I don’t think normal people said it in the mid-to-late 90’s. Like, the Soviet Union was (seemingly) finishing splintering and there was war and strife but there was a sense the world could manage it through diplomacy. The Montréal Protocol was already showing success. Most new technology still seemed promising instead of dystopian.

I’m not saying anyone was right or that we’re actually in the end times. Most of history involves muddling through crises. But it felt like global strife was at a low point and we could actually achieve global consensus on important issues.

Why is generative AI even needed for audio transcription? We’ve had decent voice recognition tools for years even on cheap consumer grade stuff.

Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall. 

To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)

Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.

I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.

Underestimate Swifties at your peril. Live Nation-Ticketmaster has been a loathed monopoly for years and they screwed up one Taylor Swift sale and there were Congressional hearings and a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice joined by 30 states’ Attorneys General.

Maybe his politics are complicated. Did y’all consider that? That a white South African industrialist who dabbles in eugenics, treats employees like shit, and thinks catturd2 is funny might be a complex enigma?

They really should make the Boeing executives be the first astronauts on this mission.

The 10,000th study to show the same result. Probably need to do a hundred thousand more.

Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.

Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.

This story should be on every newspaper front page right below war correspondents.

The fact that Harvard bent over for a “donation” is just pathetic. They have a $50bn endowment. What is even the point of having that much money if not to be uncompromising on academic freedom?

As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.

The comments on that article are really missing the point that leveling a city block to kill a few terrorists almost invariably means you created more terrorists than you killed.