I get the feeling that Ricky is the kind of person who believes he is uniquely smart, or at least that everyone else is very stupid, and gets quietly offended about it if you challenge that idea.

excellent job with this

it’s not a compelling argument for the likes of you or me, but for the poor ultra-wealthy and powerful of the world, it often makes the spark of compassion in a judge’s heart flare brightly.

OTOH, speaking as someone who worked in EMS for over a decade, the number of firefighters and EMS workers that radiate 3.6 Roentgen of Hitler particles is unnervingly high. I’m guessing this is shock that the leopard would eat THEIR face.

Golly, this is fuckin bleak.

At last, zero self awareness, wow.

okay, next question: why aren’t they getting those sterols?

follow up: are wild, native bees also affected, or is it just the European honeybees?

Amazing. This picture improved my day. Great work. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

… for dinner? Where’s the rest of the sentence?

stop removing bike lanes, start removing car lanes

yeah. I’m wondering if GPT-5 being a wet fart is going to be the thing that pops the bubble.

I mean, tools are tools. Their value, good or bad, is in how they’re used. If you do something like hit your own hand with a hammer, it’s really not the hammer’s fault. LLMs are 95% gizmos, with a few actually useful cases accounting for the other 5%, at least while they’re still priced way under cost anyway.

Dear God, I keep expecting this to run out of gas and it just won’t quit!

Oh, absolutely. But that doesn’t stop civil engineers from making residential roads that are wide enough to function as interstates, post a 25 mph speed limit, and be SHOCKED when people do 50. It’s not safe to do 50 mph on that road in any sense, but it feels like it is, so that’s what people do.

Reminds me of that 4chan post where anon gets stopped by a stranger who tries to explain that Aluminum is the best metal. Anon tries to stay calm and explain the iron is the best metal, but the guy just kept going off about Aluminum and started talking about rust and ruined Anon’s whole day.

okay, report:

• good lord, Antares and Vega are offensively bright once you adjust to the dark.

• M4!! HOLY GUACAMOLE WOW! M4 by itself made being out tonight worth it!

• M80: cool, felt cool to find it, but it looks like any of the other tighter globs and I didn’t want to mess with switching to one of my narrow AFOV higher power eyepieces on my manual dob. May revisit once I invest in a higher power eyepiece with a decent AFOV.

• Epsilon Lyrae: hmm, am I maybe just not using enough mag? looks like a regular double star to me.

• Took the telescope for a slew through Sagittarius, for a laugh, was not disappointed. Breathtaking amount of stars there.

• Was all aboard the strugglebus making sense of Hercules’s constellation. Didn’t help that he was at the zenith, which made using the dob weird when looking for M13 and made looking at the constellation annoying after staring straight up like a turkey for minutes.

• Took some time to re-acquaint myself with Draco, Cygnus, and Aquila.

• Didn’t pick out any more DSOs, in part because I got annoyed with blowing out my night vision, even with the red light, on my charts.

• I’ve been fairly serious about the hobby for about 9 months now, and it seems like I saw way more satellites out tonight than I did when I stopped back in May. Bruh, the little bastards were everywhere.

What you’re describing is what I meant. If you’re driving at a speed that feels uncomfortable, it’s likely because it feels unsafe. I’m glad you’re a human cruise control, because I’m not, I often do vibes based speed control and I’d be very vulnerable to speed traps. I know I’m a bad driver, and I’d much rather take the bus, train, or bike lane if it was realistic to do so; I honestly hate driving.

re: first study

Results. The relative risk (RR) of a road collision occurring on the beltway after (vs before) installation of speed cameras was 0.73 (95% confidence interval [CI]=0.63, 0.85). This protective effect was greater during weekend periods. No differences were observed for arterial roads (RR=0.99; 95% CI=0.90, 1.10). Attributable fraction estimates for the 2 years of the study intervention showed 364 collisions prevented, 507 fewer people injured, and 789 fewer vehicles involved in collisions.

I looked it up, it looks like the Beltway is functionally equivalent to a US interstate. This makes some sense, as speeds on interstates are going to be higher than on arterials (and the arterials in Spain probably aren’t as bad as our stroads in the US).

I’m actually sympathetic to these folks, because there’s a bunch of studies that show that people drive the speed that feels safe. You can’t engineer a road to be safe for 15 mph over the posted speed limit and be shook when folks do the speed that feels safe (the US does this ALL THE TIME). That kind of engineering is all but guaranteeing that an enforcement control is going to be a money printer.

I love this!