A wonderful series of photo-heavy blog posts about Ashgabat, Turkmenistan can go some way to answering this question.

They’ve got model numbers, sure, but the pictures and descriptions are just the most generic, most common types of grill brushes that you’d find just about everywhere in the US. Could all of the brushes of those styles really have been made by one brand, Nexgrill? Could there really be only on the order of 10 million of them sold in the last 10 years?

How big a risk is this in real terms, compared to other risks we take all the time, anyway? They’re admitting to 68 cases and 5 medical interventions (over an unspecified span of time). Meanwhile, over 300,000 people have been killed by automobiles in the US in the last 10 years. The point being, not that you should be careless with an old wire grill brush, but that the Times isn’t even trying to put this in perspective. How many man-years of seasonal grilling does it take to get you a 50-50 chance of having this problem? That might be useful to understand.

…he began wiping his cold grill with a wet paper towel before cooking food.

One of the few things I do right in life: I wipe a hot grill with a sopping wet pad of 2-3 paper towels, after cooking. The grease and oil steams off immediately, while it’s fresh and the cleaning is easy, and this step takes almost no extra time or effort. And the grill is clean for next time.

You don’t have to use paper towels, you can use cotton rags. But they will become so stained that you won’t want to use them for any other job.

I think more Americans need to know that Iran is big. Here’s a view from thetruesize.com. If you could move Iran to the US, it would stretch from Florida to Iowa to New Jersey.

What about JD Vance’s eyeliner?

What about all the women who wear pants?

This isn’t really about rules, of course, it’s about having a tissue-thin justification for systemic bullying.

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

My door. Your butt. Don’t allow two objects to occupy the same space at the same time.

It is my understanding that some fraction of players of the last Wolfenstein game had this complaint, but un-ironically.

https://youtu.be/JWfD4geJm2Q

If there were no suckers, there would be no money, no winnings to motivate the insiders. It requires exploitation in order to “function.”

The next step will be stratifying the insiders. Big bettors, people who hear things and think they know things, suckered by a tiny cadre of the innermost circle. Maybe that’s happened already.

Eventually, of course, there will be motivation to spread falsehoods to change the odds in the insider’s favor. Or to outright direct history to take advantage of long odds.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

As early as 2016, some observers suggested that the president was a Russian pawn, an instrument to end American hegemony, to ruin America’s ability to project its influence into the world.

It’s funny how absolutely nothing that’s happened since then contradicts the idea.

Let us also recall his remarks concerning the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi :

“You’re mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” he said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Like so many criticisms of others he offers, it would be perfectly applicable to himself.

I’m not sure what to think. It does sound like people living within earshot must be getting a raw deal.

On the other hand, designating Mayfield Road as “quiet” is ridiculous. cracking down on horns but not loud motorcycles (and, more and more these days, cars) is ridiculous.

The authorities always seem to be asking themselves “What excuse can we invent to shut these little people up?” and never “How can we justify kicking this car dealership out of town?”

“Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

When we say every accusation is a confession, by golly, we mean every accusation.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

I think a post like this would be more useful with some kind of geographic hint in the title:

[Hawaii, USA] Wahiawa dam failure expected! Haleiwa, Wahiawa: Get to higher ground now!

Of course, best of all would be to post it to a Hawaii community, but I don’t know if there is one.

I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

I don’t think it’s strictly about “moral high ground.” If you’re willing to do anything to win, then if you do win, the winner will be a person who is willing to do anything.

Is the Umbrella Corporation logo on her shirt relevant to anything?

“This technology” is, as used here, industrial scale lying which was made possible through industrial scale theft.

We can re-phrase the question: “Why is the right jumping headlong into industrial scale lies and crime, while the left loses ground on this front?”

An answer suggests itself to me.

Q: So do you have any hobbies?

A: Well lately I’ve really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

Q: Ooooh, that’s so hot right now