It’s the Trolley Problem. Many people finding themselves in that problem would say, “Of course I flip the switch, one person is less than five people”.

But if you take a step back it’s reasonable to ask, “WHY did I suddenly find myself in this Trolley Problem? Trolleys don’t spring into existence fully formed like Athena springing from Zeus’ forehead. They are designed and built, piece by piece. The switch was setup by the agency of someone. People were kidnapped and tied down by force. I was placed here on purpose.”

So given that realization it’s also reasonable when told you must choose to say, “Why? You designed this system. You tied the people down. You could have done it differently and instead deliberately did THIS. I had nothing to do with it and I refuse the premise that I must participate in your fucked up game. No matter what happens the blood is on your hands and I refuse to share in your guilt.”

That’s the essential argument. There’s the realpolitik decision to do “less harm”, but you can also reject the fucked up premise.

Sucks, but sounds like they’re taking the right steps. I have a little experience with animation graphs, but enough to know that making major updates to the player graph in a live, multiplayer game is a fucking nightmare to debug. The complexity increase is exponential because new states must play nice with many, many existing states and transitions. It’s also hard to automate testing. Also parts of the animation system run in background threads so you can get race conditions. Players find that a particular input fails to trigger some flag that it should and you are now in uncharted territory, and fixing it potentially involves large logic reworks. Fun times.

Not me, but someone I was dating. Her family owned a Chevrolet dealership and she was always driving some kind of lightly used mid-range sedan. Two of them catastrophically failed and one of them would randomly shut off when going over slight bumps. Like going over an expansion joint on a bridge could do a full shut off, no power steering, etc. These were all sub 20k mile cars. She would just get it towed back to the lot and get another one, like a disposable product. The family laughed about ripping off customers. The whole operation was banking off soccer moms buying enormous Suburbans and boomer nostalgia for Corvette. Basically just rent seeking an ancient contract to be the dealer for a large territory. Needless to say I will never buy a Chevy.

Denethor prefers tomatoes raw. More explosive power.

It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.

When I was in elementary school I entered the bathroom and some other boy was standing with his back against the wall, facing the urinals, with his pants down and his dick out. When he saw me he said, “No wait! I can make it!”

He then started to piss. He apparently was pissing as forcefully as he could, trying to “make it”. As his stream started it went all over the floor in front of him, then crept up the wall, splashing all over the pipes and the bottom of the urinal. Finally he got, at best, one drop of piss into the urinal at which point his stream retreated and he re-sprayed everything a second time.

“YEAH!” he said. “YEAH!”, in victory. Then he left.

It’s been like forty years and I still remember this. I have five memories from elementary school and this is one of them.

Hah, nope. Shrek was made in Glendale, so they probably had everything on site or right next door.

In the early 2000s I worked on an animated film. The studio was in the southern part of Orange County CA, and the final color grading / print (still not totally digital then) was done in LA. It was faster to courier a box of hard drives than to transfer electronically. We had to do it a bunch of times because of various notes/changes/fuck ups. Then the results got courier’d back because the director couldn’t be bothered to travel for the fucking million dollars he was making.

Heh, you can buy it online, no need to even leave the house!

One of the reasons so many people are dying from it is American dealers buy it raw and then cut their products with it using the Magic Bullet Blender. But it turns out blenders are really bad at mixing dry powders, contrary to the old wives’ tales that drug dealers tell each other. So you get one pill with nothing and another pill with a fatal dose.

It’s been awhile since I read the book (maybe I should re-read) but from what I remember, while domestic production is possible (and probably still happens to a small degree), it mostly dried up because it’s soooo easy to import it to Mexico and truck it up. Or, in the case of the OP link, import the precursors, put it together in Mexico, and truck it up. Like, as a drug trafficker, you’d be a fool not to from a risk and financial perspective. It’s literally not illegal in China.

Whether this is an “opium war” is another question. We never would have had an opiate crisis in the first place if not for the Sackler’s aggressively pushing prescription opiates. Or if we had, you know, the social will and character to actually treat chronic pain and drug addiction.

You’re welcome, that book is actually the second in a series, the first being “Dreamland”. They were both great reads (and popular enough that I had no problem getting them at the library).

Wikipedia has an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl#Synthesis

It’s not new. It was developed decades ago as a medical opiate by a renowned scientist. New, easier methods of synthesis have come around since, and abuse is exacerbated by the general opioid crisis in the USA, thanks essentially to the Sackler family.

From what I got reading The Least of Us the chemicals involved in the Gupta method are used in industry and essentially impossible to ban. There was some sort of breakthrough a few years ago that made this (relatively easy) method the standard way street fentanyl is made, although I don’t remember the details. Also until fairly recently it was straight-up legal to export fentanyl from China and from there import it into Mexico or have it drop shipped to basically anyone in the USA. Direct import into the USA was illegal but easy to do.

Media and Entertainment side sucks too. No hate on the actual devs, I know a few of the Maya devs personally and they are competent and want to help, but M+E is like 4% of Autodesk revenue so management doesn’t really give a fuck. At least there’s still Houdini and Blender is getting better as the time as well.

The same thing happened to me with a few memories:

• People turning into blocks and interlocking to form a city. It turned out to be Unico: Island of Magic.
• Some evil guy crawling into a painting, and something about hair growing. This was a fucked up movie called The Peanut Butter Solution. This one legit scared the shit out of me as a kid and I had nightmares about it.
• A guy being surrounded with evil looking puppets. This was a stage show called In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo. I didn’t remember this one until the youtube channel RedLetterMedia made fun of it.

These must have just been random VHS tapes my parents got in some bargain bin. I have no idea how we got them or what became of them.

Repair forum version:

• Here are the exact bolts you need to loosen: <dead photobucket link>
• After that make sure you note this gasket: <another dead photobucket link>
• The replacement part is very hard to find but they carry it here: <404>
• You’ll find the torque spec here: <domain sold to online casino advertiser>

Bonus points if the only schematic you can find is a 256 resolution jpg on pinterest that leads to a wordpress site were a bot only posts random schematics to farm pinterest engagement.

Thank you. It’s a new construction and the builder seems to generally pick really good subs, and I’m pretty sure whoever installed it did the entire house, so they should be familiar with it. I’ll give them a call.

Can I pester you with a question? Feel free to tell me to get bent because I know your time is worth money and this is just the internet. We have a new Trane system that was flawless when it was first put in, but over the past five months the blower has started making louder and louder vibration noises. Almost like it’s slightly off balance. If it was an older system I wouldn’t think twice, but it was dead quiet at first, just the sound of moving air pretty much.

Part of me wants to open up the cabinet and just see if there’s some sort of vibration pad that’s gotten loose, but I also don’t want to to void a warranty, or something. It seems so trivial a thing. We live in the boonies and a service call is pretty onerous for a tech. I thought maybe there could be balancing weights, like a car wheel or a lawnmower blade, but your comment about motors being sealed is making me think twice.

I paint. I sold through a gallery for awhile but it just wasn’t worth it when I could make ten times more for far less work doing my original job, so now it’s back to just for fun. Also I hate painting portraits of rich people but if you don’t do that it’s really hard to make money. I also hated the mandatory social media removed. Engaging in that ecosystem disgusts me.

Man, fuck editing the registry. The duplicate entries, the non-standard locations, the UI of regedit… I had to dig through it so much when I was supporting a corporate launcher application in a Windows facility. Did the Windows dev decide to write their data into multiple registry entries, an INI file, an environment variable… or maybe all of the above? Find out on the next episode of Fuck My Life!

I think some people want to find morels so bad they get a sort of “buck fever” and convince themselves they’ve found one. That’s all I can imagine because to my eyes they would be hard to mix up. Same with chanterelle and false chanterelle. Like… sure, I guess if you are profoundly incautious.