Warm. Uncomfortably warm. And moist. Can’t forget moist. Summer in Houston is here. 80F by 8am? Maybe. Certainly got warm yesterday despite the overcast most of the day, for most of Houston. I drove all over and got only a bit of mist on the windshield despite the threatening skies. Then it was thunder and lightning around 8pm, but no release…
Did a few pickups yesterday. IDK what’s up with my brain but this was another day when I just couldn’t get the pickups in in the time I thought I could. I left the house a bit late, due to some gastric distress, and that threw off my whole plan for the day. Unfortunately I didn’t realize it until too late. I might have forfeited about $50 worth of items. One auctioneer is a real bastard about pickup times. I did hit Costco after picking up the kid from school. A quick in and out with only a few items and it was still over $200.
Today I’ve got pickups and two doctor visits. The orthopedic surgeon in the morning to take a look at my right bicep, and my GP in the afternoon to review all the testing I had done. I am afraid I tore something in my previously repaired bicep. It’s not as bad as when I tore it loose the first time, but I definitely heard and felt something give, and it does ache a bit. Maybe the MRI can show if his repair has failed, or if I have a new tear.
Then I’ll meet with my GP to go over all the imaging and cardiac testing I’ve had done. Didn’t find any issues, clean bill of health, but the underlying complaint is still there. Getting old isn’t for the weak, or the indigent. I’m pretty sure I’ll hit my deductible this year, for the second time in 20 years, iirc.
I’m not really complaining too much. I’m healthy and most of the mechanical fixes were straightforward. Wife and kids are crazy healthy compared to just about anyone else I know. The system is broken however, and it does chafe occasionally.
Grid up, we’re living in the future, so let’s leverage that for all it’s worth.
Unfortunately with yesterday’s miscalculations and today’s appointments, I’m losing whatever momentum I had. I know how the next two weeks play out, and it isn’t with me making headway on my storage units or selling a bunch of stuff. Gnu dang it.
I will do what I can, and always be working. Stacking would be easier.
nick
Seriously. Just look at the sheer size of some of the programs. Or the startup times. It’s mostly because people use frameworks that use libraries that were built using frameworks that use libraries, ad nauseum.
A serious optimization effort would shrink programs and speed them up by – quite literally – orders of magnitude.
Why do governments subsidize artists?
Art is best as a hobby – literally everyone has done something “artistic” at some point in their life. Played an instrument, scratched out a picture, sang in the shower, whatever. Whether they did it well or poorly is irrelevant – art is part of human nature.
There are a few artists who may be good enough to make a living at it, in which case, it becomes a trade like any other: if you are good enough that people will pay to buy/see your work, great, you can earn a living at it. But literally no one *owes* an artist a living, and they certainly should not be subsidized with tax money taken from people who *do* work for a living.
According to my wife, Shrub had chronic pain from biking accident injury which the drugs weren’t touching. The Navy sent over O’Connor, who fixed the problem and, after 2008, stuck around at One Naval Observatory during Biden’s run as VP.
Trump continued with the Navy DOs as WH physicians.
Within 10 years, you’ll be lucky to see an MBBS, a Masters degree, most of whom will come from overseas even after the schools are established on US soil.
@lynn
Wait, are you using the same license plates for both vehicles ?
– yep that is one of the advantages of the “radio operator” plate type. They all renew on the same date, and are the same plate, my callsign. Much easier to remember. Cop said up to 3 vehicles, I thought it was 5 when I read the description originally, since I only have 2, I can’t be bothered to look it up. Reg window sticker has the vehicle identification number on it as well as the callsign, so the stickers are unique.
n
We just went through the Go Hot Skillz fire drill where I work.
Big promises. Promotions all around. New hiring with lots of money. Developers making things work given face push in favor of “fresh ideas”. Disappointment. Then Disaster.
I’m waiting for the last one to hit.
The company already lowered the boom on Go, banning it for all new projects, but they’re committed with some work ready for validation.
It doesn’t look like it ever actually rained last night. Still overcast, but some blue poking thru…
77F at the moment.
Lunch made. Eggos in the toaster. Children stirring.
7 minutes ’til the bus arrives.
n
The sheeple lined up for their CRWV shearing starting on Friday despite disappointing results in the first quarter after the IPO.
Buy the dip, sheeple!
My data structures professor in college stated that our ability to create small, quick performing code would lead to success in our future jobs. When I graduated and got a job, I found out that small and quick was NOT valued. But again, that was a long time ago.
Looking around, I’d say that the MS model, get something that mostly works out the door, blame the customer when it fails, sell them the better version later, is the predominant model of software development.
We briefly had “apps” which were mostly small, single purpose software, but even that has grown as resource restrictions have been reduced.
n
They’re still lining up for CRWV shearing today.
$120/lb lobster salad all around in The Hamptons this weekend!
Go away in May …
re: code efficiency
Moore’s law covered a multitude of sins, for better or worse. When I first became a professional programmer, a lot of code was indecipherable because it was written for efficiency, not clarity. Dave Cutler, the father of Windows NT, was infamous for this crap back in his days at Digital Equipment Corp. The first part of my career was maintenance on such code, and I even wrote tools to help me unwind it.
At about that time, someone realized that computer cycles were cheap and getting cheaper, but progarmmer time was getting expensive, so more effort was put into clearer, more maintainable languages and models, and less care for storage space, operating memory, and mass storage consumption.
“Orders of magnitude” may be an exaggeration, or at least only obtainable with vast programmer retraining and effort. Even in the early 80’s, most programmers didn’t understand what was actually going on inside the computer because it was hidden in their 3rd gen languages. The maintainable nature and abstraction and partitioning those languages made possible also hid the innefficiencies built in.
In 1986 I worked in technical services at a bank. One of the business programmers had a month-end program that updated master files from a million or so transactions. I was tasked with finding a fix to this program because its runtime was over 24 hours, and it was interfering with our backup schedule, since backups couldn’t run while it was running.
As an actual computer scientist, I examined his algorithm, and it was fatally flawed. He refused to make the changes I outlined, and eventually his boss and my boss got involved.
He fixed it, under duress, and the runtime went down to about 1 hour.
While there are probably many such opportunities around, the cost of finding and fixing them, and the skilled human resources to do so probably don’t make it reasonable.
TBH, just eliminating offshoring and H1B programmers would fix a lot of the issues, but at a huge cost in development time and expense.
This all flows from the “Good, Fast, Cheap: Choose two.” law. My alteration to it, my 3rd Law of Consulting, is: “Good, Fast, Cheap: Choose (at most) two.”
2nd Law of Consulting: Don’t ask me for my opinion unless you’re prepared for an honest answer. (I was once asked for my opinion about a client’s IT department. After quoting the law, I was asked to answer the question. I said that I’d fire all but one of them.)
1st Law of Consulting: If a client offers you a breath mint, take it.
Laws gained from real-world experience.
That’s not happening. Right now, Corporate America thinks that the AI will write the code with minimal oversight from offshore developers and a few H1Bs to handle emergencies.
Part of the problem is also the incredible demand for software, which needs to be fast and cheap. So bad programmers use frameworks to cobble something together that kinda, sorta works. Meanwhile, good programmers use frameworks to be faster. And the really good programmers write those frameworks and libraries, and as often as not eventually get bored and move on to something else. Leaving us with this situation.
My data structures professor in college stated that our ability to create small, quick performing code would lead to success in our future jobs. When I graduated and got a job, I found out that small and quick was NOT valued. But again, that was a long time ago.
Ship the Demo Program !
I have heard that a time or two.
Then programmers like me have to write a translation program to C++ for speed and expansion capability. I am on my 4th or 5th translator.
Maybe in the past. cURL immediately springs to mind.
(Thank God those guys didn’t get bored with HTTP.)
Lately, however, I’ve noticed a decline in quality of even fundamental frameworks.
For example all of the JSON libraries I’ve encountered have lousy performance, even JSON-C.
JSON parsing performance would be an issue on Wall Street so I’m surprised that someone hasn’t come up with something better.
Related:
Ubuntu Replaces Sudo with Untested Rust Alternative in Next Release
As Greg says: Hot Skilz!!!
Sudo. God help us all.
We had some excitement near the office this morning. “Train drags truck after deadly crash near FM 762 at FM 2759 in Fort Bend County”.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/train-truck-crash-fm-2759-fm-762-crabb-river-fort-bend-county-texas/285-858671d1-899c-48dc-8812-593bbe847357
The truck driver did not make it. If there is not a railroad crossing gate system then ALWAYS stop, look, and listen.
Related:
Ubuntu Replaces Sudo with Untested Rust Alternative in Next Release
As Greg says: Hot Skilz!!!
There will be probably less than a dozen ways to crack it.
“Millions of Texas homes face flood risk as insurance coverage craters”
https://www.chron.com/news/article/texas-floods-insurance-fema-report-20338763.php
“High water. Low coverage. Big problem.”
The cost of flood insurance has skyrocketed. I do not live in the flood zone and mine is almost $1,000 per year now for $250K in coverage.
Today I’ve got pickups and two doctor visits. The orthopedic surgeon in the morning to take a look at my right bicep, and my GP in the afternoon to review all the testing I had done. I am afraid I tore something in my previously repaired bicep. It’s not as bad as when I tore it loose the first time, but I definitely heard and felt something give, and it does ache a bit. Maybe the MRI can show if his repair has failed, or if I have a new tear.
Sorry to hear that. Hope it is just a minor ache.
Seriously. Just look at the sheer size of some of the programs. Or the startup times. It’s mostly because people use frameworks that use libraries that were built using frameworks that use libraries, ad nauseum.
A serious optimization effort would shrink programs and speed them up by – quite literally – orders of magnitude.
My software is all written in compiled Fortran and C++. It is huge but it does a lot of stuff.
My Windows user interface Win32 EXE is 18,009,600 bytes.
My Windows calculation engine Win32 DLL is 11,806,720 bytes.
My distribution setup exe is 186 MB that expands to 370 MB.
“Patrick Mahomes-backed franchisee is acquiring more Whataburger restaurants”
https://www.chron.com/culture/article/whataburger-patrick-mahomes-20335558.php
“The Texan is expanding his burger empire.”
Smart man. He knows that investing now will make his future more secure.
Part of the problem is also the incredible demand for software, which needs to be fast and cheap. So bad programmers use frameworks to cobble something together that kinda, sorta works. Meanwhile, good programmers use frameworks to be faster. And the really good programmers write those frameworks and libraries, and as often as not eventually get bored and move on to something else. Leaving us with this situation.
Yup, I know some of those guys. They are dying rapidly. I have several open source package libraries in my software, I am worried about converting them to 64 bit. I figure that I will burn that bridge when I get to it.
That’s not happening. Right now, Corporate America thinks that the AI will write the code with minimal oversight from offshore developers and a few H1Bs to handle emergencies.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha !
One of my nephews is a Product Manager for a major financial company. They just moved his programming team from India to Chicago trying to get them more responsible. My nephew is looking for a new job as he knows that the move will be worthless.
In 1986 I worked in technical services at a bank. One of the business programmers had a month-end program that updated master files from a million or so transactions. I was tasked with finding a fix to this program because its runtime was over 24 hours, and it was interfering with our backup schedule, since backups couldn’t run while it was running.
As an actual computer scientist, I examined his algorithm, and it was fatally flawed. He refused to make the changes I outlined, and eventually his boss and my boss got involved.
He fixed it, under duress, and the runtime went down to about 1 hour.
I wrote our monthly invoicing program in Fortran back in 1978 on the Univac 1108 when I was 18. It took an hour of cpu time to run.
My boss took a look at it and discovered that I used formatted reads and writes on intermediate files. He told me to convert all those formatted reads and writes to binary. That cut the run time to a minute. I learned a serious lesson that day.
If the private equity owners don’t screw up Whataburger.
If the private equity owners don’t screw up Whataburger.
One hopes that he has more investments.
Back on US soil. Currently on a 3 hour layover waiting for our flight out of ATL home. We were in England and Wales for 2 weeks, and it only rained this morning for a little bit. awe left at 10:30 local time, and the flight was around 9 hours. Even though it was daytime, I was able to sleep a couple hours. We should get home at 8:30 pm local time. I’m definitely taking tomorrow off work to recover (and give the dogs some needed attention). I might take Friday off too depending on how the sleep pattern recovers.
Global Entry was worth the price. We walked through almost as quickly as we did going into England for free…but we did pass a huge line in the stand processing queue.
Next international trip might be Italy in 2 years. Next year is Hawaii for out son’s college graduation celebration.
“Branco Cartoon – Bad Medicine”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-bad-medicine/
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – What kind of doctor wouldn’t run a PSA test on a man over seventy, especially a president? Some sort of witch doctor?”
“TVA is first US utility to apply for an SMR construction permit”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tva-first-utility-small-modular-reactor-construction-permit/748734/
“The application kicks off a multi-year federal permitting process as the country’s largest public power provider works to bring its first advanced reactor online in late 2032.”
About time for someone to stick their toe in the water.
Oh boy.
United Health was paying bonuses to nursing homes to not send the sick to a hospital.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unitedhealth-shares-drop-after-report-reveals-secret-bonus-payments-nursing-homes-cutting
Wow. If true, this will probably blow up spectacularly. How many people have had a loved one in a nursing home die? Every single one of those deaths with a UH connection is now suspect. And, probably, the other companies were doing it too.
Aaaaand, btw, good luck with finding unbiased jurors for the Luigi M. case.
A fast food franchisee can only consume so much capital.
Kansas City proper is not exactly a high end market.
As with Ted Bundy, a lot of women want to have sex with Luigi M. The wealthy family background and U. Penn Ivy League education will help too.
Beyond that, many people have been screwed by UHC, myself included.
Yes, it is. My return trips from around the World have been a breeze. The new camera scan entry takes only seconds. And you get preCheck.
“Doomsday Reef” by Matthew Bracken
https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Reef-Matthew-Bracken/dp/0972831088?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a three book post world financial apocalypse thriller series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Steelcutter Publishing in 2024 that I bought new on Amazon in 2025. I look forward to more books in the series.
The United States of America is no more. It was killed by gasoline and diesel at $60 per gallon, shutting down the trucks and trains bringing food to the big cities. Starvation and cannibalism became common. Many people have left the USA looking for cheaper places to live but soon found themselves in the same problems.
Dan Kilmer is a former US Marine sniper with a failed shot at college. He joined his uncle restoring an old 60 foot long (20 meter) twin masted steel schooner down in Florida. As they got close to the end of the immense project, his uncle fell off a ladder and subsequently passed away. Dan inherited the “Rebel Yell” from his uncle and finished the project, launching the ship and moved to the Bahamas. He makes money by running small cargoes.
Captain Dan and his crew were on one of the small islands off South Carolina when they got crosswise with the island militia. They had been running diesel drum cargos from Louisiana up the coast for gold. They decided to run for Argentina but got caught in a hurricane and were partially demasted. Then they make for Jamaica, looking for a large crane to reset the foremast.
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (355 reviews)
Lynn
The family of Ashley Babbitt settles for $5 million:
Trump admin to pay whopping sum to Ashley Babbitt’s family in new Jan. 6 settlement
St. Floyd’s family got upwards of $27 million and Chauvin got prison.
Babbitt’s murderer, Michael “Got me a Whitey” Byrd, walks free.
”A whopping sum” my ass.
The DOJ should go after Bird and make his life miserable.
“Masked NIH Employees Storm Out Of Meeting After Director Bhattacharya Questions Agency’s Role In COVID-19 Origins”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/masked-nih-employees-storm-out-meeting-after-director-bhattacharya-questions-agencys-role
Now we have a list of employees to fire at NIH !
Home from the woods. Saw two hares, a fox, and Bambi’s mother. As I am not a Disney villain, I did not shoot her.
My choice of location was good. With the wind on my face, the heavily pregnant doe walked up to within about 15 yards of me and never even knew I was there. Roe are, in my opinion, the most beautiful of the deer family. To see one right up close like that was a treat.
My hunting buddy has arrived to spend a few days with me at the BOL. What ought to have been a light snack before bed turned into steak sandwiches and beer, followed by cheese, crackers and talking nonsense until after midnight. I rate our chances of getting up and out pre-dawn after four hour’ sleep as slim to nil.
Goodnight!
“China Demands US Scrap Golden Dome Missile Defense System As It Will ‘Turn Space Into A Battlefield’”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-demands-us-scrap-golden-dome-missile-defense-system-it-will-turn-space
Maybe we should put a Golden Dome over Taiwan also.
Michael Byrd once left his service weapon weapon in a restroom at the Capitol Visitors Center. If he had been fired, as he should have been, Ashli would still be alive.
The Chinese have already decided to make space a battlefield; they just don’t want anybody playing defense up there.
The thing was, SDI and “Star Wars” was an absolute success. Even a system that could knock down 25% of the incoming missiles made an attack too risky; the 25% of the silos that survived would be enough to destroy the USSR completely. The Soviets needed a nearly total success in a first strike to be able to survive a counterstrike. I’m sure that the ChiComs have made/will make a similar calculation.
Israel’s “Iron Dome” has proven that it can be done, and Trump’s “Golden Dome” is clearly the responsible thing to do. Expensive? Yes. But the most expensive waste of all is the SECOND-best military; you spend all that money and then still lose the war.
Taiwan should buy the Iron Dome from Israel, and add enough anti-drone defenses to prevent the CCP from overwhelming Taiwan with cheap drones.
Up until iOS 5 and Automatic Reference Counting, effective memory management on the iPhone was difficult. Windows developers not used to the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm and bad habits with regard to abusing the stack couldn’t produce stable apps beyond a certain size.
The canonical sudo joke…
https://xkcd.com/149/
——————
Finally home from my busy day.
Ortho doc says the imagery looks good, the exam looked good. Sprain, maybe. Something moved, “maybe some scar tissue let go”… Monitor and if no improvement in a month, revisit.
GP doc, ‘hey it’s great you don’t have cancer, and your heart is in good shape, all the other stuff looks good too. BUT. Still no explanation for the original complaint so let’s have another guy take a look, just to rule out the last two things.’ Also, he seemed really really surprised that I think I have a mild allergy to olives. Says he’s never run into that before. Off to the ENT and an allergy screen…
Me, I just want to rule out the majors, and most of the minors, then I’ll just deal… as long as I feel confident I’m not “ignoring” a possible issue, I’m fine just living my life.
BTW, suddenly I have “old man skin.” How did I get old?
OH, RIGHT. The last thing that ate all the time between now and 5pm was celebrating eldest’s 16th completed year on this earth. (I insist it’s the 17th birthday, since you should count the first one too. Kinda like programmers with an ‘off by one’ errror.)
20 years of marriage, 16 years of kid, 14 years of kids. I came by my grey hair honestly…
n
I see that I won 3 more lots of two panels. That brings the total to 12 identical 415w panels. I had to pay a little more than 10c/watt for these six panels. I’m beginning to think I should save these panels for the big house, and use the other two identical 440w panels for the dockhouse.
I’m saving enough on the panels that it makes sense to buy proper gear to work with them. Maybe grid tied to start, and add storage as I can afford it? I’ll have to see what the electric co-op offers at the BOL.
I also won a tomahawk. All the tacticool kids have one, so I got one too. I guess I’ll watch some youtube and see why I want one.
n
Breaking: 2 Killed in Shooting Outside Capital Jewish Museum, Including Israeli Embassy Staffer (Updated)
https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2025/05/21/breaking-2-killed-in-shooting-outside-capital-jewish-museum-including-israeli-embassy-staffer-n2189424
Tomorrow would be a good day to hammer The Ivys for another $1 billion, and take another $1 billion in grants off the table for some of the non-Ivy cesspools.
Shooter is from Chicago:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/05/21/targeted-attack-two-people-with-ties-to-israeli-embassy-shot-in-dc-n2657467
Long day and I’m beat. I’m off like a prom dress.
n
>>Didn’t find any issues, clean bill of health, but the underlying complaint is still there.
@nick, hope you get to the bottom of what ails you. Unfortunately for me, sometimes the complaint is inherent to the condition without a better explanation.