https://xkcd.com/605

Bud Clark for the win.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/Expose_Yourself_to_Art.jpeg

My favorite is "and there was some kind of error message." There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?

A recent (satire) headline from The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/alabama-middle-schooler-jailed-after-taking-basketball-1851186115

The last time this happened, the deal was that the music was generated by bots, and also listened to by bots. Basically it was a scheme to get money out of Spotify.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/spotify-ejects-thousands-of-ai-made-songs-in-purge-of-fake-streams/

But also, folks will use AI to generate anything these days, like these books that suggested that a good way to identify whether mushrooms are poisonous is to taste them.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

CADmonkey, DemBoSain, and HjFun are correct in this case. 43,560 sq. ft., or 4046.86 sq. meters.

Coffeebiscuit presumably dropped a zero accidentally.

It's also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." That's usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with "other alleged speakers include..." so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.

It looks to me like they did it this way so that it could have natural-language names in many languages. So, the function Z10096 is called "is palindrome" in English, but if you're coding in Japanese you can call it "回文の判定". I don't think the idea is for people to refer primarily to the alphanumeric soup version; I think that's just the unique identifier for the database.

It does look like it's leading to some issues, though. E.g., someone added a test for the "is palindrome" function which uses a somewhat common example: "Straw? No, too stupid. I put soot on warts." Now, a human would probably say that this is a palindrome, because it's got the same letters forwards and backwards, but most of the implementations disagree, because they consider the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation to be part of the string; that is, they test whether the input string and its reverse are equal. So someone (possibly the same person) has added a second python implementation which ignores spaces, capitalization, and punctuation, and mentions that in its name on the page.

Fundamentally this function is solving a different problem than the others (as demonstrated by the differing results on the relevant test), so should it get its own number and page? should there be a "palindrome disambiguation" page? This seems like something the site will have to figure out how to handle.

It is, at least in part. This story cites a Washington Post article, which in turn brings up Project 2025.

An excerpt:

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

They explain earlier in the article that the use of the Insurrection Act would be in order to deploy the military to put down civilian inauguration day protests. It's a little oddly written, in that it makes it sound like this is the main thrust of Project 2025, though they do eventually mention:

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.

In any case, yeah, they're not bothering to hide any of this. They know they control the media that their side hears.

Source article (as linked at the start of OP's article): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/

Good sci fi usually isn't about the future, aliens, etc. It's about the present, but portrayed in a strange way so as to bypass your existing preconceptions about the situation, so you can look at it with fresh eyes.

The number was $1,212,000 to be in the 90th percentile in the US in 2017 according to https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p70br-170.pdf

But worldwide, it was indeed about $93,000. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-be-in-the-richest-10-percent-worldwide.html

Does the software have an option for closing the session? Some burning software lets you leave the session open so that you can burn additional files to the disc later if it's not completely full yet, but many dedicated DVD players will only actually play the disc if the session is closed.

(This knowledge pulled from the dim recesses of my memory, which, like DVD, isn't what it used to be, so bear with me if I'm mistaken.)