Climate change fueled wildfires cause home and rental insurance rates to surge; State Farm solvency in question.

There! Fixed the headline. Journalism is so hard!

There are a lot of concepts in mathematics which do not have good real world analogues.

i, the _imaginary number_for figuring out roots, as one example.

I am fairly certain you cannot actually do the mathematics to predict or approximate the size of an atom or subatomic particle without using complex algebra involving i.

It’s been a while since I watched the entire series Leonard Susskind has up on youtube explaining the basics of the actual math for quantum mechanics, but yeah I am fairly sure it involves complex numbers.

The explanation I’ve seen is that … is notation for something that can be otherwise represented as sums of infinite series.

In the case of 0.999…, it can be shown to converge toward 1 with the convergence rule for geometric series.

If |r| < 1, then:

ar + ar² + ar³ + … = ar / (1 - r)

Thus:

0.999… = 9(1/10) + 9(1/10)² + 9(1/10)³ + …

= 9(1/10) / (1 - 1/10)

= (9/10) / (9/10)

= 1

Just for fun, let’s try 0.424242…

0.424242… = 42(1/100) + 42(1/100)² + 42(1/100)³

= 42(1/100) / (1 - 1/100)

= (42/100) / (99/100)

= 42/99

= 0.424242…

So there you go, nothing gained from that other than seeing that 0.999… is distinct from other known patterns of repeating numbers after the decimal point.

Yep, thats my impression as well so far.

Trump is confidently blazing through (what should be) obvious lies, while Biden is mumbling and forgetting what he is trying to say half way through saying it.

I’m from the wet side of the PNW and we have all of those as well, excepting possibly northern widows, I’ve not heard of those.

I’ve spent weeks in cabins and lived in houses and apartments all over WA.

Every single time I have ever seen a spider in a house or apartment, its been something that is totally harmless to humans.

Out in the boonies? Sure, thats where you’ll actually run into some dangerous things.

That being said, I’ve never lived in MN, perhaps dangerous spiders are a more serious threat in urban/suburban areas, and yeah, climate change fucks up everything.

Something absolutely absurd started happening a few years ago, right in the middle of Seattle, like 2 blocks from a main road:

Coyotes.

I’ve seen coyotes out in the foothills occasionally, on trails far from cities, in the brush on the east side of the state.

But… basically that heat wave a few years back, and wildfires and droughts managed to drive a population of coyotes into residential areas of Seattle, likely hunting the rabbits.

That was pretty stunning to me.

RIP sandy buddy.

Unless I am mistaken, aren’t basically every kind of Tarantula you can keep as a pet non venomous?

I’m the kind of person that’ll take basically any kind of spider save a black widow and just put it outside while my gf is screaming at 115db to murder it and will then be angry with me for 3 days that I didn’t.

Poor tarantula.

Oh right, this ‘politician’ is an amazing argument for lowering housing costs such that people can afford studios instead of living with crazy ‘main character’ people like this.

All things are possible through Christ lol

Its generally more up to date with newer standards and such than Debian, but it is by no means bleeding edge.

Bleeding edge is generally bad unless you really need some specific thing for a specific reason.

If your whole set up is bleeding edge then congrats, you are a basically alpha testing an OS.

Yeah, Arch is not a great choice.

I would suggest PopOS! or Nobara.

Or just good ole reliable Debian.

Ya’ll need God.

Posting this from TempleOS

I’ve found Krita to be a less clumsy way to edit images than GIMP, been using it that way for years.

Yes, GIMP is powerful when used correctly, but Krita is far closer to Photoshop in terms of UI and out of the box features.

Obligatory: Do people not know that Krita exists?

Hold on , I’ll edit this when I find a link.

Edit:

Ok, so here is OpenAI wanting to make… well basically it seems to want to have not only an AI agent in a text support chatbox telling you how to fix a problem…

…but give it the ability to completely take over your computer and just do it for you, presumably via Remote Assistance and whatever the Mac equivalent is.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/openai-plans-chatgpt-supersmart-assistant-135029243.html?guccounter=1

No way this could go wrong and lead to fake support sites just fucking writing a batch file and executing it in the blink of an eye.

Then we’ve got both Zoom and Otter who yes, straight up, want to build AI powered avatars, based on each employee/user and replace the human entirely in meetings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/zoom-s-ceo-wants-a-manipulatable-ai-avatar-of-you-to-attend-meetings-instead/ar-BB1nGO5m

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/could-ai-personas-attend-your-work-meetings-for-you-one-tech-ceo-says-yes-and-by-the-end-of-the-year/articleshow/107797330.cms

Fuck the infinite paper clip making machine, we are intentionally trying to make the infinite meeting machine.

Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.

Ive been calling this the reverse turing test:

Can you tell that a known human being is not an ‘AI’ chatbot, based on text correspondence?

Apparently we are now just going to have AI simulacra of ourselves date each other on dating apps and meet with each other on zoom.

The meeting thing in particular is so fucking insane.

Problem: Meetings waste time and accomplish nothing!

Solution: Don’t hire or train competent people, instead, automate meetings, the transcripts of which will presumably still have to be read, and will likely not make any sense, thus necessitating more meetings.

The goal of technological civilization apparently truly is to create maximum misery via maximizing meetings.

Call and tell them you found the Golden Tablets.

Sure!

https://m.youtube.com/@tommycampbell

I am on mobile but the url should fix itself.

Another running bit he does is…

Ok, so he calls it a ‘special version’ of Lauren Boebert’s autobiography.

I think what this means its that the only editorializing is that he adds ‘It was like a fairy tale.’ at the end of all of the maybe couple of pages he reads, which presumably would not actually be in the actual book.

But you see, I cannot actually tell how much of the rest of what he is reading is direct from the book and hammed up for effect.

She comes across as having the writing ability of maybe an 8th grader… and the stories are so absolutely absurd… but the problem is that Lauren Boebert is so fucking absurd, I cannot reliably draw a line between what Boebert has written, and what Campbell is hamming up.

Its … its like reading a diary of the villain from mean girls, except she’s a hick, regularly does crimes, has the trashiest life imaginable, she has infinite self confidence and is somehow self aware but also not self aware at the same time.

This would happen in a just world.

It won’t though.

Reminds me of the recent millionaire guy who got lambasted on YT (i think his actual posts were on TikTok?).

Guys, I am going to lock up my money, my phone have no contacts and go to a new city and start from nothing and earn a million dollars in 30 or 90 days or something.

Whoah big surprise, a few weeks in he has to call the whole thing off for health reasons.

OMG he got robbed? Lost his paper work and thus couldn’t get the right aid? The shelters are full? Sleeping outside in a city is extremely dangerous and unhealthy? Your hygiene suffers? No one talks to you or treats you like a human being?

In a just world we’d put the income tax levels back to around FDR levels and thus be able to actually fund social programs and eliminate a great deal of the wealthy’s massive over representation in politics.

Instead it looks like we will be making a b-line toward theocratic corporatocracy.

Blargh.

Edit: Income and Corporate tax levels.

Alex, I’ll be forgoing your 3 options and asking instead “What is an obviously still using cocaine addict?”

He might have graduated from the rock to the powder, but at this rate he’ll either be incarcerated or back to the rock soon.