Today, a colleague of mine did a search for how to compute the location of the magnetic north pole. Basically, given a date (in the past or fairly near future) is there some function that would return the geodetic latitude and longitude of magnetic north. The search engine barfed out some LLM generated junk math related to the formulae for describing the path of the sun through the sky. We rolled our eyes and ignored it, but I can imagine these LLM search results leading people on some merry trips down various rabbit holes.

Yeah, when 7 was EOL, I experimented with Windows 10 briefly. I bought another SSD and swapped it in and installed Windows 10 on the laptop and tried it out. I found it sluggish. So I swapped the drives back and ran 7 until a couple of months ago. Ubuntu is working well. It was a pretty good laptop when I bought it; it has a discrete video processor and I've done some upgrades to the RAM and disk (like swapping the original HDD for SSD). So I'm very happy with it at this point as a linux system that I can do web and email stuff with and not worry about the OS being ancient and unsupported. I use my Windows 10 desktop for the heavier work, and dread the approach of Windows 11.

I recently wiped my old Windows 7 laptop and installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Still reasonably responsive, and I mostly use the thing for simple stuff. I cannot see myself ever "upgrading" to an OS that requires me to authenticate to some commercial provider's system to get permission to use my own computer.

As someone who has watched almost all of extant Doctor Who (not on first broadcast, since most of it came out before I was alive, but in reruns and torrents), I've seen the writing quality ebb and flow over a long time. And I would say the quality of the show is mostly dependent upon the writing. My favorite era was from about 1970-1980 (Pertwee and Baker). I distinctly remember a man wrapped in bubble wrap, spraypainted green, flailing around on the floor in the role of an intergalactic grub. And it was great! Because the story was great, and special effects, though they can help give the show a polished look, can't fix bad writing.

At some point in the 80s, they changed the show from the short serial format to the hourlong episode. The show started getting a lot more 'action' scenes, with people running and screaming. Not too long after that, it was cancelled and on hiatus for about 15 years (neglecting the Fox TV movie). And while I enjoyed a fair amount of Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith, the writing definitely hit a high somewhere in there and started going downhill again. I really wanted to like Capaldi's Doctor because I thought he had the chops to play it well, but the writing got so tedious -- Capaldi sitting on top of a tank in some medieval fortress, playing electric guitar because he was having ennui was just crap. I never watched more than the first episode of Whittaker because I couldn't get through the slog the show had become.

I watched tonight's episode. Meh. Nice to see Tennant again, and I guess they needed to do something to 'get the band back together,' but I certainly hope it gets better from here. And again, most episodes now are 30-50% people running around, dodging hails of bullets and screaming. There was an extended sequence tonight that I mostly spent in the kitchen making tea because it was just mindless action.

Yes, clearly if you are rich enough, you can build and deploy a death-trap submersible; why not a death-trap floating hamster ball? Actually, it sounds like it cost a lot less to collect this guy than to sieve the remains of the sub people off the ocean floor, so he's doing even better.

No, the GPP is on about the definition of "recession." The occurrence of recession in the US is commonly identified by two quarters of real contraction in GDP. In 2022, the US GDP contracted during the first two quarters. People, especially conservatives, who wanted to see (or at least portray) the US economy as failing because a Democrat was president at the time, jumped on two quarters of GDP contraction and announced that this constituted a recession. But that's not actually the definition of recession; it's just one simple indicator. The actual definition more complex, based upon an index of economic indicators including more than just GDP. So, recession was not officially declared because the index didn't call for it, and conservatives have tried to make this out as "changing the definition" of recession because it's more politically convenient for them in this case if recession is defined in the simple, incorrect/incomplete way.

Actually, the "recession" thing is not unlike their incorrect insistence that "vaccine" was suddenly redefined, but that's another tedious conversation.

In my experience, it's not just that. It's been a few years, but last time I moved, I went into the cable ISP office to set up new service. I asked the person at the counter whether she could tell me what the actual amount of my bill would be, and the answer was no. Which I knew going in, but I just wanted to make sure. So the cable office has a computer program that is able to exactly calculate what my bill will be after I subscribe, but somehow they are unable to run that exact same software before I subscribe? There's no unknown information in the system, except the information they withhold from me. They clearly have the ability to provide that information. The only reason I can see why they don't is because they're afraid that if they tell me the actual cost of their service at the point of sale, I might decide not to buy it. They're hoping that once I've already subscribed and get the bill, I'll succumb to a sunk cost fallacy and just go with it.

No, but the international aspect combined with the limited cooperation of foreign governments makes for a significant challenge. You're certainly right, that such perpetrators are theoretically prosecutable, but in practice it seems to be much more difficult.

Not a bad idea, until the "author" of the book turns out to be a faceless foreign corporation that vanishes out of existence overnight, reincorporating almost immediately under a different name. They already do exactly that for reasons far less serious than killing people.

It doesn't say in the summary, but last I heard, Java is now the only language in which AP CS is offered. So they should have known that much, at least.

Some years ago, I was asked by a high school teacher friend whether I might have interest in coming to the school part-time and teaching CS. I looked in to the idea, and in discussions with the principal, they wanted someone to teach AP CS if they taught any CS. So I looked at the AP CS materials. In the end, I didn't think the AP CS curriculum was well designed. Having been a (pretty good) college instructor, I have some understanding of what works and what doesn't. I thought the AP CS curriculum was a little light on learning to program and had too much emphasis on topics like ethics (i.e., hacking is bad), intellectual property rights, piracy, and other topics that seemed tilted toward industry propaganda rather than useful education.

I know the curriculum has changed a lot since I looked at it, but given how it was and how I understand it has been shaped since then, it's not surprising to me that 1/3 of the students were unable to correctly answer a question that should be pretty simple to do in Java.

Actually, it looks like triple-dipping. They get enormous government grants/subsidies to build infrastructure, then they charge their customers for building that infrastructure, and now they want to charge "big tech" companies a third time for that same cost. As you say, all while raising prices.

The way I see it, if you started with $100k, turned it into a million dollars, and paid $500k in taxes and $300k extortion to MAGA, you'd still have $200k and you'd have doubled your money. I mean, it's not ideal, but I'd rather be up $100k than nothing.

I would prefer not to top post. In fact, I didn't used to, in the old days of BBS and Usenet. Today, the Outlook web email client that we use at work makes interleaving such a trial, especially in that it provides no automatic visual cues of threading, authorship, etc., that it's hard to justify the time. Furthermore, I don't think most of my coworkers have ever deal with interleaving in email, and I suspect they'd just become confused and upset if exposed to it.

So I went and found the whole story and read it. It was enjoyable, if a bit silly. Thanks for the reference.