.


I could be wrong, but I don't think that is the thunder the "thunder clappers" was named after.


Wikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...


The dash in the spelling is unusual (according to books.google), also different languages tell different stories

Russian - looks like a hot topic at the start of WW2 :

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D0%B3%D1%83%D...

German:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Guttapercha&ye...


At some point we started calling it latex instead. There's still plenty of stuff made from natural latex. The harvesting of latex from Hevea brasiliensis is almost exactly the same as harvesting latex from Palaquium gutta (gutta-percha)

EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm


Do you REALLY believe that there was a hundred-fold spike in the use of the term gutta-percha in the 5 years between 1869 and 1874, or would you willing to consider that you are looking at spurious data?


Consider a similar new material/technology development --- certainly from 1969--1974 there was presumably a similar spike in the use of the word "computer", which was similarly transformative.


LLM's can do anything, but the decision tree for what you can do in life is almost infinite. LLM's still need a coherent designer to make progress towards a goal.


LLMs can do small things well, but you must use small parts to form big picture.


The societal impact of that UI design decision will be interesting to watch play out. People are so used to trusting the first Google search result that it now being AI that's sometimes wrong or hallucinated.


But as they stated, Google has already had ads inline with the search results, and it's been like that for well over a decade. (Long ago, ads used to only be on the sidebar)

Frankly, the AI section at the top seems like something Google would have been very reluctant to add since it saves the user from scrolling through the ad listings, and it was only added to compete with newer AI search services.


The bad guys are driving their train when a cop train shows up in the mirrors behind their train.

Cop walks up to the window and asks for their license and registration please. Another shootout occurs followed by a multi-track multi-train police chase, but everyone needs to stay on their respective train tracks.


Then things go south. I mean really south, heading to the Mexican border.

On a little platform on wheels, with a see-saw type manual propulsion. And the police are waving their billy clubs and gaining on you!



That looked very British. Apparently it was made for an advert for a 1980s high speed train.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_37


Apparently the trick for roller coasters is to keep the passengers hearts in the same plane so they don't perceive the ride as jerky.


Unless you are in Poland; then you need to keep the Poles in the right-hand plane or it will be unstable.


I thought the Poles needed to be either all on the left-hand plane, or within the unit disk, for stability? (I haven't had my coffee yet, so maybe I'm remembering wrong).

Either way, I loved the joke. Thank you!


You are right, I wrote that before having my coffee...


I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.


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