Michael C. Grant

Verifying myself: I am mcg on Keybase.io. 19t-ViWWHHCyM7IFYCpmxETgy9gqdF4XABVK / keybase.io/mcg/sigs/19t-V…

@BobMurphyEcon I have, and I would.

I understand why everyone is dunking on Richard Dawkins, but fairness compels me to speak up: If you took a complex project you were working on, uploaded it to Claude, and had a 3-day conversation about it, you wouldn't be making fun of Dawkins for saying it's conscious.

@Austen wait, even after I left?

How is everyone in Austin so fit and hot?

@pez1963 @NashvilleScene Are you suggesting it hasn't already done so? I mean there has been a fair bit of gentrification in the last 20 years.

@NashvilleScene Not happy with this the area is going to lose its soul

Following a $12 million sale, a replacement building is planned for the site of 12 South Taproom & Grill — with future tenants expected to be national clothing retailers Ralph Lauren and Alo. nashvillescene.com/food_drink/bit…

@esrtweet I'm feeling this pain right now... trying to decide between adding an extra docker image in my CI so I can build with a sufficiently old version of glibc and a musl static build ... I'd prefer musl but it may not be possible due to dependency issues... argh

planefag, I'm not excusing the attitude of the guy who pissed you off. But there is an explanation for it, and I'm going to put on my Mister Open Source hat and lay it on you. The real reason there aren't prominent links to downloadable binaries on forge sites like GitHub is that in open-source land there is no such thing as a truly portable binary. Windows and Mac make binary distribution easy by being limited to a single hardware platform and a single ABI - application binary interface.. (The assertion I just made can be quibbled with at the edges. I will be unkind to anyone who attempts this.) An application binary interface is a set of conventions for how you decorate your binary so the operating system's program loader knows what to do with it, and how you write traps from your binary to call operating system services. Windows and Mac have, effectively, just one ABI each. So you can generate one binary for, say, Windows, attach it to a download link, and Windows users will generally not come back screaming for your blood because it fails to work in some obscure way. (Again, this statement can be quibbled with, but see this whacking great truncheon in my hand? Just don't.) There is no such grace in open-source land. There are a whole bunch of complicated historical reasons for this, starting with the fact that Linux runs on more different hardware architectures, and continuing with the fact that Linux isn't the only game in town (there are the BSDs), and continuing into technical minutiae that would make your head hurt, and continuing further into technical minutiae that make *my* head hurt. But what this actually means is that if you want to provide binaries and not get sperg-screamed at, you can't just provide one. You'd have to provide many, and no matter how comprehensive you try to be somebody is going to be disgruntled because you didn't cover their corner case. This is not a cost-free proposition. For each different kind of binary you provide, you need to cross-compile your source code in a different environment, many of them posted on distributions and hardware platforms you don't have routine access to. So people almost never do it at all. Because most projects don't do this, sites like GitHub don't see any demand push to make binary download links really accessible. Instead, the problem is normally handled at a different level. Your distribution maker keeps huge sets of compiled binaries lightly hidden inside of installable packages, tuned for the ABI of that single distribution. Your package manager hides from you the packages for everything but your hardware architecture The person who pissed you off was rude, but he wasn't exactly wrong about the objective facts. What you want isn't practically possible. Instead of being annoyed because GitHub doesn't feature binary-download links, search for that software using your package manager. Sometimes you won't find it. That's when you have to download source bust out a compiler. Sorry, but that's the way it is. We're trying as hard as we can - really, we are. But the complicated shape of the terrain constrains what we can achieve.

@Blutch88 @J_Von_Random @ReviewsPossum (regardless I'm just joshing anyway)

@michael_c_grant @J_Von_Random @ReviewsPossum The unit used by the people who sent m'en on the moon.

It's nearly impossible to reach the Sun because you inherit the Earth's inertia when you leave Earth. This means you're going at least as fast as the Earth's orbital velocity, which is 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour), so you need to slow down. In the frictionless vacuum of space, it takes just as much energy to decelerate as it does to accelerate, so it takes the same amount of fuel to go from 67,000 MPH to zero as it does to go from zero to 67,000. NASA managed to get the Parker Solar Probe to the Sun by using using gravity from Venus to "tug" it in the direction opposite of Earth's orbit to slow it down. It took seven passes by Venus to accomplish this, orbiting the Sun 24 times. The whole process took seven years. It still didn't really reach the Sun, but now has a highly irregular orbit in which it passes close (in astronomical terms), and the Sun's gravity accelerates it so much that it gets flung back out to the orbital distance of Venus by the slingshot effect before returning. During those close passes, it becomes the fastest man-made object ever made, reaching speeds of 430,000 MPH (692,000 KPH).

@Blutch88 @J_Von_Random @ReviewsPossum Yes and no (but mostly yes): ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myt…

@J_Von_Random @ReviewsPossum Interesting. I get it, but at least mph and kph are scales that any automobile driver is familiar with. 108,000 kph -> about 1000 times faster than I might typically drive on the freeway!

@michael_c_grant @ReviewsPossum Notice that I also list km/h as a retard number here.

@J_Von_Random @ReviewsPossum

@ReviewsPossum > 67,000 miles per hour (108,000 kilometers per hour) What are these retard numbers? Use km/s like a civilized person.

@EdWiley I would not question that

@EdWiley It would be difficult for me to eat any dish that makes that sound, I concede

FAFSA is the worst acronym to pronounce. There is none worse. It sounds like a plate of pulled pork.

@dustyslay I'm inclined to agree, but the thing is I never have an excuse to be stuck there for long enough for it to matter. What I'm really interested in are the best *hub* airports. The places I'm likely to fly *through*.

I don’t know who did this study, but the Nashville airport is actually really good. Good food, good coffee and live music.

@timsoret I think there's a spectrum of possibilities. For instance, if the number of people that had to pick blue was 1, that's the logical choice. If 100% of people had to pick blue to save the blue folks, it's necessary to pick red. There's a threshold in there somewhere.

Assuming no possible coordination: If everybody was rational, we would all individually pick red & be safe without needing coordination, trusting that the sum of individual interests would lead to the most optimized outcome. Except that many humans are irrational & dogmatic, and driven by idealistic / empathetic concerns, would pick blue, even if that requires coordination which is not guaranteed & which puts them as risk. Knowing this, even if you’re initially inclined to vote red, the actual moral choice, to avoid the death of those willingly putting their lives at risk, is to vote blue to maximize the chances of saving everybody. In short, if you know that others are not perfectly rational agents, to save them you have to go along with their irrationality, which is counter intuitive.

@ChrisMurphyCT you cannot be serious.

awesome

@cultra @JEBistline How many people to the left of that group started out there?

With the Boston Marathon today, a good time to re-up one of the greatest figures in sports data: the distribution of marathon finish times (n=9,789,093). The spike at 4:00 is not a coincidence.

@politicalmath What do you mean, you're not short

I just want all my followers to know that I am an extremely unattractive, wildly obese, short and awkward person with a stutter and Tourette's syndrome (a very awkward combination)

@ranman I would upgrade if my in-house hardware could handle it.

No one in my real life appreciates this but my new house has good internet.

@amyalkon My gmail address is apparently very close to many other people's, so I get signups like this often. I still need the Google account, but I've given up using the address, and I set an autoresponder to tell people "you emailed the wrong person". I still get signed up for stuff!

Some dickbag bounces all his gmail to me and won't contact Google to stop it. Begged him for YEARS. Nada. (Lazy moral sewage.) With a personal poltergeist! I cancelled his car rental and upgraded him to something Bentley-priced. On a different day. Deadbeat still getting multiple messages from Netflix. (Check out the name!) And I unsubscribe to everything I can.

@stephenpollard @spectator I know how painful this is. Maybe more than it is supposed to be. I'm very sorry!

Here's my @Spectator tribute to my wonderful cat, Louie, 'Nothing prepares you for the death of a pet' spectator.com/article/nothin… My companion – my friend – Louie died suddenly on Tuesday. He was nine (his tenth birthday was due next month) which, in cat years, made him middle-aged. No one saw it coming – he’d had his six-monthly check-up a few weeks ago and was seemingly fit and well. If you don’t have a pet, you can’t fully appreciate the depth of the bond and the corresponding rawness of the grief. Louie has been my constant companion, especially since I divorced and moved into my own flat six years ago. Living alone, I regarded Louie – formal pedigree name Albalou Bojangles, a British shorthair – as my closest friend, in the sense that I saw more of him (it seems bizarre to be writing in the past tense about him) than anyone else. He was there throughout Covid, when I was shielding, and through treatment for my leukaemia. My whole flat is a reminder of his presence with scratch pads, toys, cat furniture, and all the other paraphernalia that comes with a cat. The morning after his death was so difficult. We’d had a morning routine which was the same every day. I slept with the bedroom door closed, as otherwise Louie would be in the room demanding food. At around 5.30 a.m. he’d start scratching the door and meowing loudly. I’ve always been an early riser anyway so I’d get up and go to the kitchen to give him his food as he rubbed himself against me, as if saying ‘thank you’. Then he’d push his face against the shower glass as I washed and follow me to my bedroom, jumping on the bed while I dressed. Louie would follow me into the study as I looked through the papers and hop onto my desk, usually bashing my keyboard. That same routine, every day. But not any more. I’m bereft. Louie had spent the day with me on Tuesday as I was having a new boiler fitted, so I was keeping him out of the way. At around 2 p.m. he was – as he often did – lying across my tummy as I watched TV on the sofa, purring happily as I stroked him. I had to disappear to my study for ten minutes to check some edits on a piece and when I got back, he was lying outstretched, all 35 inches from his nose to the start of his tail, under the dining table, where he never sits. I went to stroke him and he didn’t move, so I assumed he was in a deep sleep. I called ‘food’, which always wakes him up, and there was nothing. Then I realised he wasn’t responding at all. I called the vet in a panic saying I thought he had died – I couldn’t quite tell if he had actually stopped breathing. I’m only five minutes from the practice and when we got there, the vet confirmed he had no heartbeat. As I think about it now, I’m struck by how he must have known something was happening and so took himself to a new place to stretch out ready to go to sleep forever. It was all so sudden – ten minutes before he went he was (or at least seemed) totally fine. The vet said it was most likely a stroke or a heart attack, perhaps after some underlying issue. The only good thing is precisely that it was so sudden and so he didn’t suffer. On Wednesday night I went to the kids’ house to break the news. Cat owners will know that wonderful feeling when you open the front door and your friend has somehow sensed your return and is sitting there waiting for you. I live in a maisonette and Louie would almost always be at the top of the stairs as I put the key in the door. There was no Louie that night when I got home. My flat is empty. Rest in peace, my friend.

@iowahawkblog maybe a coffee mug

I have an adult daughter and I am 100% certain if I gifted her this she would smile politely and then donate it to Goodwill after using it as evidence to file a restraining order against me