johncearls

I had the same experience. I was very excited to try a Doner in Istanbul, because one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle was a Doner place (The Berliner). They didn't seem to know what I meant. I got something they insisted was a Doner, but not really the same sort of thing.

Not sure if the Seattle place is really Americanized or I need to save up and try one in Germany.

Plenty of great Turkish food btw, but obviously Doner's are not really a local thing.

I can confirm this. In fact, they require you to physically be in the UAE (no VPN from the states) to access health related data on UAE citizens. Writing this from Abu Dhabi.

What if you are an American who is not interested in projecting power across the globe? What if you would like to stop spending 1/3 of your budget on the military?

I take no pride in being an Empire or hegemon. I know this will be ugly and disorderly and could almost certainly be handled better, but as an American, I am looking forward to the day when problems 5000 miles away from my home are no longer treated as my problem.

But how much of what you own is do you actually "need."

People are welcome to do with there money things that simply make them happy. That is a good and proper use of money.

This would be a very boring life indeed if people were only allowed to own things that others decided they need.

I'm not your buddy, pal.

If you look at the debt-to-GDP ratios and identify the spikes, you will see there were two recent(ish) events that overwhelmingly inflated the debt. 1) 2008 housing crash. Bailing out Wall Street was expensive. 2) Covid-related spending (2020-2022). The interesting thing is that both occurred during transitions in the party of the president, with unchanged policies no matter who gained power. Contrary to the my side did it, no your side did it, blame game that always accompanies these sort of stories.

As usual, George Carlin was right. "It's a big club and you ain't in it."

I love mine.

Being able to snap a pic without getting too far out of the moment, like when I am at a museum or in a beautiful place is great.

Even better is being able to snap a picture of my grandchildren without distracting them. As soon as I pull out my phone, they are grabbing for it. Some of my favorite pics were taken by my meta glasses.

Free Luna!

My understanding of the Shahed's is that they are relatively simple. They can be programmed with a certain destination and then have some basic image recognition that allows them to "choose" exactly their target based on computer vision, e.g. the shape of a building or radar station. So in that sense, they are autonomous. To my mind, they are more cheap precision missiles (more like a tomahawk) than an autonomous drone.

Predators are a whole different beast. They are semi-autonomous airplanes, that can be controlled by satellite or AWAC or whatever. Almost certainly with the ability to loiter or escape if they lose contact with their controllers

On a tech site, pessimism like this make me sad. I'm a nerd. I have been dreaming of a future where humanity finally takes its place among the stars since I was young enough to have dreams.

I am looking forward to buying a little piece of it. I plan on putting a couple thousand into the IPO. I view it like buying into D.D. Harriman in "The man who sold the moon." I plan on taking those shares and forgetting about them for a couple decades. Maybe leave them to my grandchildren. This is the longest of plays and I hope it works out.

Maybe SpaceX will fail, but this is the first time since I was a boy that there is any real hope that humanity will step into that future, and I want to be part of it. Maybe Musk is suckering in dreamers like me, but I'll bet on a better future. This is it. This is our shot. Godspeed.

Whitespace forcing proper indentation practices has always been one of my favorite aspects of python. I TA'd a data structures in C++ class and the lack of proper indentation making code unreadable was my biggest pet peeve. I always made the student fix their indentation before I would help them debug it.

I know that is mainly a beginner coding issue, but never having to deal with that issue was always one of the biggest advantages of python.

That said, I believe a lot of the stuff that was added in 3 and beyond (to make it more typesafe, accounting for unicode, etc) has made it a lot less readable over time. You can argue that it has made Python a better and safer language, but the pseudocode aspect has gotten worse. I kinda miss that.

Interestingly, I read or heard something that said that a fatal flaw in hypersonic in regards to naval combat was that hypersonic speeds create plasma and that the plasma made optical sensors and remote control useless. They need to slow down in order to hit naval vessels, which makes them vulnerable.

But that was a great quarter. You should have seen the bonuses.

I can't read the article. Could someone please point to the research that they are referring to?

Madison is exceptional for a midwestern city. It has a large and excellent state university. Epic is based there and most of FAANG has outposts there to draw the CS talent. Additionally, it is the state capitol which means a lot of companies providing services to the state. Aside from all that, it is a pretty picturesque location for the Midwest, with the two big lakes and surrounded by rolling hills. Something you won't find in Urbana-Champaign for comparison.

When people talk about low cost of living in the Midwest they generally mean more depressed areas. I live in a very low cost of living rural (15k ppl) community in Illinois, with half an acre on a lake in a 3000 sq foot house where the mortgage is only 250k. Of course, if I ever lose my remote job, I'd never be able to find work. Most of the people here work at one of 2 medium-sized factories or the hospital. The median household income is only $40k.

The town I live in is a far more common case for the rural Midwest.