Two9A

This came up in the latest episode of Tom Scott’s Reverse Trivia: they got onto the topic of princes, and Tom had the sudden realisation of where “principality” comes from.

And Gary then dropped “duchy”: region granted to a duke.

Words have histories, we often forget it.

Whenever I come across ASCII art in the comments, it’s a good day. Here’s one from the day job:

So there are multiple people in this thread who state their job is to unfuck what the LLMs are doing. I have a family member who graduated in CS a year ago and is having a hell of a time finding work, how would he go about getting one of these “clean up after the model” jobs?

In landfill, but not as raw material. If you didn’t already know how to make bronze, for example, you’d have a hell of a time making new bronze based on old contaminated remnants.

The argument has been made that, even if another intelligence arises in 100 million years, there are multiple problems for them: the Sun will be burning hotter by then, easily accessible raw material will all have been used up (Cyprus is no longer covered in surface-level raw copper, for example), we’ll probably irradiate the surface on our way out, etc.

That was kind of the author’s point: that HTTP is so broadly specified, and at that point had so many unnecessary RFCs extending it, that you could halfway-sensibly write a hardware control protocol by HTTP alone even if that was a terrible idea.

Source: I wrote the tea-brewing extension to HTCPCP, which takes it another notch into the ridiculous.

I occasionally come back to the time Colbert sat down with Anderson Cooper and they got onto the subject of the deaths of their parents; Colbert gave some deep answers, and Cooper went down a rabbithole afterwards of collecting stories about grief and the grieving process.

There’s more to the man than the late-show format allows to show, certainly.