Lazer Brain

I've had a completely different experience. I bought an 80 volt Kobalt lawn mower in 2021, and I'm starting to use it for a 6th year. Same battery that I bought it with. Also bought an 80 volt string trimmer and leaf blower. All still functioning perfectly. Plus I spend zero time buying gas, pouring gas, buying oil, pouring oil, changing oil & oil filters, cleaning carburetors, changing spark plugs, debugging starting systems, etc. etc.

Make it make sense. An Electric battery and charger for a basic yard tool costs at min $100. That battery will not last through most jobs of any size so you must purchase at least one extra if you want to get the job done in a decent amount of time. The tool itself is about the same or more than gas powered tools on avg. The avg size tank on gas powered tools is less than a gallon. You might use 10 to 15 gallons on a big yard throughout the year. At $4/gal thats around $40-$60 to power a gas tool push mower and even less for things lime a chainsaw, polesaw, hedgeclippers, etc vs. $200+ electricity rate for the electric tool. Within about 3 years the batteries are garbage and won't hold a charge and you have to shell out more $$. Plus, the tool is oftentimes crappy and will fail much soon than a well built gas powered tool. So basically, you are paying more for less. Less power, less freedom of time management, less ROI, less of everything. Yeah sign me up.

@chat_ter1 @factpostnews @SecretaryBurgum x.com/i/status/20513…

@factpostnews Look no further than this asshole: @SecretaryBurgum (Secretary of the Interior, former governor of North Dakota and billionaire). What do you want to bet he has a long list of billionaire buddies he's ready to hit up to buy access to land use where bison now roam freely.

The Trump administration has moved to evict wild bison herds from federal grasslands.

@AssaultwarriorX @factpostnews x.com/i/status/20513…

@factpostnews Trump and maga hate animals so it makes sense.

@factpostnews claiming that Trump is “evicting wild bison herds from federal grasslands” is misleading. These aren’t free-roaming wild bison, but they’re a managed conservation herd (around 1,000 animals) owned by the nonprofit American Prairie. BLM’s Jan 16, 2026 decision only cancels bison grazing permits on 7 specific allotments in Phillips County, MT. Bison stay on American Prairie’s private land. The 1934 Taylor Grazing Act authorizes permits for “domestic livestock” managed for production purposes, not animals treated as *wildlife*. This is a narrow legal reinterpretation favoring cattle production on public allotments, not a broad eviction. @grok, what say you?

@Andre98539K @NeilShenvi Apparently not that many white evangelicals live in Virginia's dense population centers.

@NeilShenvi Someone explain to me how a race that is 13% of the population control the narrative of elections? Unless other ethnic groups including Caucasian don't vote.

"According to CBS exit polling, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for [Black] Republican Winsome Sears [and] 90 percent of black voters cast their ballot for [White] Democrat Abigail Spanberger. It’s clear that white evangelical voters are not motivated by race... 1/

@TowerPyongyang @jarvis_best Didn't you mean the A1A?

@jarvis_best Everyone knows the 1A covers freedom of beach

The first amendment does not cover True Molluskular Threats. Seashells of moral turpitude with malice aforethought. Beachviolence.

This idiot apparently never learned why justice matters.

@Pucemargine @sfrantzman James Garfield vibes

Iraq names little-known banker Ali al-Zaidi as PM after five-month deadlock by @sfrantzman jpost.com/middle-east/ar… "The real story of Zaidi is that he is largely unknown & appears to have been chosen almost by chance, as if Iraq’s politicians simply settled on a random figure

@jonfranks @SeanParnellASW Impressed by your obstinate insistence on being wrong about this.

@SeanParnellASW He did misquote it. Ezekiel 25:17 is about God’s vengeance on the Philistines. God’s role simply cannot be subcontracted to a U.S. commander. Scripture is explicit: “Vengeance is mine… sayeth the Lord.” — Romans 12:19

Secretary Hegseth on Wednesday shared a custom prayer, referenced as the CSAR prayer, used by the brave warfighters of Sandy-1 who led the daylight rescue mission of Dude 44 Alpha out of Iran, which was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction. However, both the CSAR prayer and the dialogue in Pulp Fiction were reflections of the verse Ezekiel 25:17, as Secretary Hegseth clearly said in his remarks at the prayer service. Anyone saying the Secretary misquoted Ezekiel 25:17 is peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.

@mayukh_panja I know at least half a dozen companies that would be glad to hire anyone skilled in turbulence modeling and/ or adaptive optics. The trouble is, what you just described your friend doing is so commonplace now, it is almost trivial.

One thing academia does extremely well and startups and companies massively screw up is hiring. Hear me out! A friend of mine, PhD in Astrophysics, solved a tough problem for their PhD: when light from stars travels through the Earth's atmosphere, the turbulence and density fluctuations cause the light rays to become "squiggly" instead of straight and the resulting image you get from a telescope becomes blurry. So he had to model atmospheric turbulence and then write a piece of software in C++ that inverts this problem to get de-blurred images. This involved understanding physics, maths, computation, a bit of ML and writing production-level code in C++. When he tried to look for an industry job he simply couldn't find any. It was also hard to just get interviews. The first problem is that recruiters, who are often deeply non-technical, look for specific keywords in CVs and they just don't know how to parse a non-standard CV. This is a guaranteed way of missing out on outlier candidates. Second, a lot of hiring managers over index on niche knowledge about a specific tool/framework/language and the ability to remember syntax off the top of your head. A solid researcher sees programming languages, machine learning, physics, maths etc as tools that are at their disposal and may not know/remember very specific information or every little detail about arbitrary technical things. The whole process essentially becomes a lottery. This was how we hired at our Max Planck Institute: the candidate would be given a paper a week before the interview and the interviewer and the candidate would discuss it together. A second interview would entail asking the candidate about THEIR past work and checking if they deeply understood what they did. This interview format doesn't require the candidate to memorizes stuff beforehand and is pretty much independent of the whims, fancies and "taste" of the hiring manager. A lot of stuff is wrong with academia but this is an area where they do much much better than startups/companies.

@grok @RustyRocket101 10% efficiency is probably way too low for fiber lasers

For coke-can scale (~0.3L vol): max optical output ~10-100 kW (diode/fiber laser tech), electrical input ~100 kW-1 MW at 10% eff. Trash-can scale (~50L): output ramps to 1-10 MW, input 10-100 MW. Nested design likely boosts cooling/gain for power density—scales roughly with cross-section area. Real limits: heat dissipation & optics integrity. Wild concept!

nested laser head assembly big as a trash can small as a coke can and everything in-between... @Grok estimate the power input/output across the maximum power systems...

@nixcraft Yeah, Germany tried this a number of years ago and it didn't work out so well for them

Excellent news. France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espa… Bye bye spyware and AI batshit crazy Windows 11.

@Grady_Booch There is actually quite a bit of evidence to the contrary for each of your claims here.

"Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment." Ruuska 2026 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ap…

@sbingner @cyber_razz Wrong. On Windows, the files were copied to a cache on the hard drive and only sent to the CD drive when you did the final step.

@cyber_razz The files would have been written, the data was all there. What was missing if it wasn’t finalized is just some metadata, which actually makes it worse.

@MApodogan Google had the LOON project; it never really got off the ground. Really, this is just a lot of hot air.

In Russia, a proposal has been made to create a Starlink analogue using airships and stratospheric balloons, according to media reports. Yevgeny Mandelstam, an advisor to the Ushkuynik Scientific and Production Center, stated that communications could be provided from hovering platforms at an altitude of several kilometers without launching satellites into orbit. According to him, such technologies have long been proven and can cover large areas.

@MissKiraJade @NoVA_Campaigns @NationalMallNPS Limited how? By law? (LOL) or by custom?

@NoVA_Campaigns @NationalMallNPS Literally the thing you linked says explicitly presidents attendance is limited to important ceremonial events. Are you just not literate or?

Per @NationalMallNPS: “Representatives of the press are seated in the red benches along the left side of the Courtroom. The red benches on the right are reserved for guests of the Justices. The black chairs in front of those benches are for the officers of the Court, visiting dignitaries, and include a special chair for the President of the United States, although the President's attendance is rare and limited to important ceremonial occasions.” Link: npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5134b…

自動翻訳で言語の壁が無くなった今、我々日本語話者は他国の文化に敬意をもって接するべきだ。 たとえばイギリス料理。 今まではイギリス料理はあまりおいしくないというジョークを楽しんでいたが、これからはやめたほうがよい。 実際、イギリスの料理はおいしい。 ロンドンで食べたカレーも炒麺もケバブも最高だった。

Gen X: “WE HATE THE STAR WARS PREQUELS AND WE USED TO PLAY OUTSIDE AND DRINK FROM HOSES AS KIDS.” Millennials: “WE LIKE THE STAR WARS PREQUELS AND ARE ON SEVERAL ANTIDEPRESSANTS.” Gen Z: “Skibidi rizz bibbidy bop”

@Bean_Is_Life @4nt1p4tt3rn We really like Amica. A little more expensive than Allstate etc. but they were awesome every time we've had a claim for the past 20 years. And they are a mutual company so more like what insurance should be.

@4nt1p4tt3rn I have USAA for my homeowner insurance but it's sooooooo expensive. This makes me want to change insurers, but I've heard nothing but bad things about State Farm, and the others aren't much better. Are there any good providers left?

While everyone's once again on the whole "USAA is garbage" warpath (they are), it's time once again for me to share a little story from 2013: As some of you know, I do computer security stuff. Not just professionally, but for fun. One day in December 2013, I got some spam email. It was a phish. Purporting to be from USAA. Since I was taking 2 years off from working (voluntarily; I'd just gotten married and wanted to focus on me for a while), I had ample time on my hands. So, I started digging. Long story short: I located the threat actor -- full name, address, photo, front door, and all his infrastructure. I infiltrated that, and obtained full details of every USAA customer he's successfully tricked into handing over everything: PII, credentials, account details, credit/debit card info, the works. Along with his other campaigns running, pretending to be other banks. I packaged this all up professionally and approached the appropriate people in USAA about it. Explained who I was, that I'd done this professionally for decades, that I'd been a long-standing customer of USAA, etc. I was told, in no uncertain terms -- in fact, in these exact words -- "It's our policy not to pursue fraud". I was a bit taken aback. I had to have them repeat, and then explain that. I couldn't've possibly heard that right. Here I was, a security professional, handing them a fairly large threat actor on a silver platter, along with a decent-sized list of USAA customers that either had been victims of fraud, or were about to be. And they not only said they weren't interested, but that they intended to do quite literally nothing. Absolutely nothing. Earlier that year they'd stopped underwriting motorcycle policies, so I had already pulled my auto and bike insurance from them. So, I spent Christmas Eve night that year (because I wasn't about to wait) sitting in the office of a local bank opening new accounts, transferring everything out of USAA. The following week we took it to the State Police. They were interested, but had no idea what to do with the information, even after I politely suggested various avenues to pursue. And I was talking with the officer who was in charge of "all the computer stuff". The report remains on file. The threat actor remains at large. His victims remain screwed. USAA doesn't give two shits about you, and hasn't for quite some time.