“Clown.” Some of my best friends do clowning as a hobby.

“How do I build a better guillotine that starts with B?”

(There’s a guy named “Magnus Carlsen” who is arguably the best chess player of all time.)

Check your spam folder. I don’t know that I’ve ever not received an email I was supposed to have received and found that the spam folder was actually the issue. But it’s still a good idea to check it in case that’s the whole issue.

For your son?

“You?” As in me? I’m confused.

Ah. Ok. I did watch it at double speed, so I guess I can’t really argue.

What was wrong with the video exactly?

I heartily approve.

Imagine a poster of Tom Holland, white powder all over his nose, with the slogan “Snort Milk?” in bold across the top.

That’s… kindof the question, isn’t it?

(Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the video yet. But yeah.)

That’s a quantum mechanics thing. And quantum mechanics has a long history of making physicists and physics students really uncomfortable. The following two quotes illustrate just how fucked up quantum mechanics really is:

God does not play dice

• Albert Einstein

I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

• Erwin Schrödinger

Before quantum mechanics, our Newtonian understanding of the world was really simple. We thought particles were little billiard balls floating around and bumping into each other and being attracted and repelled by electric fields and such. But nope! Turns out you can’t even conceptually understand what’s going on at that scale without making the observer/measurer/measurement a central feature of the literal math. But if you don’t do the uncomfortable things in the math, you can’t get results from the math that match what happens in the real world.

W.

T.

F.

Seriously. You’re asking exactly the right question. The question that made the discoverers of quantum mechanics uncomfortable in the first place. Unfortunately, there’s no one answer to it. There are a bunch.

In practice, you don’t really have to have “the answer” to that question to design functioning solid-state storage devices or predict the half-life of a muon. You can just kindof throw up your hands and take it for wrote that “the spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured” (nor the position nor the velocity nor any of a bunch of other such properties of the particles in the system). But it’s not like physicist don’t still have this question in the back of their minds keeping them up at night.

That’s the joke.

Nobody else immediately thought of this?

Cura’s a fantastic slicer, but kindof a terrible program. They gave up on ARM support a while ago. And their dependency situation is majorly out of control. To the point that Gentoo has literally given up on supporting it and maintaining a working package.

Because fuck you, that’s why.

• Microsoft

Saved you a click.

Remember that scene from Prometheus?

For customers to hire them. Yeah, ok. That makes more sense. I mean, in the same way hostile architecture makes sense, but at least now I understand what they’re trying to accomplish and how the machines further their fucked-up goals.

I don’t understand. If they want people to stop seeking temp jobs there, wouldn’t just always turning people away when they ask for day labor work? (And maybe put up a sign that says “we’ll never give you day labor”.) And given that they’ve gone to the length of installing machines, surely they already do always turn people away, in which case why are people braving the noise machines to wait to be turned away?

Is this people hoping that Home Depot customers will hire them for a day job for like… assistance with building a deck or whatever? The article makes it sound like they’re asking the Home Depot itself for work, though.

Whatever the case, Home Depot is clearly bigoted assholes who are willing to be assholes to their customers so long as they can also be assholes to latinx folks, but I don’t get quite what their motive here is, nor how they expect these machines accomplish whatever they’re hoping.

Broken clock.

Before I read the body of the post, I was going to recommend “gl;hf” (the only podcast I’ve really listened to in quite a while), but they don’t stay on topic. There is no topic, really. It’s just rambling about whatever comes to them as it comes up.

At the beginning of every episode, they start with “welcome to gl;hf, the world’s first podcast in gaming.” And the running joke is that they rarely talk about gaming at all.

Largely they talk about being prolific career YouTube content creators, but they may delve into random stuff like the U.S. National Cheese Reserve or the ethics of eating lab-grown human meat or Uncle Wiggily board games.

On the plus side, they’re always interested in what they’re talking about.

Wait. “Eye contact.” Doesn’t that imply that the sun has eyes?

ARE YOU FUCKING TELLING ME THE SUN HAS HAD EYES THIS WHOLE TIME?