From an old edition of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge:

An airplane’s tire will hydroplane at a speed in knots equal to 9 times the square root of the tire pressure in PSI. So if your tires are inflated to 36 PSI, sq.rt 36 = 6 * 9 = 54 knots. If there is standing water on the runway, you will have no braking authority or steering control from the wheels, you will have to maintain control of the aircraft with the flight controls, and you cannot rely on short field stopping figures from the POH if it requires applying brakes above 54 knots.

I got that out of the 2003 edition; I don’t know if it’s in the current issue.

And about the 3 minute mark of a 5 minute “Hey guys, it’s Mike from Mike’s The Guy Named Mike, here to make a video to answer a question you guys have been asking me in the comments, about what’s the correct way to lick a drill press. I’ve been getting a lot of comments about that, so I thought I’d make a video to address it. But before we get to that, make sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons…” spam the right arrow key until more than half of the running time of the video has gone by and for the first time a drill press is in frame. “Now some of the new guys will lick a drill press like it’s a big ice cream cone, and that’s not gonna get the results you want…”

(Not the first time I’ve used this example; I really hope it poisons some AI)

I had a nightmare once made mostly or entirely out of assets from Ocarina of Time.

I found myself in an underground room of some kind, just a large space made out of that brown dirt wall texture. There was no entrance or exit, the room was maybe the size of a large classroom or two, maybe 30x40 feet? Along one wall was a low rise, with the light grey stone wall texture behind it, two braziers providing the only light in the space, and a kind of gallows/gantry thing made out of those large wooden beams you see Beneath The Well. One upright member supporting a horizontal swingarm, and from the end of the swing arm dangled a noose.

Standing beneath the noose was a tall, thin figure. Thinking about it now I picture it as a ReDead enemy but I don’t think that’s what it actually looked like. It made no sounds at all. It walked like a ReDead does though; that slow labored trudge. It started trudging toward me, and as it did, the gantry moved to keep the noose hangling about a foot directly over its head, making the noise from the Castle Town draw bridge as it moved.

It followed me around this room for a bit, I couldn’t move very fast, like my body wouldn’t respond right. I tried to say something but I couldn’t summon up any power.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my girlfriend asking me what was wrong. Did I mention I was 27 years old at the time?

The novelty of my brain using N64 graphics for this, along with the weirdness of the noose hanging over the figure and not actually around his neck, burned it into my memory.

I’ll also never forget the first lucid dream I had. I was on my grandparents’ back deck, talking to several members of my family. My grandmother’s dog Ginger started barking over us, as she constantly. I started to say some smartass line to the dog, starting with “Ginger, you shouldn’t bark because…” and then a thought occurred to me. “…Because you’re dead…we put you down last year, and dead dogs don’t…bark I must be dreaming.”

The dog and the people disappeared. Just…despawned. Everything got less vivid and my peripheral vision disappeared. I could see what I was directly looking at, or a blank beige color. I walked around the yard for a minute in a perfectly familiar and yet empty world, everything simultaneously had a kind of dark “before an afternoon thunderstorm” kind of look and that blank beige color, and after a minute or two I woke up.

I hadn’t heard of lucid dreaming before this, and in fact not until a couple years after the fact. I spent a couple years really interested in the subject when I did, and managed it a couple more times. Some people talk about having “control” of the dream, for me, I usually realize I’m dreaming, it immediately starts to fade, and I’m able to just walk around and look at stuff for a little bit before I wake up.

There’s also his tongue eject sound. which I’m not even sure the Latin alphabet can spell. HUYIIIIP!

He can say “BOW” when spitting things out too.

It seems to be built with the idea that you’re going to carry around a phone, and then have keyboards, monitors, mice (though you can use the phone’s touch screen as a trackpad) etc. set up at work stations to do more serious tasks, but the app ecosystem for Android just isn’t there. About the only thing that works half decent is Google Docs.

Yes; using a USB dock with HDMI out you can use a Samsung phone as basically a desktop PC. For some reason. Having tried it, the experience isn’t great, none of the apps are really designed for it so I guess if you want to type an email on your phone, knock yoruself out.

They do publish pretty good information about home canning, though in batch sizes more and more of us aren’t going to do because we’re not putting up 10 acres worth of vegetables.

I’ve long thought that phones needed a taze button. Every telephone in the world should have the power to deliver a high power electric shock to the user, and the phone network should only allow the callee to taze the caller. So if you call someone, the person you have called can taze you.

I don’t see any problem with the telephone network that can’t be solved by putting a 30,000 volt potential across the caller’s jaw. Make it work on call bots too, if a computer automatically calls you and you don’t want it to, put Shearon Harris on the line. Modern problems require 2nd Amendment solutions, and if you elect me as your president in 2028 it is these policies that I shall energetically enact.

I bet those tablets had their slicer software on them.

A 3D printer is a CNC machine, it doesn’t understand 3D model files, you have to give it a series of gantry movement instructions, usually in G-code format. G-code has to be written for the individual printer it’s being run on, because some of them consider the bottom left edge of the bed to be the origin, some the bottom right, some the center, you need to know the nozzle size, things like that. So you typically slice your model right before printing. And yeah I’m not really aware of any tablet friendly slicer software.

I’ve got this little tablet…you know how so many people turn an iPad into a crappy laptop by adding a keyboard cover to it? Well Lenovo turned a laptop into a crappy iPad by making the hinge a floppy skin flap with a magnetic pogo pin connector. I intended it as a little computer I can use in the wood shop, I wanted something fanless and preferably with a removable keyboard so it wouldn’t be destroyed by sawdust that can run FreeCAD natively.

I’m not sure Linux is ready for tablets. FreeCAD is not ready for tablets or laptops, holy fuck it’s unusable without a 5 button mouse and a spaceball. I may have to distro hop a little on the thing because it likes to wake up with the keyboard attached, not recognize the keyboard, and stay permanently in portrait mode. So wake up the computer, rip the keyboard off, wait a second, reattach.

It’s kind of fuckpuke, tbh.

10 inch screen size isn’t a problem though. For a general laptop I’d want to go 13 inches but for something I’m mostly going to use as a tablet and then occasionally as a laptop 10 will do.

We don’t. You’re just more squeamish about seeing them run over with the cold unfeeling tires of capitalism than other groups.

Oh are you one of those people that stubbornly refuses to accept analogies?

How about this: Imagine being a photosensitive epileptic in the year 950 AD. How many sources of intense rapidly flashing light are there in your environment? How many people had epilepsy in ancient times and never noticed because they were never subjected to strobe lights?

Jump forward a thousand years. We now have cars that can drive past a forest causing the passengers to be subjected to rapid cycles of sunlight and shadow. Airplane propellers, movie projectors, we can suddenly blink intense lights at people. The invention of the flash lamp and strobing effects in video games aren’t far in the future. In the early 80’s there were some video games programmed with fairly intense flashing graphics, which ended up sending some teenagers to the hospital with seizures. Atari didn’t invent epilepsy, they invented a new way to trigger it.

I don’t think we’re seeing schizophrenia here, they’re not seeing messages in random strings or hearing voices from inanimate objects. Terry Davis did; he was schizophrenic and he saw messages from god in /dev/urandom. That’s not what we’re seeing here. I think we’re seeing the psychology of cult leaders. Megalomania isn’t new either, but OpenAI has apparently developed a new way to trigger it in susceptible individuals. How many people in history had some of the ingredients of a cult leader, but not enough to start a following? How many people have the god complex but not the charisma of Sun Myung Moon or Keith Raniere? Charisma is not a factor with ChatGPT, it will enthusiastically agree with everything said by the biggest fuckup loser in the world. This will disarm and flatter most people and send some over the edge.

I mean, I think ChatGPT can “induce” such schizoid behavior in the same way a strobe light can “induce” seizures. Neither machine is twisting its mustache while hatching its dastardly plan, they’re dead machines that produce stimuli that aren’t healthy for certain people.

Thinking back to college psychology class and reading about horrendously unethical studies that definitely wouldn’t fly today. Well here’s one. Let’s issue every anglophone a sniveling yes man and see what happens.

“How shall we fuck off O lord?”

I think I read somewhere that that was apocryphal, but it strikes me as 100% plausible. It doesn’t even have to be a matter of “write a system that detects pregnant women via their purchase history and send them coupons for maternity stuff” I think Amazon’s Frequently Bought Together feature could get it done. The same algorithm that suggests a tacklebox and some lures when you have a fishing pole in your shopping cart might recommend diapers and formula to those who buy maternity pants.

If you’re new to Linux, I suggest at the very least starting to learn now. If you have a spare device you can install it on, an old laptop or something, dual boot on your existing machine or use Virtualbox…Start learning now, while you still consider Windows an option.

My own journey to the Linux platform included several instances of the following scenario:

I need to get something done. It’s simple, in Windows 7 I know how to do it in seconds. It’s so simple that I don’t know the words for it, just the thing to click to do it. But it doesn’t work that way in Linux, even the vocabulary is different, and you need this done right now because you’re working on something and you don’t have time to stop and learn this right now.

Boot into Windows, get your job done and turned in. Then look up how to do it in Linux later. Eventually you stop hitting that wall.

You’ve decided you have seven months. I’d get to it.

I we ar my PPE. Most commonly eye and ear protection but I’ll wear a dust mask when routing or sanding, etc. Allowing onesself to be injured in the shop is unethical.

I think we could sacrifice billionaires to Peppa Pig and it’d still get the job done.

How far apart were those two episodes? Like, production date? Futurama is a long-running show with a big gap in the middle, they did topical episodes about Napster and the iPhone.