Check out Fez if you haven’t already. Also Tunic does a great job of starting out basic & breaking precedent.

I’m enjoying what they released this year too. Beautiful People is now on my regular playlist.

Hackers and hobbiests will persist despite any economics. Much of what they do I don’t see AI replacing, as AI creates based off of what it “knows”, which is mostly things it has previously ingested.

We are not (yet?) at the point where LLM does anything other than put together code snippets it’s seen or derived. If you ask it to find a new attack vector or code dissimilar to something it’s seen before the results are poor.

But the counterpoint every developer needs to keep in mind: AI will only get better. It’s not going to lose any of the current capabilities to generate code, and very likely will continue to expand on what it can accomplish. It’d be naive to assume it can never achieve these new capabilities… The question is just when & how much it costs (in terms of processing and storage).

The reality of Texas green energy is so detached from the political rhetoric from politicians… The state making the most wind energy has leaders in the capital demonizing it while the state finances (and citizens) clearly benefit. I wish the voters of Texas paid more attention and called out such obvious gaslighting :(

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-child

Usually these costs are including education and childcare. In the US you can easily expect to pay around $1K / Month for full time child care between the ages of 6 months and 5 years (when they’ll start public school). Here’s a recent summary for major cities in Texas reflecting that amount: https://tootris.com/edu/blog/parents/child-care-in-texas-can-cost-up-to-10000/

That’s over $40K just in childcare costs before entering school. Now, many people don’t have to pay this because they have family (or a non-working spouse) who assist; but from a cost perspective it’s fair to include.

Add on to that food, clothing and such… between ages it’s easy to see how some estimates can reach over $200K through age 18.

The Ola one looks pretty dang nice; if it were available in the US I’d probably buy one just for random rides on nice weather days.

https://newatlas.com/motorcycles/ola-electric-roadster-motorcycles/

A bit of an elaboration on why water towers are used in combination with pumps. Pumps are great for moving a constant amount of water around at whatever rate the pump is designed for (e.g. a small pump will move something like 1 gallon per minute). a big enough pump (or series of smaller pumps) can cause that pumped water to consistently flow at that rate.

The problem is that people don’t use water at a constant rate. In the morning, several residents probably all run the shower at the same time. if too many people open the water tap at the same time, a pump will give each just a fraction of what they expect.

But a water tank high up supplies water by gravity, you could open a large number of water taps, and as long as the pipes from the tank are big enough they’d all have the same pressure as if just one opened.

The water is gradually pumped up to the tank no matter if people are using it or not, then when many people want water, they all get it at expected pressures and the tank start to empty. Eventually people close the taps, the tank will slowly start to fill again from the pump.

This same basic design is also how water towers supply water to many single story buildings, it’s not a unique engineering feat for skyscrapers, but an adjustment to fit somewhere within the building’s footprint.

If you want a fun karaoke night, first song(s) need to be something that will get most everyone singing. Younger crowds: something like Tayor Swift “Shake It Off”. Middle age crowds, something like Nirvana or Aerosmith. Older crowds any Beatles #1.

I personally like Cyprus Hill “Jump Around” if you’re willing to learn it well enough beforehand as to not butcher the lyrics. I’ve seen Vanilla “Ice Ice Baby” also get a similar reaction of everyone knowing the song and enjoying it enough to give you kudos for choosing it.

After everyone’s over the initial hesitation, go belt all your love songs and power ballads; but get the party started first.

This article links to the London School of Economics summary, which includes the graphs and goes a little deeper: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2024/06/07/the-rural-urban-political-divide-is-mostly-driven-by-white-voters-and-there-are-fewer-divisions-over-policy-than-many-think/

Here’s the core image highlighting the differences: https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/58/files/2024/06/Brown-Fig-4.png

For those not keeping up: this is the fallout from Erdogan ignoring economics and keeping interest rates low for years; only in the past year or so having conceding to reality and finally letting rates rise. They’ll likely continue suffering fallout from his prior stance on interest rates for the remainder of the decade.

From last summer:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/22/economy/turkey-hikes-interest-rates/index.html

and

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/14/turkeys-erdogan-agrees-to-monetary-policy-turnaround-under-simsek.html

Since the other reply was unhelpful: apps are supposed to have limited privileges and isolation from each other, yes… But the whole point of malware like this is that they figure out ways to break those restrictions and get escalated privileged.

You can get more technical detail from reading the report, in this case it looks like the app does not contain malware, but instead requests an update after install that contains the bad code and then breaks the app limitations and scans for the target banking applications and copies the security certificates.

Closing legal crossings will almost certainly increase illegal ones…

*Senator

Nearly as scandalous as dancing!

Or the violent video games, or gangster rap, or dungeons & dragons, or that rock n roll music…

The answer to regulatory capture isn’t prohibition though, because prohibition essentially means unregulated.

Prohibition is effectively the same as a tax on gambling from the point of view of gamblers, but the tax is just the additional effort people have to spend to not get caught or fines when they do. The difference is there’s no tax revenue for the governing authority to redistribute, fines go almost exclusively to pay for enforcement.

Same question, but for Big Red soda…

If only we had some clue as to how the other guy would handle the protests… oh yeah, we kind of do:

Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op

Trump threatens military force against protesters nationwide

“The goal is to make the town progress by improving the resilience of its inhabitants,”

Sounds a bit like Stardew Valley?