When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

Before anyone gets too excited: some of their electrodes are no longer able to record a signal from the patient’s brain. They’re reprogramming their software to work with fewer electrodes. No one is being turned into a borg drone.

I suspect it isn’t even illegal, but I’m not an expert.

You can state what you don’t want, but no one will be paying attention. Except maybe the LLM reading your posts…

There’s not going to be a moment when the world suddenly goes from having oil to having no oil. Some oil reserves are relatively cheap and easy to extract. Other, very large reserves are currently so difficult and expensive to extract that doing so isn’t profitable. As the easy oil gradually runs out, the supply drops, the price rises, and sources of oil that were not profitable at the old price become profitable. This maintains the supply of oil and stabilizes the price.

Eventually oil will become so expensive that alternative technologies will be cheaper than it. This will happen with plenty of hard-to-reach oil left. So it’s true that the amount of oil is in principle finite, but that limitation isn’t really relevant.

One bad quarter and they’re doing this? I don’t even.

The summoning circle is broken! You’re free!

I don’t know about Oregon, but I see how people ride their e-bikes here in NYC and it makes me suspect that most e-bike/car collisions are the e-bike’s fault.

Well, yes - George W. Bush appears in retrospect to have been sincere. Some of the other powerful supporters of the war did profit from it, but at the expense of American taxpayers rather than Iraqis.

This meme contains a common accusation from 20 years ago, but I think it’s odd that it is being posted in 2024, long after it became clear that whatever the purpose of the invasion of Iraq actually was, it wasn’t to obtain oil wealth.

When you say it’s common, are you talking about heat pumps or old-fashioned resistive heating? I’m not very familiar with heat pumps since they weren’t common at all when and where I bought a house, but at least where I lived it was normal to have either an oil or a gas furnace for heating. Resistive electric heating cost a lot more to operate and so it was generally used only where it would be too difficult or expensive to install a furnace and hot water pipes or hot air ducts. For example, some friends of mine lived in a 19th century house which was meant to be heated by a wood fireplace and they also had electric heaters in the bedrooms, whereas my own house was built in 1980 so it had an oil tank, a furnace in the basement, and hot-water radiators.

(My own house also had a modern wood stove in the living room and buying firewood was even cheaper than buying heating oil, but the problem was that the wood stove took a lot of work and it only heated the living room since it wasn’t connected to any mechanism for spreading the heat to the rest of the house.)

Is heating with electricity common in Finland? That seems like it would cost a fortune even in good times.

On the one hand, she has a bizarre compulsion to smoke. But on the other hand…

Nobody really knows why that’s supposed to attract a potential dating partner, but it’s really common

Back when I did online dating I wrote about playing computer games, not because I expected that to be attractive to the average woman (of course it isn’t) but because I was hoping to meet one of the rare women who shared my interest.

A friend of mine managed to marry a woman who agreed to have their honeymoon be a week-long canoe trip through the wilderness in Maine, complete with living off of the fish they caught. It can happen!

hāt tomāt

Tomatoes were one of the few things my dog wouldn’t eat.

I still don’t understand who these ads are targeted at. The model is well past looks-attractive skinny and into to looks-unhealthy skinny. Does that make someone want to buy an expensive purse?

There was the same nonstop excitement there would be during an actual soccer match.

No. No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!