presidentender

Strangely only "Kimi" has accurately heard of me. Gemini thinks I'm a German-language version of the stuff I do in English, Kimi recognizes my long-defunct blogging about technology and economics.

I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits.

I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so.

The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a good driver now." I didn't put the pieces together right away, but it turned out that the dongle had actually trained me, like a dog's shock collar.

The reason for my too-frequent hard-braking events wasn't speed, although that would be a contributing factor. It was a lack of appropriate following distance. Because I'd follow the drivers in front of me too closely I'd have to brake hard if they did... Or if they drive normally and happened to have a turn coming up.

Over the period I had the insurance spy box in my truck I learned without thinking about it to increase my following distance, which meant that riding with me as a passenger was more comfortable and it beeped less often. Of course since I'd been so naughty early during the evaluation they didn't decrease my rates, but I think the training probably did make me statistically less likely to crash.

One of my mom's best friends when I was a kid had Huntington's. She was a few years older than mom, and her sons were a few years older than my brother and I. One of them chose to get tested. The other chose not to. I remember thinking that was foolish, but I was seven years old. In retrospect, it's strange that a seven-year-old was privy to such things.

For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.

One of my favorite... solutions, I suppose, was to find a break (not a leak) in a pipe by running current through it and using some sensor (I think the vocabulary is "signal generator," but I do not know). Current does not run further, there is your break; dig and find.

When the pipe is PVC, though, current does not run through it - so what do we do? Why, pump an electrolyte solution, and run your current through that!

It's simple, but it's not done, and so the plumber friend who told me of the original solution patented it, tried to sell it, and found that potential buyers were almost offended at how easy it was. As soon as he'd describe it to people they'd almost think they came up with it themselves. So it is a valuable idea, but it is also utterly worthless.

Are there similar optimizations available for basketball? Shoes can only do so much.

If the company is employee owned, how do you propose that an investor even could back it? Investment results in an ownership stake.

Luddite technologists. What a time.

It doesn't preach so much as it explores. The author strikes me as being more economically literate than Rand or LeGuin, but not as good a writer as the latter.

The real and staggering excellence of the series is the speculation - it's not such hard SF that it explains the mechanisms by which everything happens, and there are real characters who do more than stand as cardboard observers to technology, but it's crunchier than most.

It would surprise me to learn that Steve Yegge had deferred the opportunity to type a lot in favor of using an LLM to generate natural language.

I'm biased in his favor, but I recognize that brevity is not among his virtues.

I'm prone to plantar warts, and the only success I've had has been from surgical removal. I have not tried duct tape, though.

Once I went to a podiatrist who injected bleomycin, a chemotherapy drug. My foot hurt for several days and blood blisters formed beneath the warts, but the operation was unsuccessful.

I went to another podiatrist for the same warts and he anesthetized me and removed them with a curette.

Several years later I had a few more show up, and got some of the same anesthetic the second doctor had used, which worked marvelously. Unfortunately I didn't remember which anti-bleeding agent he had used and so I was less able to tell what was going on during my self surgery; ultimately, though, it was effective.

I also had a wart between the third and fourth knuckle of my left hand for many years. I'd pick at it sometimes but it was benign otherwise. One day I noticed that it was gone. The spot where it had been gets dry and flaky moreso than the rest of my hands.

Those of us who have the foresight to make such sacrifices should also have the foresight to structure our investments to make them resilient against redistribution.

Fractal seems to have addressed the entire market they had identified. It doesn't appear that they're still recruiting founders.

I was in their pipeline and interviewing potential business cofounders, but chose to go the traditional venture route - it didn't work out, but I don't think I'd have succeeded at the Fractal business either.