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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Once, but I don’t think it was aliens or supernatural or anything. I was walking home down embassy row in Washington, DC and we crossed 16th St near the White House, and we saw something that looked like a ball of lightening but that way too low to the ground. I asked, “Did y’all see that too?” and complete strangers agreed they did. There was no sound.

    Obviously, in that neighborhood, you don’t assume “aliens!” or anything. It was weird to us civilians and I’m quite sure there’s a scientific or classified explanation. But it was definitely a “What the fuck was that?” moment for a half dozen strangers just walking down a busy street.

    It didn’t move around or look like images of ball lightening, though it looked like lightening in a sphere in many ways. If it was some electrical explosion, we’d have presumably heard it. So, who knows? Governments and atmospheric conditions do weird shit sometimes.



  • The key scandal to me — I live in NOLA — is that the city council had tons of debates and put in place a process and limitations on facial recognition to limit false positives. But the new cameras aren’t city owned. A private company sells the cameras to businesses. Then, if a crime happens, the police call the company and ask if they “witnessed” anything. Then, the company basically texts officers a location if they think their facial recognition software spots the suspect.

    And since we’re apparently the demonstration city (again) for a company, it’s no cost to taxpayers. Maybe that makes it no different from typical police work to you. But even if the product worked perfectly, and it likely doesn’t, I don’t like the idea of the NOPD secretly working overtime to find loopholes around laws and regulations.

    And that’s before you get to collecting evidence for trial. Defense attorneys probably won’t have a hard time getting these cases dismissed unless there’s tons of other evidence.




  • What the fuck does that even mean? Like Juan Manuel de Rosas era, Evita era, giant sloth and terror bird era, or some other era? Like, I love Argentina and have been to Buenos Aires and Iguazu Falls. It’s a beautiful country full of beautiful people. But what is the time period dumbfucks there have created some sort of lore around?

    In the U.S., the right romanticizes the days of polio and scarlet fever and stupid wars and pretends it was basically the movie Grease. What’s the Argentine equivalent?







  • I think I read that the studio insisted on changes that annoyed Mike Judge. Pootie Tang met the same fate. They should have just let professional comedians release whatever but some studio executive didn’t get the jokes and was like, “This movie won’t appeal to suburban fathers over 45.” or whatever.

    In my experience, it often comes out that all of the shitty parts of comedy movies are not the fault of the creators. But comedians aren’t given creative freedom like Scorsese or whomever and also are like, “Make whatever edits you want. I made a stupid movie with my friends. You got my check?”


  • I’d say in the U.S., no one will even notice in New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, maybe Chicago and NYC but a place like Dallas or Jacksonville would be less tolerant. A place in the northeast like Boston or DC would be culturally less permissive but you’d be safe. They’re tolerant but have a puritan history (Boston) or are culturally sort of conformist (DC), for lack of a better term. DC is very much not hostile but it’s small-c conservative in the sense that everyone wears suits to work and it’s not counter-culture.

    I live in New Orleans and am cishet — so don’t take my word for it — but even my “boring” high school friends own multiple dresses because of Mardi Gras and Red Dress Run and events like that. No one cares about gender conformity here but drive more than a hour away and it can get unsafe quick.

    I can’t speak for coastal California but I’ve been there a bunch and it seems similar. No one is even gonna notice in San Francisco. It’s just expensive as fuck.

    Most urban centers — especially coastal ones — are pretty chill about it in 2025, I would say. But you should ask residents. New Orleans and San Francisco are, in my experience, not even going to notice. But most cities aren’t actively hostile. If you prefer suburban life, I’d look at college towns.




  • And it’s just historically ignorant and obnoxious. Basically all of the historic cities along the Gulf Coast existed before the United States. It was Spanish Florida, the Louisiana territory, and Texas when the US constitution was written. There’s a part of Louisiana called “The Florida Parishes” to this day because north of Lake Pontchartrain (which is actually a brackish estuary connected to the Gulf of Mexico) was part of Spanish Florida.

    It’s just dumb and, as you mentioned, I don’t know a single person who lives or makes their living along the Gulf Coast who was calling for this. If anything, it’s a pain in the ass for them because now it’s a culture war thing and they have to be conscious that inland morons care. Like if you’re a fisherman, how do you label your catch? Even people who run charter boats out of Venice for bachelor parties in New Orleans now have to contend with this headassery when making ads and web sites or whatever.


  • This is hardly the dumbest one originally but I worked construction in high school and college. One old dude had gotten “RESPECT” tattooed on his abs in his youth. By the time I met him, he had a beer belly and had had some injuries and surgeries. It was just a completely different font/message.

    By contrast, the best tattoo I’ve seen is a friend who is a musician. She has musical notes tattooed behind her ears. You wouldn’t even know if she did her hair a certain way (for a job interview or something) but when she was ready to party, the musical notes were on display.

    I also knew a guy who was an artist who had an amazing sleeve. He obviously cared about the artistic aspect; he literally flew to Japan multiple times to have it done because he cared that much about being a canvas for the specific artist he chose. That was the most impressive. I like the subtlety of the music notes but I’m not against going all out. It’s really the middle-ground — like a drunk tattoo that meant something at the time — where people regret it later.



  • It’s probably less about making the kernel smaller and more about security and reviewing code. The less code you have to maintain, the fewer vulnerabilities even if it’s old code.

    I would doubt almost 20 year-old code is taking up a lot of space or presenting new vulnerabilities. And it’s obviously open source so if anyone needs it, they can always use an older kernel or maintain it. Sometimes, your oldest code is insane. I wish there was a budget for every company and government to pay retirees part time to go back over their oldest code that’s still in use. A lot of retired programmers would do it for fun and nostalgia. And to be horrified something they wrote 20 years ago hasn’t been updated or replaced.