111·
13 hours ago
Strait of Economic Infarction.
“Just beat my record for most consecutive days without dying.” — Bill Murray.
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Cake day: March 4th, 2025
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4·14 hours agoU.S. government spending on the military contributes $3.8 billion to Alaska’s economy, a figure larger than the entire Yukon economy.
Wow.
vs.
2·7 days agoDrought conditions in Texas have worsened, with severe impacts on crops such as winter wheat and livestock feed availability.
“Things are looking bad for far south Texas, where climate outlooks suggest higher than normal probabilities of dry conditions over much of the state,” said William Baule, regional climatologist at the Southern Regional Climate Center and research assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
U.S. Drought Monitor data, published April 2, showed drought conditions intensified from March 24 –31. There was no change in abnormally dry conditions (D0), while drought categories (D1–D4) worsened overall.
Moderate drought increased 4.48 points to 88.98% (D1). Severe drought worsened sharply by 7.27 points to 62.81% (D2). Extreme drought was up 6.74 points to 29.34% (D3). Exceptional drought weakened by 0.86 points to 4.96% (D4).
The drought has made it difficult to take soil samples, according to Dwayne Peirce, Texas A&M AgriLife agriculture and natural resources agent, who has pulled samples since the 1990s.
“I’ve never had the difficulty that I’ve had this spring, pulling soil samples for our spring and summer crops,” he said. “It’s taken me, on an average, at least twice as long, if not three times as long, to sample the field. Just trying to find a location that’s soft enough to get the probe in the ground has been difficult.”
From the wikipedia page
Rodney Bingenheimer saw Van Halen at Gazzarri’s in the summer of 1976, and convinced Gene Simmons of Kiss to see them perform. Impressed, Simmons produced a 29-track Van Halen demo tape, entitled “Zero”, at Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles, with post-production overdubs completed at Electric Lady Studios in New York. Simmons suggested changing their name to “Daddy Longlegs.” However, a very disappointed Simmons could do no more once Kiss management decided that Van Halen “had no chance of making it”.
It’s the assumption that what works for me will work for you. Situations change. Markets change. Skill relevancy changes (ask IT workers).
As for university in Romania, I can’t speak to that. What I can say about it in the US is:
“Go to college and get a good job.” sounds great until you go to an elite school for a Sociology degree. Oh, you’ve got a law degree? The firm expects you to work pro-bono to establish yourself. Work for little pay while establishing yourself while paying off student debt.
and not just students at elite schools.
https://fortune.com/2026/04/03/experience-creep-jobs-ai-entry-level/
Bottom line: have a couple of career paths/options.
Flamebait. Begun the flame wars have.
The Texas State Board of Education met this month to discuss potential changes to how social studies is taught under the state’s Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for K-12 social studies curriculum.
The Texas Education Agency has also published a recommended reading list of literary works developed with input from more than 5,000 Texas English teachers, according to a previous report by The Center Square.
Teachers and historians have raised concerns about elements of the proposed standards.
16·9 days agoSo apparently he pocked about 26 million according to this article from Dec 09, 2019:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/sami-bebawi-snc-lavalin-1.5383469
The prosecution is trying to prove SNC-Lavalin transferred about $113 million to shell companies used to pay people who helped the company collect money and secure contracts in Libya, beginning in the late 1990s.
What remained in the accounts after the kickbacks were paid was split between Bebawi and Riadh Ben Aissa, a former colleague, the Crown alleges, with Bebawi pocketing $26 million.
So even if he spent some of it, he should have considerably more than $100K.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Love is like a Rock?
25·11 days agoFor clarity the platform is called Snowflake.
While numerous cloud storage and SaaS vendors were targeted using the stolen tokens, BleepingComputer has learned that the majority of the data theft attacks targeted the cloud data platform Snowflake.
The headline is not calling the customers snowflakes.
When I grew up there was a company that said “Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti day”.
4·14 days agoIt appears to be trying to walk the role of mediator.
Iran and Oman are reportedly drafting a protocol to monitor ship transit through the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian state news agency IRNA reported on Thursday, citing an official.
A New Route Through Hormuz Sees Three Omani Vessels Slip Past Iranian Waters. The southern coastal route contrasts with the usual northern path running near Iranian waters
These require subscriptions to read in full.
Oman grapples with its national identity as a neutral mediator after Iran’s attacks
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-oman-neutral-mediator-iran-attacks-national-identity/
For Oman, the Strait of Hormuz is a windfall and a burden
The world may never know.
The Document Foundation’s official reply came from Italo Vignoli, a founder Collabora lists as having already exited TDF membership.
He has kept it short, confirming that the removals happened, pointing to TDF’s recently adopted Community Bylaws as the basis. Those bylaws include a clause requiring anyone affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with TDF to step down from membership.
Link to those bylaws from Jan 15
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-version-1-of-community-bylaws/13472
Quote from that link [bylaws] above
Members involved in legal claims for endangering the Foundation, eg. by means of putting the charitable status at risk, or misusing TDF’s funds, or by damaging any of TDF’s assets, or by attempting to do any of these must relinquish their membership by means of notification to the MC. If the legal claim, in relation to the mentioned matters, involves a company/organisation then also their affiliated members must relinquish their membership.
Back to the original linked article:
The stated rationale is that past situations saw people put their employer’s interests ahead of the foundation’s, and the clause exists to stop that happening again. The specifics of the legal dispute between TDF and Collabora are not mentioned by either party.
TDF also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing “when the time comes.”
So without details, all the article really details is that this happened. The why is murky. It seems the TDF is trying to protect itself, but there’s no description of Collabra or TDFs legal dispute.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-your-weight-change-when-you-fart/527684
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/does-internal-gas-affect-your-weight
https://fartsound.net/blog/does-farting-make-you-weigh-less
“Technically, yes, you do weigh less after farting. When you expel gas from your body, you’re removing mass, which means your weight decreases. However - and this is a big however - the amount is so incredibly tiny that it’s essentially meaningless for weight loss purposes.”
So
A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.
US Government websites are supposed to meet WCAG 2 Level AA. If a person with disabilities goes to such a site that the AI rewrote, will Google be held liable for the non-compliance?
You know what would make that article better? Explaining that MCP means “Model Context Protocol” and at least explaining that it is a protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs. I get it, they’re talking about Claude, so they know what they’re talking about and assume that the reader is in the know, but then some bot comes along and drops it into Hacker News, and then we have to go and look it up.
“Yeah, but it’s great for Limbo parties, once.”