Grok didn’t kill itself.

Fun fact: Hitler’s actual plan when he invaded Poland was to reproduce the trench war stalemate of WWI on the Western front. He knew that in that war, about 2.5 million German soldiers had been able to stymie more than 4 million French and British troops while the remainder of the German army pillaged Russian territories. This is why during the Winter of '39/'40 he devoted almost half of German productive capacity to making artillery shells that mostly ended up not being used until the later invasion of the USSR. His biggest success of the war was the blitzkrieg of France, and it was absolute blind luck (mixed with French ineptitude and lack of preparation) that it ended up going the way it did.

I remember the desperate scramble to find something to read when I had to go take a shit.

defects galore

A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.

The point of being an executive is depositing huge checks while serving on the boards of other companies and voting for their executives’ huge checks. Are you new to this planet?

“Nothing’s on purpose, ma’am.”

THEY BANNED A FUCKIN BEE

I can’t wait until we have to pay for breathable air.

Weighing way too goddam much is also a cause of back (and knee) problems.

Dude has an unlimited supply of ketamine. He probably is actually enjoying life most of the time, unfortunately.

he’s been selling the AI kool aid for so long that he actually believes his own bullshit

I worked for an Internet startup in the ‘90s and at one point we were sucking up to R. J. Reynolds’ venture capital division for more funding. This tobacco company had so much fucking money they had actually branched out into venture capitalism to do something with it. The VCs came to visit us one day; we were in a non-smoking office and these assholes spent the entire day literally chain-smoking in the meeting room. We had not much ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see to the end of the hallway. I kept walking past the meeting room and loudly coughing and my bosses eventually sent me home.

We ended up not getting any money from them. The only good part of this story is that these guys have all surely died horrible deaths from cancer or emphysema by now. But in order to sell the lie that cigarettes aren’t harmful, these R. J. Reynolds executives had first convinced themselves of it. The human capacity for self-delusion is truly remarkable.

Where I live, a few stop signs have a square white sign below them that says “EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN”, i.e. you don’t have to actually stop if you’re turning right. It’s incredibly fucked up - it works fine if you’re a local and you’re familiar with these signs, but people new to the area don’t know anything about it and if they’re on the crossroad they actually expect the other driver to stop since all they see is the backside of the octagon. It’s pointless to have these signs anyway since people usually roll through stop signs as it is.

Why would you have failed? You are supposed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign.

It’s hilarious to me that Musk claims to work 100 hours a week but he’s the CEO of five companies. Even if the claim were true (and of course it isn’t) it means being the CEO of one of his companies is a 20-hour-a-week job at best.

I know many people who believe that “right on red” means they have the right of way to make the turn and don’t have to stop first or yield to traffic.

Butler was (will be?) right!

Random tea story: I travelled in India a few … shit, decades ago. On one of my train trips there was this one guy selling tea from a big urn. Usually these guys jump on at a station, sell cups of tea or coffee to whoever wants it, then they jump off at the next station; they can’t sell tea or coffee in more than one car because the passageways between cars are usually kept locked.

This one guy walked up and down the aisle selling a few cups, then he went to the door (the car doors that people use to get on or off the train are usually kept open or they’re not even there) and while holding his urn in one hand grabbed the vertical handrail on the outside of the door with his other hand, swung himself out into space (this while the train was moving at full speed), grabbed the handrail of the next car and swung himself in. He did this just so he could sell a few more cups of tea before we reached the next station.

People tend not to believe me when I tell this story, but there are a bunch of Youtube videos from India showing people doing even crazier shit than this on trains. For me, it just tends to make me not sweat the tea rings underneath my cup.

Edit: found the one I was thinking of.

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More than the complete collapse of the programming profession is discouraging new coders?

If they do it quietly, they won’t get the stock price bump every company gets from saying they’re going to replace (costly) employees with AI.