WTF-Beta

Year-round Christmas!
I have year-round Christmas avatar, year-round Christmas tree (lit!), year-round Christmas string lights (also lit!) in front of the house.
Not weird, I just have very strong Christmas spirit, year-round.

@Mik said:

Are we really that willfully ignorant and unwilling to look for the truth when that information is so easily available?

***Do you want the truth? Can you handle the truth?***

Save for counting all you weirdos as friends, I am normal, not weird at all.
While I have a normal number of steak knives, I rarely use them to eat food; rather, I use them for food prep.
I am very good at separating meat from bones using only a spoon and a fork. This does not make my weird, just eccentrically skilled.

How about "solvable" instead of "soluble"?
Solvability instead of solubility?
Or "solve" as a noun (in place of "solution")?

Americans usually say "solvable" in the context of discussing a problem. The Indians say "soluble" instead (at least that's what I noticed from watching Indian-produced math-centric YouTube videos).

Have fun with the old people, Jon!

I recently reunited with a childhood friend. We were neighbors and kindergarten classmates for a while. Before this reunion, we haven’t met each other for over 45 years.

It’s not AI. It’s Super Soldier Serum perfected by AI.

What's wrong with a little luxury for Christmas? Even biblical Jesus got luxury gifts from the three wise men on his birth day. It's not Lent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/us/politics/justice-department-civil-rights-division.html

Justice Dept. Turns to Partisans and Conspiracists to Fill Depleted Ranks
The civil rights unit has recruited people whose questionable work histories and dearth of education and experience might have disqualified them in the past, former officials said.

@ShiroKuro said:

I might want to go back and delete this in the future, since it’s kind of personal.

Darn, after reading what @mik posted earlier, I was ready to ask you to post your grant application here so we can judge whether your proposal is worthy of our hard earned tax dollars (as opposed to those woke carp doomed-to-fail-from-the-start projects that @mik wrote about). I guess that won’t happen now.

Just looked … 4.90.

Annoying electronic beeping noise in garage.
Turns out it was alert to replace an automatic garage door opener’s depleted backup battery.
The replacement battery cost 1.5 bags of LaGuardia almonds; should be good for ~3 years.

If you like "big AI is evil" or "doom and gloom for big AI" sorts of commentary, you may like ...

Yellow

China's Xi's state visit to the U.S. overlaps with the Middle East-Autumn Festival, so it I have been seeing this meme making the rounds in certain sinospheres:

All these are art I pieces hang on the wall. Why do I have them? They came with a house I bought a long time ago. Nothing personal at all. When buying the house I did not have anything that I wanted to hang on the walls in particular, but I also did not want the walls to be too bare. So when the seller offered to leave those pieces behind for a token sum, I took the offer.

The last one ... 'til this day I am not sure whether I am hanging it in the orientation the artist intended. I am not motivated enough to find the answer.

But, maybe just for fun, you folks can tell me in which orientation you think I should hang that last piece.

@Bernard said:

OpenAI needs to be treated just as any other hacker. Jail time.

Not practical to put an entire corporation in jail. Please enumerate the specific individuals you believe should be jailed over this incident.

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-agent-hacked-australias-health-service-their-government-found-out-months-later/

OpenAI agent hacked Australian government's health statistics portal. Probably first publicly documented incident of an AI agent hacking a government website.

Unintentional benefit of the war:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/24/how-trump-is-unintentionally-helping-worlds-climate/

... the war with Iran has triggered an unforeseen benefit in the fight against global warming.

[The] war on Iran, now in its seventh month, has led to a plunge in the consumption of oil and gas around the world as fighting disrupts production and transportation.

Brb

That Matterhorn looks ominously evil!