Furthermore, it is the only Russian refinery that produces cracking catalysts, which are components that other facilities depend on for secondary oil refining.

So an even bigger win for Ukraine if this indirectly reduces refining even more at other locations.

The strikes have hit the unit’s process columns. The refinery has a capacity of 8.4 million metric tons of crude oil per year.

had

Guy gets shot and the impact sends him flying across the room, out the window, etc. Physics says “oh hell no”. The guy who fired that shot would have likely had his arm dislocated from the recoil if he was able to even hold onto it.

I work in IT for a tech company that is embracing AI to an extent. We have a ticketing system for managing all the work we do. Tickets can range from simple tasks that take literally 5 minutes to complex multi-part collaborative projects that take weeks.

Recently I’ve been getting tickets that read like a miniature novel, with formatted sections labeled things like “summary”, “acceptance criteria”, and so on. It’s all clearly AI generated, and it makes it difficult to understand exactly what is being asked. I don’t need (or want) three pages of word salad when the requestor could have simply said “write a script to alert us when the API key ‘X’ is set to expire in 7 days”.

When I see tickets like these the first thing I do is go back to the requestor and ask them exactly what they want from me. Often times what they want is not what it sounds like their AI generated ticket is asking for, or at least specific details are wrong. And I have absolutely no problem wasting their time when they waste mine with this AI slop.

He’s not in power anymore. How will YOU solve it?

Simple. He’ll wish it away the same way he did Covid. When that fails he’ll have RFK start telling the world that Ivermectin kills them.

It will be like the dot com bubble in many ways. Back in the late 1990’s every other TV commercial was for Pets.com, Ask Jeeves regularly had a balloon in the Macys Thanksgiving parade, and Lycos was pushing to be the home page for everybody. They never recovered after the bubble burst, and companies like Google quickly took over.

In a similar vein I think a lot of the AI big hitters will vanish once this bubble bursts, leaving one or two lucky/cautious ones still around to scavenge the pieces. But I don’t think companies will be so hung ho about using AI for everything once that happens.

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

Jokes on them. I have a septic system.

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced.

While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Something about the lyrics just makes me smile.

It’s been decades now, but when I was still in school I worked for a temporary employment agency for a couple summers. I had an interview with them so they could get a feel for my qualifications, then they would line me up with random office jobs that could last anywhere from one or two days to a month or more. For most of one summer I worked in the mailroom of a law office.

If you can find an employment agency like that near you it might be a good way to get your foot in the door. Keep your eyes open wherever they send you and see if there might be chances for longer term jobs. The experience of being a temp with a good work ethic can also look good on a resume.

TACO now and forever.

My wife & I saw this late last year. We agree that it was amazing. What’s truly incredible about it is that the actors were all members of an amateur theater in the UK where it took them years to write & refine the show. They started performing it at their little amateur theater where it eventually got noticed, took it to London’s west end (their version of Broadway), and after a few years there brought it to Broadway in NYC. It’s done so well on Broadway that it’s run there was extended something like 8 times, and it’s now starting a tour across the US.

Cue, not queue

/petpeeve

President of peace my ass

Way back in the 80’s a neighbor of ours was house manager for a theater, and I’d occasionally work as an usher there with her son. Rodney Dangerfield came through town for a few shows and I was lucky enough to work them. To make a long story short, the first performance was awesome, and he had snappy comebacks when he was heckled. But at the second performance it was clear somebody was feeding him lines, because he was heckled the same way at the same time in his act. From the back of the theater we actually spotted the guy who was doing it since he was slowly walking around the back.

Also, that second night a real heckler yelled out something at Rodney as well. Rodney paused briefly then continued on with his routine like nothing had happened.

Aside from his regular-ish parody tours, we’ve also seen him do an acoustical tour of only his own music without any parodies, costumes, etc. We also saw him tour with a 30+ piece orchestra. Two words: “OBOE SOLO!”

My wife & I have seen Weird Al 4 times now and will be seeing him again this summer. While he mostly does a big show of his parodies with costumes & props we’ve also see him do a low-key acoustical tour where he only played his original music and none of the parodies. We also saw him tour with a full 30-piece orchestra, which was really fun as well.

The submarine commander didn’t do this unilaterally. He was clearly ordered to do so, and that order would have come from Hegseth or Trump.

I like the idea of referring to LLMs as “spicy autocomplete”.