WTF-Beta

From the article:

there is a right way (and a wrong way) to eat steak frites

F* that elitist attitude. Once the food is mine, I eat it anyway I want; my enjoyment of said food is paramount.

@jon-nyc said:

How useful is it for a couple? I associate it with bulk purchases.

From Costco, I still buy certain frozen treats and prepackaged drinks that has relatively long shelf lives that I can daw down slowly. But the savings from those purchases can hardly make up for the membership cost. Nay, getting gasoline from Costco (already cheaper than other gas stations) using its credit card (with 5% cash back for gasoline/diesel purchase) is what makes the Costco membership financially worthwhile for me these days,

@Daniel said:

There are men who go to Costco to have sex in the bathrooms.

As the article quoted in the opening post says: “… the warehouse giant has emerged as an unexpected anchor for connection.“

“The Last International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) Problem AI Could Not Solve”

I have just discovered this thing called "micellar water." I saw boxes of "micellar facial cleansing wipes" in Costco and decided to try it. No rinsing off required.

I used it to wipe my face last night, I liked it then. I woke up this morning, and I still like it the morning after.

So, for those of you who have been using micellar water for much longer, what say you? Any long term side effects that I should be cautious about?

How to prove that a digital photograph was really taken by a camera and is the original (as opposed to, say, generated by AI or has been altered somehow)?

Apple Inc. has implemented a system to "prove" just that:

https://gizmodo.com/apple-explains-how-its-new-iphone-18-photo-verification-actually-works-2000812623

It's built into the iPhone 18, you can choose whether to use that feature (configurable on the phone), and if you do, your iPhone will send your picture into Apple Inc.'s cloud for cryptographic processing (the phone needs to be connected to the cloud around the time the picture was taken). Apple Inc. claims that it cannot actually "see" your picture as it cryptographically signs it. At the end of it, there is a trail of digital evidence that speak to what the original picture was as taken by the camera sensor, which sensor captures the data, in which phone, and when the picture was taken.

Now the trillion dollar question: What do you folks think of it?

@steve-miller Bon voyage, enjoy Switzerland!

Speaking of Zurich and airports ... sometime in the near future I expect to have a 14 hour layover at the Zurich airport, from 8 PM to 10 AM the next day. Anyone familiar with the Zurich airport care to share tips for how to best deal with this extended overnight layover at ZRH?

@CHAS said:

They need want that why?

1. To target advertising more precisely.
2. Grab the data first, figure out how to monetize them later.

The world is set to burn record amounts of coal this year, ...

... A big reason is that many countries have struggled to procure enough oil and natural gas because of disruptions to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. That has led places like Europe, China, Japan and Korea to burn more coal for electricity instead. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/climate/global-coal-demand-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFE.Z8EM.5o973Tr5xwbD

A JD Vance priority:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/us/politics/stay-at-home-parents-subsidies.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-1A.XCFi.J1Iq6_NUNoUs

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies ... using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, ...

My take:

• I think it's generally a good idea to subsidize childcare for low-income parents, and the publicly funded benefits should also apply to parents who choose to stay at home to care for their own children (as opposed to only let the money go to professional third-party caregivers).
• I would like to see more funding allocated to childcare subsidies, which this proposal does not do. The proposal merely redistributes existing funding (taking from the same pot of money that used to go to professional third-party caregivers to give to some stay-at-home parents). This will likely reshuffle the deck and lead to some working parents losing childcare services that would then force them to quit their jobs and become stay-at-home parents.
• I don't like the restriction that limits this proposed benefits to married parents only. Single parents, divorced parents, widowed parents ... they are parents too and should be eligible for the same benefits. Restricting the benefits to "married parents only" starts an unnecessary culture war that may weaken the support for the proposal.

AI-powered toothbrush with camera, by Dyson (yes, the vacuum cleaner and hair dryer company), for $499.

https://www.dyson.com/oral-care/electric-toothbrush/camerajet/ceramic-pink-set

https://www.usatoday.com/story/shopping/trending/drops/2026/09/01/dyson-launches-camerajet-toothbrush-with-camera-water-jet/91561253007/

Put some groceries in it, or replace the stroller with a a grocery cart.

Try to "refresh" or "reload" the page in your browser.

Yeap, I knew that @steve-miller would say Speed Queen.

Just looked it up. A new SQ washer costs about 3x the price of the typical new, non-SQ washer that I would buy for my own use.

The world is a massively multiplayer role playing game.

Many years ago, I, as an adult visiting Tokyo, saw a building with many pianos — a piano shop. I went inside, saw no employee, so I walked around, looked around, then sat down and played the biggest concert grand. When I looked up, half a dozen store employees, all men, surrounded me at a polite distance. Reading the room, I thought they treated my presence as a “security situation.” Turned out I wondered into one of their special rooms presumably reserved for artist recording (I could not be sure due to language barrier), and I was politely invited/escorted to another room — also with many marvelous grand pianos — a showroom where visitors are allowed to play the pianos.

Would have been a cuter story in my memory had I been a six year old, though my parents/legal guardians may have had a big scare for having lost a kid in Tokyo.

The New Yorker dude’s story might have ended up in a police report instead of the New Yorker had he looked like a delinquent teenager, the sort the princess-like woman would clutch her purse in his presence and call the cops.

At least it’s not about digestive health.

Congratulations on getting fiber Internet, it’s usually the best form of Internet wherever it’s available.

Advice to kids: use your head, but not that way.

https://www.bmj.com/content/394/bmj-2026-100418

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/nfl-cte-brain-disease.html

... nearly a quarter of all former NFL players who died during 2016-21 had CTE neuropathology at death ...

1 in 4 NFL players had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

https://www.inquirer.com/health/measles-deaths-lancaster-county-pennsylvania-20260825.html

Pennsylvania reported two measles-related deaths on Tuesday, the first fatalities from the highly contagious disease in the state in 35 years and the only deaths involving the highly contagious disease confirmed nationally so far this year.

The deaths occurred in Lancaster County, the center of a major measles outbreak that has sickened nearly 400 people this year, state officials said. Both people were unvaccinated.

What’s the school board’s rationale?
The journalist/editor didn’t even bother with a line like “we asked the school board to comment but has not received a response at press time.”