Charles's summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors' windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses' interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders.
I seem to be horribly pessimistic today. I find it more likely that it will motivate flag officers to leave the military, to be replaced by officers who will have no problem when Trump/Vance declare martial law and order them to halt the 2028 federal elections. If their big military project in 2027 is pulling the 100,000+ uniformed troops stationed in Europe and Asia home, that will be the real giveaway.
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.
At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I've ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be "Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP", my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn't interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what's in the database.
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
Status report on dewarping documents from photographs. I've finally settled on a camera (iPhone 17) and set up lighting, so I'm starting to take pictures seriously. Current state of the art for my dewarping software shown in these images. First one is a 24MP "original" taken with the iPhone. Second one is the dewarped output for it. I've settled on the .avif format as the best combination of quality, compression, and availability.
I’ll bet that in the last 1000 years England has seen more immigration than in the previous 500,000,000 years.
Britain was almost entirely depopulated by the end of the last glacial maxima 22,000 years ago. All of Scotland and Ireland were under the ice. Southern England was inhospitable tundra. At least on a percentage basis, the immigration after the ice started to retreat was probably larger than the last 1,000 years.
At current valuations AI would have to bring in $400 per year per US resident for the AI companies to produce a decent return on investment. Which isn’t happening in the foreseeable future.
Individuals may not spend $400 on AI-based services. Employers may purchase much more than that on behalf of each of their (remaining) employees.
Even making the heroic assumption that the various fabs are not severely damaged or destroyed.
It seems insane to me, but if China were to decide that if they can't have 3nm chips -- and Biden certainly leaned on Taiwan and countries that might act as intermediaries to block access -- then no one can have 3nm chips... well, a dozen ballistic missiles with big enough HE payloads (and sufficient accuracy) puts TSMC out of that business. TSMC is building a very large campus and production lines in Arizona, but has consistently said they don't plan on ever locating their leading edge processes there.
Should have added, the various companies that have decided to design their own chips for AI -- Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, probably some others -- also depend on TSMC for fabrication.
Nvidia, of course, manufactures the chips preferred by AI data centers.
Nit-picking... Nvidia designs chips. All of their chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. Earlier this month Nvidia's CEO said publicly that he had asked TSMC to increase their 3nm fab capacity because of the volume of new orders Nvidia was receiving.
This from the magistrate judge’s findings in the Comey case. If it weren’t a Trump-directed prosecution, my gob would be comprehensively smacked.
I understand that this is the first time the assigned DOJ attorney has ever done a prosecution. Her previous experience appears to have been as a real estate lawyer who did work for Trump previously. What would be more surprising would be if she was wonderfully competent and didn't make any procedural errors.
I see this morning that Trump is now encouraging the House to vote to release the Epstein files. I've gotten really paranoid over the last 10 months, so I simply assume that's posturing, and Pam Bondi has already told him that her response will be, "There's an ongoing investigation and the DOJ never releases evidence in an ongoing investigation, not even to Congress."
Demonstrating my own biases, Klobuchar wouldn't have a chance. The BosWash urban corridor Democratic mafia hated that Reid and Pelosi attained the top positions in each chamber. They're not going to allow that to happen again.
Manchin screwed his own party not long before deciding not to run for another term and his senate seat is now held by a Republican. How is that supposed to be good for Democrats?
The man would have been 77 on election day if he had run again. Can't we let the olds retire? The fact that no Democrat who doesn't have the sort of name recognition that Manchin had in WV (his uncle held statewide office for years; Joe was WV Secretary of State and Governor before he was a Senator) can win is a different problem.
Manchin voted for every nomination Obama and Biden sent to the Senate. While Biden was in office, Manchin eventually voted for every major bill. Sometimes he needed an earmark: the price for his vote on the infrastructure bill was to approve a NG pipeline that ran from the gas fields in WV to a market hub in Virginia. He wasn't nearly as bad as, eg, Joe Lieberman from Connecticut.
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.
Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like "excellence is a habit", "if we all succeed, I've succeeded", and an understated "we're just that damned good". When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.
The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka". The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)
My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Thread”
Charles's summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors' windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses' interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.
"
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
On “It’s Your Party, you can cry if…”
Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders.
I seem to be horribly pessimistic today. I find it more likely that it will motivate flag officers to leave the military, to be replaced by officers who will have no problem when Trump/Vance declare martial law and order them to halt the 2028 federal elections. If their big military project in 2027 is pulling the 100,000+ uniformed troops stationed in Europe and Asia home, that will be the real giveaway.
On “Open Thread”
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.
At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I've ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be "Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP", my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn't interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what's in the database.
"
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
"
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
Any of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari should do it.
Also Edge, if you have a fairly recent release. Microsoft has been slow to support AVIF at the operating system level.
"
Now I just need to get the software to open them.
Any of Chrome, Firefox, or Safari should do it.
"
For wjca, since it's an openish thread...
Status report on dewarping documents from photographs. I've finally settled on a camera (iPhone 17) and set up lighting, so I'm starting to take pictures seriously. Current state of the art for my dewarping software shown in these images. First one is a 24MP "original" taken with the iPhone. Second one is the dewarped output for it. I've settled on the .avif format as the best combination of quality, compression, and availability.
https://mcain6925.com/ordinary/demo1.avif
https://mcain6925.com/ordinary/demo2.avif
On “Shabana burns the cakes”
I’ll bet that in the last 1000 years England has seen more immigration than in the previous 500,000,000 years.
Britain was almost entirely depopulated by the end of the last glacial maxima 22,000 years ago. All of Scotland and Ireland were under the ice. Southern England was inhospitable tundra. At least on a percentage basis, the immigration after the ice started to retreat was probably larger than the last 1,000 years.
On “Pop!”
At current valuations AI would have to bring in $400 per year per US resident for the AI companies to produce a decent return on investment. Which isn’t happening in the foreseeable future.
Individuals may not spend $400 on AI-based services. Employers may purchase much more than that on behalf of each of their (remaining) employees.
"
Since no one else has posted it, Nvidia reported record revenue and profits up 65%. The stock is up 5% in after-hours trading.
"
It seems insane to me, but if China were to decide that if they can't have 3nm chips -- and Biden certainly leaned on Taiwan and countries that might act as intermediaries to block access -- then no one can have 3nm chips... well, a dozen ballistic missiles with big enough HE payloads (and sufficient accuracy) puts TSMC out of that business. TSMC is building a very large campus and production lines in Arizona, but has consistently said they don't plan on ever locating their leading edge processes there.
"
Should have added, the various companies that have decided to design their own chips for AI -- Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, probably some others -- also depend on TSMC for fabrication.
"
Nvidia, of course, manufactures the chips preferred by AI data centers.
Nit-picking... Nvidia designs chips. All of their chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. Earlier this month Nvidia's CEO said publicly that he had asked TSMC to increase their 3nm fab capacity because of the volume of new orders Nvidia was receiving.
On “Your quest begins now!”
This from the magistrate judge’s findings in the Comey case. If it weren’t a Trump-directed prosecution, my gob would be comprehensively smacked.
I understand that this is the first time the assigned DOJ attorney has ever done a prosecution. Her previous experience appears to have been as a real estate lawyer who did work for Trump previously. What would be more surprising would be if she was wonderfully competent and didn't make any procedural errors.
"
I see this morning that Trump is now encouraging the House to vote to release the Epstein files. I've gotten really paranoid over the last 10 months, so I simply assume that's posturing, and Pam Bondi has already told him that her response will be, "There's an ongoing investigation and the DOJ never releases evidence in an ongoing investigation, not even to Congress."
On “Spelunking for fun and profit”
Demonstrating my own biases, Klobuchar wouldn't have a chance. The BosWash urban corridor Democratic mafia hated that Reid and Pelosi attained the top positions in each chamber. They're not going to allow that to happen again.
"
Manchin screwed his own party not long before deciding not to run for another term and his senate seat is now held by a Republican. How is that supposed to be good for Democrats?
The man would have been 77 on election day if he had run again. Can't we let the olds retire? The fact that no Democrat who doesn't have the sort of name recognition that Manchin had in WV (his uncle held statewide office for years; Joe was WV Secretary of State and Governor before he was a Senator) can win is a different problem.
Manchin voted for every nomination Obama and Biden sent to the Senate. While Biden was in office, Manchin eventually voted for every major bill. Sometimes he needed an earmark: the price for his vote on the infrastructure bill was to approve a NG pipeline that ran from the gas fields in WV to a market hub in Virginia. He wasn't nearly as bad as, eg, Joe Lieberman from Connecticut.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.
Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.
On “Still I Rise”
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
On “People and poliltics”
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
On “Horrifying stuff”
Core Tenets of American Culture
The "rugged individualist" myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like "excellence is a habit", "if we all succeed, I've succeeded", and an understated "we're just that damned good". When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.
The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka". The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)
On “Ramsayer, Korea and me”
My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.