The "monthly question volume has collapsed [to] about 300" appears to be an artifact of the last category being the current month, January 2026, even though we're only in the 5th day as of this posting. (Specifically, 321 as of Jan-5 @ 10:30 AM EDT). I expect the number will be in the 2,000+ range by the end of the month, matching both recent trends and a simple extrapolation from the first few days. (Which would still be the worst full month on record.)

This. Stock options are zip until they're liquid. People learn this lesson in every startup boom.

Which isn't to say they might not be worth millions... but their valuations now are basically fiction.

It's the usual issues. If you acknowledge that homeless people are actual people who have problems which can be partially or fully solved, then you need to work on the problems.

You seemed to be confused. The goal is not to solve the problems of the homeless. The goal is to solve the problems caused by the homeless.

You know what Metrocard could do that Omny can't? Charge my commuter benefit Visa card -- you know, the one that lets you use pre-tax money to pay for the commute? I could buy Metrocard with it. Omny won't accept it. Of course when I call them they refer me to the issuer, who refers me back to Omny. Since it worked with Metrocard and it works with other transit systems, I'm pretty sure the problem is with Omny, but they don't give a shit.

Yes, but that 7mph IS about double their previous speed. You used to be able to win a race with the M14 by accident when walking briskly. Now you probably have to work at it.

Two more: drive car.

Officer, I was driving 50mph over the speed limit with my lights off at night in a stolen car with no plates, the wrong way down an Interstate highway, and as you can see by the empty bottles around me, my blood alcohol level is higher than your IQ. Why would you expect me to have a license?

It appears most of the high-precision users either detected or were informed that the NIST time was no longer healthy. NTP was affected, a bit more disturbing is that some other high precision users (but not GPS) were affected:

On Dec 21, 2025, at 2:30 PM, âjeff.sâ¦@nist.govâ(TM) via Internet-time-service Internet-time-service@list.nist.gov wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Utility power was recently restored to the NIST Boulder campus. Assessment and repair activity is in progress, but I want to give a brief status update regarding Internet Time Services on the NIST Boulder campus. As usual, status notes per-server will be manually updated here:

https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/ser...

Clocks and time transfer services operated from the NIST WWV/Ft. Collins and Gaithersburg, MD campuses are independent and were unaffected throughout.

Soon after the last notice, NIST facilities staff stationed on-site started a diesel generator held in reserve and activated a power transfer switch positioned to supply âoesecond backupâ power to the affected laboratory. The period without ac power (due to automatic âoefirst backupâ generator failure after 2 days of continuous operation) was about 2 hours. However, large battery banks kept all clocks and most measurement and distribution chains powered throughout. Additional quick action by NIST facility staff secured temperature control for the most sensitive clocks. We regained some monitoring ability showing that the disseminated UTC(NIST) signal likely did not deviate by more than 5 us (five millionths of a second) and appeared stable. Knowing this, I decided to keep the Boulder Internet Time Servers active until we lost monitoring or some other event caused the time scale deviation to increase significantly.

To put a deviation of a few microseconds in context, the NIST time scale usually performs about five thousand times better than this at the nanosecond scale by composing a special statistical average of many clocks. Such precision is important for scientific applications, telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and integrity monitoring of positioning systems. But this precision is not achievable with time transfer over the public Internet; uncertainties on the order of 1 millisecond (one thousandth of one second) are more typical due to asymmetry and fluctuations in packet delay.

NIST provides high-precision time transfer by other service arrangements; some direct fiber-optic links were affected and users will be contacted separately. However, the most popular method based on common-view time transfer using GPS satellites as âoetransfer standardsâ seamlessly transitioned to using the clocks at NISTâ(TM)s WWV/Ft. Collins campus as a reference standard. This design feature mitigated the impact to many users of the high-precision time signal.

Best wishes,

-Jeff Sherman

Not enough CO2. 2000 tons seems like a lot, but the Lake Nyos disaster which killed people within 25km was a release of 100,000 to 300,000 tons of CO2. A release of 2000 tons would be a major industrial accident but not an area-wide disaster.

And it would be pretty hypocritical to try and stop it now after we've been insisting that people who work with their hands accept the fact that technology might cost them their jobs for hundreds of years. But yes, the question of whether we are going to use the resulting productivity gains to improve the general welfare or to further empower the wealthy is a big one. I'm hoping this time we can get it right.

Lots of this anger seems to stem from the fear that AI will take the jobs of programmers and artists. And while I sympathize (it might destroy my vocation as well) for centuries we've been asking craftspeople and those who do manual labor to accept the fact that their careers can be upended in the name of economic progress. The original sabotage is (supposedly) a term that arose out of the anger about automatic looms hundreds of years ago. Now the same kind of automation that took jobs from people who worked with their hands is coming for white collar jobs and it would be pretty hypocritical to suddenly call a halt now.

But maybe this time we can actually try and make the economic benefits work for the welfare of society as a whole, e.g., by using taxes to distribute the benefits.

What your missing is the fact that lots of people use it responsibly and no one notices. If you are using it right, e.g., to help you write a bunch of documents (it helped immeasurably with the right tone and suggesting phrases for all the paperwork for my wife's tenure application) no one notices because you use it responsibly and don't just copy paste whatever it does. Exactly *because* people are so hostile, everyone using it in a responsible way doesn't get noticed and all you hear about are the idiots who copy paste it without thinking.

For instance, if you look closely you can see all sorts of great uses on youtube where suddenly channels have great animations helping explain what they are talking about (e.g. for continental drift or engine parts) but those aren't noticed and everyone complains about the slop.

You mean because it learns just like people do from our common cultural heritage?

Remember, the point of intellectual property is to incentivize creation not to allow authors to block the creation of new works. That's why it's only supposed to be a limited time and we have exceptions for sufficiently transformative uses.

Why not strip an award because the creator has the wrong political affiliation or anything else you don't like. Game awards should just evaluate the quality of the game not make political statements.

If you are really convinced generative AI makes games shitty then what's the problem? Presumably those games won't get the awards because they suck. The only reason for this policy is because you think it *will* make for good games but you want to stop its use anyway.

If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your test is, the more likely its relevance will be challenged. And the more widely your test is given, even if it passes CRA muster, the more pressure there will be to water it down to reduce racial and gender differences -- and also reduce useful signal.