Feels like the Great White North here … well, not really but it is chilly. It was 41F and dropping when I went to bed. Nice during the day, with the nuclear fire in the sky, but as soon as we rotated out of its magnificent radiation, it got chilly willy. I expect today to be the same.
Good weather for working in the attic though. I got the home run for the server closet circuit, and the master bathroom circuit run. Didn’t land them in the panel, might do that today. Did more organizing and finding stuff that got brought up here but never made it out of a box… And there is a lot of it.
Finally got a chance to visit with my fisherman buddy. He’s got a new puppy that is tiny and cute and has SO MUCH ENERGY. Chihuahua and terrier mix… both he and his wife are doing well in their cancer fights. I finally asked because I hadn’t had a chance to hear anything from his wife. I’m glad it was good news.
I’m staying up today too. I’m moving slowly, sedately, with ponderous majesty, or something, but I’m moving and making progress. I don’t want to lose momentum.
So I’ll keep plugging away, and take some meds for the aches…
Stack or work, but do something.
nick
I must be getting old and jaded.
Back in January, a new open-source app (OpenClaw) hit the younger, AI-enthusiastic tech world like a bomb. It lets you give an AI full access to work on your computer: answer your mails, install programs, whatever you want it to do. Back in my younger days, I would have loved to experiment with something like that! Now, I just think of all the things it is likely to screw up.
OTOH, now that I am teaching teenagers, it is refreshing to see that young enthusiasm in their eyes. I may not have that enthusiasm anymore, but it is nice to see it.
– – – – –
We have solar on the roof, but in Winter it doesn’t produce a lot. Part of it is the low angle of the sun, and part is snow on the roof. So we’re thinking about added a few more panels on the south side of the house – great winter sun and no snow issue. At the same time, we would add a battery.
The result would be – by my estimate anyway – that we would be completely independent except for about 6-8 weeks around the Winter solstice. During that time, we would have the usual problems with the rooftop solar, plus running the heat pump, so we would still have to buy power.
There’s a psychological factor to increased independence, and near immunity to future price increases. Plus we would be immune to power failures (except in Winter). On the other hand, the hard, cold figures aren’t all that great. Savings would be around Fr. 800 per year at current prices. The installation would cost around 30 times that.
Worth it? Or a waste of money?
Brad,
do you expect to be able to use the installation for 30 years? Would just investing the cost of the installation generate SFR 800 return a year?
Glad to hear that about your buddy and his wife. I am sure a puppy is good for whatever ails one.
I am so stealing that line…
In positive news, my leave until and including 10 March has been approved. First, I will sleep a lot.
Good morning!
A magic device that wakes one in the night and tells one to eat cookies? Sounds too good to be true, as long as it also prescribes milk.
Be well, Nick.
VW has been left holding the bag on the Scout EV boondoggle as it looks like Walz will be fitted for an orange suit at a Federal Prison before too long.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/vw-group-delays-scout-motors-launch-until-at-least-2028-report
People would actually buy a Harvester Scout like Walz owns. Unlike Walz, however, many would get their hands dirty working on the engine.
For those of you who don’t understand the reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N-B0_OKkeg
The latest way to keep the plates spinning on the monkey trick as well as generating Mac Mini sales for Apple.
The Real Life Tony Stark weighed in on OpenClaw recently.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2026019344602288166
The A18 Mac Book will be a hit if it has enough RAM and Tim can keep the price under $600.
8 GB will not be enough to run OpenClaw, however. I have to turn the AI tools off in Xcode on my 8 GB MacBook Pro M1.
Also, more Atom/Node.JS bloatware making the young’n’s lazy and stupid … like VS Code.
Related: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/euthanized-while-white
The majority of the buyers will never need that app. 8GB and 256GB SSD would be plenty for the majority of purchasers. Those that need more, know who they are, and will be purchasing something else more suited.
Truth be told, my M4 MacBook Pro is vastly overkill for my needs. I just wanted one, mostly for the SDXC slot and Thunderbolt 5. Other than that, the M2 Air would be fine and would still be overkill for me.
I still see HSN selling HP touchscreen laptops with 4GB and 128GB and within a show will sell a thousand. For the price of $399.99, with a mouse and a case. Windows 11 “S” Mode. There are people for which these are truly useful machines. It would work quite well for my wife except I transitioned her to the Apple ecosystem.
A Mac on the A18 chip would be just as useful. The only unknown is what the device will sell for. Apple will need to keep the price under $600.00 otherwise Apple will be intruding on the Air, which can be had for $700.00 on sale.
If the price of the A18 model is $500.00 or less (which I highly doubt), I will buy one, in blue. Not that I need one. But for traveling where I don’t do much beyond Email and some web apps, it would work quite well. Low risk and value if stolen or damaged.
I may even buy one in yellow for my wife and brother-in-law at that price point.
I have 8GB RAM and 256 GB storage on my MacBook Pro M1. It works except for when I enable the AI code completion features in Xcode.
The newer MacBook Pro is heavy, hopefully something Apple addresses with the refresh later this year.
Plus, I got hooked on the Touch Bar working for Clapper. That company spent money for machines.
When I finally pull the plug on my 2012 Pro as my primary Mac, I will need 512 GB storage to continue to manage my photo and email archive on the platform.
Better deals are available for ~$300, even with tariffs and AI supply chain issues.
Once Apple delivers a MacBook with USB-C docking capability for $500-600, all of the big PC vendors are going to have to offer the feature at the same price point.
Existing laptops without the capability will have to be blown out of inventories cheap.
USB-C docking will be the “killer app“ this year.
I have 24GB and 1TB on my MacBook. Much more than I really need. Why? Because I wanted it and it’s my money.
Lightroom does run fast. It would probably run the same speed with 16GB, where such a statement gives the fanboys gastric distress.
up and with coffee in the pot. I think I can recommend the big moka pot, if you want to make more than two little espresso cups at a time. It’s heavy, with thick metal for the lower pot and thin stainless for the upper ‘pitcher. The design flares the bottom, so that more heat hits it, and so it’s more stable. The only real question is if the silicon gaskets are available, but they might be the same size as the name brand…
—–
54F, sunny and clear. another beautiful day.
I will try to get the hall bath electrical roughed in today, and get my truck unloaded and stuff put away. That should be doable.
Slept in because I could and after waking at 3, 5, and 8am, I needed a bit more. FWIW, three Lemonades cookies bumped my sugar to 140… more than a Little Debbie stick donut.
—–
time for breakfast, and hopefully the coffee will be done soon, the only real drawback is how long the moka pot takes.
n
Nothing guilty looking about this…
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/former-norway-pm-attempts-suicide-after-epstein-linked-raid-corruption-charges-report
It’s a big club…
n
Can I buy a new desktop with Windows 11 Pro and a CD / DVD drive anywhere from a reputable builder ? Or will I have to use an external USB CD / DVD drive ?
I got headhunter spam from “stellantits.com”. Typical Indian attention to detail or outright spam? Who knows? Get deleted either way.
For work I just bought some Dell Pro Max towers and was able to get an internal DVD drive, though not Blu-ray. I would frankly just go with a usb external so you don’t limit your choices.
Sony discontinued production of BluRay writeable media. Others will continue to manufacture discs, but Sony holds control of the license.
Something is up with BluRay. Sony also ended production of a BluRay recorder similar in function to a VCR, a product never seen in the US, but popular in Japan.
The PC vendors know what’s coming.
BC: Pet Rocks for $2.99
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2026/02/24
Oh yeah, the monkey trick allows one to do all sorts of crazy things. For now.
“Supreme Court to Decide on Climate Lawsuits Against Energy Giants”
https://www.chemicalprocessing.com/industrynews/news/55359373/supreme-court-to-decide-on-climate-lawsuits-against-energy-giants
“The court’s decision on whether to shield energy companies from climate lawsuits could significantly impact future climate litigation. The case, involving major oil firms and local governments, raises questions about legal responsibility and federal preemption in addressing climate change costs.”
It is way past time for SCOTUS to do this. The lawyers are trying to get a free piece of the energy companies just like they got a free piece of the tobacco companies. 30% to 50% of your electricity and gasoline bills could go to lawyers retirement funds if this is not stopped now.
Feels like the Great White North here … well, not really but it is chilly. It was 41F and dropping when I went to bed. Nice during the day, with the nuclear fire in the sky, but as soon as we rotated out of its magnificent radiation, it got chilly willy. I expect today to be the same.
It was 37 F at the office last night when I left to go home at 2 am. The office is a mile away from the Brazos River which affects the weather around it a lot. By the time I got home, 5 miles away from the Brazos River, it was 40 F.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Yah, sure, it was expressed as a means to the end of increasing social disorder.
But, considering the anarchotyrannical “social order” we now “enjoy”, would killing all of the lawyers actually make things worse?
Just make sure to bundle in all of the lobbyists and activists. Many but not all of them are lawyers and we don’t want to miss any.
Golden Moment: Men’s Olympic Hockey Team Descends on White House, Prepares for the SOTU
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/02/24/golden-moment-mens-olympic-hockey-team-descends-on-white-house-n2199533
Too bad the women’s team had prior commitments–I hear Shakey’s is a booger with their non-refundable pizza party deposits.
After Massive Loss To USA, Entire Canadian National Hockey Team To Be Euthanized For Being ‘Sad’
https://thefederalist.com/2026/02/24/after-massive-loss-to-usa-entire-canadian-national-hockey-team-to-be-euthanized-for-being-sad/
So we have chinese harvesting organs on demand for western clients. State assisted suicide, essentially for anyone that wants it. Experimental surgeries for all…
JEP thought it wouldn’t come, but it has.
n
Pournelle was an optimist.
“Despair is a sin.
We haven’t seen human flesh at the supermarket … yet.
We haven’t seen human flesh at the supermarket … yet.
You havent been to the “special” market.
As I proposed before, energy companies should announce that they are suspending sales in Boulder while litigation is pending “out of an abundance of caution” to meet their fiduciary duties to their shareholders.
During the same press conference they can note that they are considering expanding the policy to the entire state of Colorado. They can assure reporters that they have checked the official capacity figures for wind, solar, and other non-fossil fuel sources in Colorado, and found that there is enough capacity there to meet demand. When asked what will happen when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow, they should state that they are sure that the governor and legislature will have to explain their plans.
Yes, though I’m not christian and don’t accept christian framing of sin. (I’d express it more as, If you give up, you’re a dumbass and a coward.)
The problem comes in taking an objective view of a very bad situation. The effort to avoid despair can lead one to downplay the seriousness of the situation or to reject logical projections of trends.
“Learning From Minnesota’s Somali Fraud Scandal”
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/learning-from-minnesotas-somali-fraud-scandal/
“The massive public programs fraud committed almost entirely by Somali perpetrators has recently exploded in the national news. The controversy is centered in Minnesota, where the amount of money bilked from American taxpayers could prove to be as high as $9 billion. But the scandal is spreading to other states as well. When Ryan Thorpe and Chris Rufo published an article in the November 2025 issue of City Journal linking the fraud to the funding of Al-Shabaab—a Somali-based Sunni Islamist organization that is designated a terrorist group by several nations, including the U.S.—President Trump took notice and announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Somali immigrants. In late December, YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a 42-minute video that showed him knocking on the doors of Somali-run day care centers in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area that seemed to have no children in attendance. The video went viral, quickly garnering more than 130 million views on X and 2.5 million views on YouTube. But while this story is new to most Americans, it is anything but new to Minnesotans and others who have been paying it the attention it deserves.”
Are any of the Somalis not involved in defrauding the USA ?
It is obvious that Walz is involved somehow. You don’t participate in that level of fraud without a payoff.
“A long overdue update to legacy computer software?”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-long-overdue-update-to-legacy.html
“That being the case, Anthropic claims to have developed an AI system that can update legacy COBOL systems, convert them into modern coding languages, and replace the old systems with the new. This means it will have to read and understand COBOL (not always an easy task with rambling, much-modified legacy coding), break it down into more understandable chunks, rewrite each chunk in modern computer languages, test them for accuracy, produce easy-to-understand flow charts or other technical documentation for each of them, and gradually replace all that clunky stuff with modern software.”
My engineering software package that I write and sell for a living is 800,000 lines of Fortran 77 code and 650,000 lines of C++ code. I never could get my Fortran 77 code to work with the Fortran 90 compilers so I have been limping along on a 1990 F77, C, and C++ compiler from Watcom. I am now biting the bullet and converting my Fortran 77 code to C++ using a customized version of F2C that I modified to do about 80% of the work for me. I have about 150,000 lines of the F77 code converted to C++ now and am converting 5 to 10 subroutines a day when I do not have distractions known as customers. The hardest part is the indexing of arrays starts at one in F77 and starts at zero in C++. And the character strings are a total rewrite.
Sadly, the 1990 update for the Fortran language started the path of converting from a professional language to a hobbyist language. Every time I mention this, the Fortran language lawyers start screaming like banshees. None of them know what is like working with over a million lines of code in your desktop software.
Tuesday. Bedtime.
How nice it was to have a day off. I got lots of stuff done that had been back-burnered because of work. I did some banking stuff, talked to the glass fibre Internet people for the BOL, went to the pharmacy, bought some music online, had lunch out, went to the range.
A good day. Now for a good night. Goodnight!
They’re trying to satisfy 80% of the market. With “the market” being the number of people talking about it, not the number of lines of code or the number of people maintaining legacy code.
As for LLMs translating COBOL or other old code to new languages, libraries, and frameworks, let’s just say that I have my doubts. It would be great if it works, but that’s a mighty big if. If I were a vice president in charge of a corporation’s COBOL-based payroll system, I’d insist on 100% coverage by unit and integration tests and 100% successful pass rate by the new system. I suspect that what will be delivered will be similar to the replacement of C-based Linux command line utilities with Rust-based versions which pass “a significant fraction” of tests.