I get a similar vibe from psychology. There’s a number of “experts” that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours… And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can’t be reproduced in a lab.

Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).

If it’s not a 55 gallon drum, don’t even bother bringing it.

I’ve got no strong contenders.

“Blind coding” “Script slopping” “Junk writing” “Not knowing what you’re doing, but it’s fine because you also aren’t capable of knowing what you’re doing” “Slop slapping” (as in “I had a problem with my computer, so I slop slapped a solution on it”) “Wasting GPU cycles so you can also waste CPU cycles”

In case you don’t know, C is the successor to B (which used imperial variables). There was a planned successor to C called D, which would use all unitless quantities, like they do in Fermi approximations, but it turns out those aren’t very good. That’s why we have C++ (which supports metric and imperial) instead.

If it’s all if statements and if it uses well nested logic and if it’s written in a modern language and if the number of if statements doesn’t exceed 57, it could be good. Otherwise it is overly verbose. Otherwise it is dated. Otherwise it is spaghetti code. Otherwise it should go to the regular code check routine function.

At least for federal cases, bench trials have higher acquittal rates (38%) than jury trials do (14%). That’s based on data from 2018-2022, and there may be case selection bias.

It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile

… And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.

https://youtu.be/P0hfSjJksoo At 1:15, I think that’s the mess hall on the USS Tripoli. Maybe they only use table clothes when not at war, or on holidays, or something. I didn’t find what the bare tables look like. Anyways, the trays look similarly new, based on the few shots of them that are clear.

I’m also very dubious that the problems in the US military are an inability to get things to a place. Could this be a vegan that is not being offered suitable meals, or a joke of some kind?

The restaurant didn’t murder the guy, but the reviewer requested a seat in the non-murdering section, so seating him right next to it loses a star.

… And he can do it again in 2-5 hours ;)

I made paneer, following a recipe I’ve used dozens of times before. The resulting cheese was perhaps softer than usual, and even after squeezing it and dripping for hours, the slow drip of whey continued, unabated.

I dared to try a bit. The texture was just as expected, with the familiar squeak as the cheese broke apart upon chewing, and just a hint of extra liquid. The flavor was also fine. I could have added more salt, but that’s a problem I’ve run into before, and I usually cook the paneer into something, so I would just make a saltier sauce.

I decided it would be fine to leave dripping overnight, but I thought something was unusual. It was late, and dark, and I was ready to go to sleep, so I needed an answer to the lingering doubt at the back of my mind. The bowl I hang cheese over to drip is one of my largest bowls, but I dumped out the accumulated whey anyways - then I went to bed.

In the morning, my wife woke me up in a panic, and I came downstairs to discover that the bowl had filled, then overflowed with whey. I dumped the bowl once more, cleaned up the mess, and then promptly dug a pit to bury whatever this approximation of cheese was. Maybe it will stop. Maybe it will flow down into the water table, and bacteria will digest whatever is in the Great Value whey.

In either case, I have made the important decision that the outcome is not my fault. Walmart is responsible for whatever occurs, and if I need to sell this house at some point in the future, I hope Walmart will disclose the state of affairs to the buyer, because I most certainly will not.

Three stars out of five.

I get that she’s an English major, but how is that an excuse to not know that cameras typically have a flash so they can illuminate the object being photographed?

Not safe for le-outdoors

Five Guys has 30,000 employees, so this is $50 each, if it’s split evenly.

Dick with wine? Sounds like Friday night, amirite? Err… For straight women, obviously. And gay guys. And handsome prime numbers that… Nevermind.

Powerade, “Very Real Power” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh5XrXMwB2U

This is only enough fish fingers for like… 0 children.

In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.

Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.

When I was a child, my elderly neighbor grew pears, and they were the best pears. My parents live in the same house, and the pear trees my elderly neighbor grew are still in the same spot, still alive.

The pears on those trees aren’t the same anymore. They turn meally before they get soft, and they never get sweet enough. They don’t have the same strong flavor, and they don’t bake up well in desserts.

She taught me many things about growing plants, but never anything about what she did for the pear trees. So now pears aren’t what they’re supposed to be, and the reason is lost to me.