As opposed to French, which famously exists as a natural truth of the universe. Even if we had never discovered French it would still be there… waiting.

I haven’t seen a Darths & Droids reference in the wild in a while.

I remember just cackling the first time I read their Episode I comics.

Have you played Caesar 3 with the Augustus mod? Its like a whole new game. It adds a ton and there’s even a whole fan-made campaign.

I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 mods installed for Rimworld. The in-game mod management system is pretty basic and simply does not cut it. Definitely interested in more management options.

There are islands out there. If you truly think you would prefer that life you can just… go do it.

You don’t even need an island. You could wander off into the jungle of Vietnam and never hear from society again.

Copilot is a LLM. So it’s just predicting what should come next, word by word, based off the data its been fed. It has no concept of whether or not its answer makes sense.

So if you’ve scraped a bunch of open source github projects that this guy has worked on, he probably has a lot of TODOs assigned to him in various projects. When Copilot sees you typing “TODO(” it tries to predict what the nextthing you’re going to type is. And a common thing to follow “TODO(” in it’s data set is this guy’s username, so it goes ahead and suggests it, whether or not the guy is actually on the project and suggesting him would make any sort of sense.

There are actually 4 states that were independent countries at one point or another.

Hawai’i

Texas

California

Vermont

You’re correct that Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky besides (obviously) the sun and the moon.

The brightest star is Sirius, near the constellation Orion.

Polaris is absolutely NOT the brightest star in the sky. Not even close.

How to actually find it: Find the big dipper (I know you know what it looks like). Take the two stars at the front end of the “cup” part. Draw a line through them “up” and out of the cup until you hit a star. That’s it.

I’m going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.

Squeal

“Sorry, I’m under a pretty strict NDA and I’m not allowed to discuss it.”

No idea. He used the money he saved to help for a down payment in a condo.

A friend of mine lived in downtown Boston during the pandemic. Like, across the street from the Garden. His building lost a TON of tenents when people fled the city since they could now work remotely. He was going to move as well, but then the building offered to reduce his rent by $700/month if he stayed. So he did.

I love driving stick. Or I did up until the day my left knee fell apart. Now it’s just not an option for me.

Bullshit. You were singing Amish Paradise and we all know it.

Yup, I had someone print off Excel sheets, manually highlight and write in corrections, and them bring the pages over to my desk to have me fix them in the file.

I also once had the city reject a report I submitted because the width of the columns in the Excel file were different from the previous year and they wanted to print it all off on one page.

I used to work for municipal government in a major American city. The database for the entire city downloaded query results to your desktop formatted as Excel 95. Still does.

At one point I had to install special R packages because someone retired and I was tasked with taking over the worksheet they had been maintaining forever and the usual R packages to read data from Excel can’t parse Excel 5.0.

There was also someone in the office who still used a typewriter on the regular.