shagie

And to Patrick Steward's opinions on it...

> According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston's presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was "immoral" and inconsistent with TNG's core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart's point "well taken", stated that Livingston's temporary removal in "Chain of Command" was thus a "sort of a bone they threw to Patrick".

https://agents.stackoverflow.com/all

> Already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer, if it’s in there somewhere.

> Indeed, you can’t even have a discussion. A lot of people come to Stack Overflow, not knowing what to expect, and try to conduct a discussion when they should be answering the question. The trouble here is that answers are always listed in order of votes, not chronologically, so the discussion instantly becomes scrambled when the votes start coming in.

> Instead, we have editing. Once you’ve earned a little bit of reputation in the system (and there are all kinds of ways to earn reputation), you can edit questions and answers.

> ...

> There are lots of good ways to edit things. You can improve spelling, grammar, and even copy edit any question or answer to make it better. After all, for the next 20 years, this question will be the canonical place on the web where programmers will come to find out about enlarging fizzbars without overwriting snibbits. Anything you can do to clarify, explain, or improve the question or the answer will be a public service. If there’s code in the answer, you can debug it, refactor it, or tweak it to make it better.

> You can also improve on the answers. If an answer is incomplete, expand on it. If an answer has a bug in it or is obsolete, you can edit it and fix it. Because Q&A in Stack Overflow are editable, you can safely link to a Stack Overflow permalink knowing it will always have a good answer. Stack Overflow won’t have the problem of other sites where obsolete or incorrect answers have high Google PageRank simply because they’ve been on the Internet for so long. If someone finds a security bug in an answer, it can be fixed… it won’t keep coming up in Google’s results for years and years poisoning future code.

https://youtu.be/qYWBBFJKlPM

https://youtu.be/NMcLXG6PXto

Also from Andrew Sorkin...

    • Joshua Malina: Jeremy Goodwin (Sports Night) / Will Bailey (The West Wing)
    • Janel Moloney: Monica (Sports Night) / Donna Moss (The West Wing)
    • Felicity Huffman: Dana Whitaker (Sports Night) / Ann Stark (The West Wing)
    • Clark Gregg: Calvin Trager (Sports Night) / Mike Casper (The West Wing)
    • Timothy Busfield: Director (Sports Night) / Danny Concannon (The West Wing)

Incidentally, this is one of those times when the comment section of YouTube becomes the most wholesome place on the net.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheWestWing

For example, https://youtu.be/LwNtZgLPCpg was posted 13 days ago (October 16th).

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Oct29-5.html

It ends with:

    Yesterday, The New York Times threw a wrench in the works. It reported that Dan J. was not happily living in his quiet fishing village reading books about fish and tending to his garden when he suddenly decided to run for the Senate. Nope. In fact, Peltola's team combed through voting lists to find all the Dan Sullivans in the state and then carefully selected Dan J. and helped him get on the ballot. This sort of trickery is actually not unusual. Other candidates have been doing this kind of stuff for years. The question is whether it will affect the election. Republicans who were planning to vote for Dan S. will still do so. The big unknown is are there many Peltola voters who will be disgusted by this trick and switch to Dan S. The disclosure may not be fatal, though, because: (1) not all Alaskans will even know about this before they vote, (2) some Alaskans have already voted, and (3) some people who like Peltola will admire her cleverness for pulling this off.

    The revelation could possibly affect the lawsuit, but probably not. Parties often recruit candidates. In primaries, it is not unusual for parties to (financially) support someone on the other team who they think would be a weak general-election opponent. This kind of stuff is actually the original use of the thing we call rodent reproduction. Republicans did it this year in a couple of Democratic House primaries, for example. It is scuzzy, but perfectly legal, to contribute to a candidate who you think is a weak opponent to your candidate. In fact, there have been many primaries where a Democrat switched his or her registration to Republican in order to vote for a crazy fringe candidate, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this development is not going to help Peltola. (V)

You don't. The only ways to get rep on stack overflow is described at https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

    You gain reputation when:
    
    question is voted up: +10
    answer is voted up: +10
    article is voted up: +10
    answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
    suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
    bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
    one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
    site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)

The scaling focuses around discoverability, (the rate of) asking questions, and the amount of time available for people to curate (which includes helping new users get onboarded).

Much of the early days of Stack Overflow, discoverability was trivial. It was easy to find an interesting question because few things were asked and this was the days when there was a lot of changes. We're dealing with 2008 and beyond - there were a lot of new frameworks and languages being updated then... Spring 3, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, React, Vue, Spring Boot 1, Java 7 and eventually Java 8.

This was a time of rapid change and the experts were answering on Stack Overflow - and it was scaling up to meet that demand with additional tools.

But it also started becoming a place where students were posting questions (every September you'd get the "how do you draw a triangle with stars?" questions 20 times a day in the Java or Python tags...)

This started being visible in 2010 with question quality and by 2014 it was a full on epidemic.

One part of this is that the original community of people who followed Jeff and Joel's blogs and helped barn raise the site had gotten smaller as an overall portion of the site because of that explosive growth. Some people wanted it to be a place where any user could get help with a question (and closing questions was antithetical to that) and others were looking for it to be more of a wikipedia. That conflict still simmers.

Another part of this is that a smaller and smaller percent of the overall user base was using the curation tools available. Fewer people were closing questions (that really did need to be closed) and helping onboard new users with expectations. When there are 6000 new questions a day that represents a lot of work for the volunteers to try to onboard them. Initially, everyone came from the same point and there wasn't much onboarding needed. With its growth, a lot of new people were coming to it from the approach that it was a forum or immediate feedback chat.

That growth without scaling up the tools for onboarding and curation (making it easier to do) meant that the people trying to help new users and make discovery of well written questions easier had less time per user (or question) to do so... and got increasingly curt - they couldn't spend 5 minutes per question anymore and instead were trying to do things in 30 seconds or less.

This was the beginning of "Stack Overflow is unfriendly."

The attempt that corporate had from this, instead of making it easier to help people took away curation tools and close reasons were made more specific... which in turn meant that the people trying to close questions to make discoverability of well written questions on the home page easier were incredibly pedantic in order to meet those reasons.

Some of the tooling is set up to be able to handle 6000 questions per day, and scales poorly back to having 100 questions per day.

The user base of Stack Overflow at 2 months old is very different than Stack Overflow today, even if it has the same question rate. There are very few people who are around to help onboard users (diamond mods if you read this - there's 25 of you and 100 questions per day... you can spend 5 minutes per new question per day to help onboard the user for expectations and still have half an hour a day for other moderation tasks).

Many of the people who did curation when SO was growing and at its peak have become disappointed with Stack Overflow and while they may look at it to see if its a site where their contributions would again be appreciated... though the changes that corporate appears to want have been additional curtailment of curation tools and have even proposed removing close votes all together ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438185/the-company-... ).

---

Stack Overflow is mostly dead. It lingers on, but every change that is being attempted or proposed in trying to get more "engagement" takes it further and further from being a place where new knowledge is collected and collated.

I would attribute this mostly to there aren't any curators left - so everything they try building turns into a mess. Corporate has leaned too hard on the community to do curation and diamond mods have largely stopped doing curation in favor of moderation.

With low activity and the largest ratio of staff and diamond mods to active users, this would be an excellent time for those two groups to completely take up the task of curation and onboarding to set a new standard for how it should be done... and if they aren't willing to do it, that really suggests that the final nail in the coffin is in place waiting to get hammered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_Uni...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41833

2020 numbers had 22,894 MW of capacity. More storage capacity for power is needed.

The "where are things located" is in the mountains where there's a significant elevation change. Most of the country is too flat to have pumped storage be practical. Installed pumped storage in Michigan (about 2GW of capacity there) does little for the power demands of North Dakota.

And then... there's also building new ones.

    Even though FERC has issued licenses for three proposed pumped storage projects since 2014, no new pumped storage projects have come online in the United States since 2012. EIA’s most recent survey of planned power plant additions shows no pumped storage projects under development.

    At 5:12 a.m. on December 14, 2005, the northwest side of the upper reservoir was overtopped when water continued to be pumped from the lower reservoir after the upper was full. This led to the catastrophic failure of a triangular section of the reservoir wall and the release of 1 billion US gallons (3,800,000 m3) of water in 12 minutes. 

   ...

   As of 2011, Ameren was reported to have paid a total of close to US$200 million in settlements related to the 2005 breach.

The current PRs: https://github.com/punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers/pulls

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...

One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...

https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...

Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...

    Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.

If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.