IHeartBadCode

I have a Brother HL-L3230CDW. It has been a horse and has quickly become my most prized possession of all things that I own. It takes anyone’s toner and produces quality without question. It works with my various Linux, Macs, Windows, and Android devices without hesitation and minimal fuss to get setup.

So that’s what I would recommend. Is a good bit of coin up front but in my opinion, it has paid for itself in cheaper long run TCO and sanity in that it just fucking works.

Why does it look like he’s giving an invisible man a blow job?

Or you can make multiple accounts. The app makes it super simple to swap accounts on the fly.

but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox

Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.

For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.

The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.

Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.

IBM hawks new conversion tools all the time. None of them are amazing sliver bullets, all of them require humans to comb over the resulting output. And every single one I’ve ever used chokes on any weird case.

From the RPG fixed form to free form, DDS to DDL conversion, and so on all of them are usually more trouble to use than to not use.

IBM does this kind of stuff all the time. And for some folks it’ll work some of the times. But at this point, I just skip any WS tool they put out and have a snippet on RDi and RDz that does all the required plugging away to call web services from the COBOL module.

This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.

The problem isn’t a conversion of what may or may not be complex code, it’s taking the time to prove out a new solution.

I can take any old service program on one of our IBM i machines and convert it out to Java no problem. The issue arises if some other subsystem that relies on that gets stalled out because the activation group is transient and spin up of the JVM is the stalling part.

Now suddenly, I need named activation and that means I need to take lifetimes into account. Static values are now suddenly living between requests when procedures don’t initial them. And all of that is a great way to start leaking data all over the place. And when you suddenly start putting other people’s phone numbers on 15 year contracts that have serious legal ramifications, legal doesn’t tend to like that.

It isn’t just enough to convert COBOL 1:1 to Java. You have to have an understanding of what the program is trying to get done. And just looking at the code isn’t going to make that obvious. Another example, this module locks a data area down because we need this other module to hit an error condition. The restart condition for the module reloads it into a different mode that’s appropriate for the process which sends a message to the guest module to unlock the data area.

Yes, I shit you not. There is a program out there doing critical work where the expected execution path is to on purpose cause an error so that some part of code in the recovery gets ran. How many of you think an AI is going to pick up that context?

The tools back then were limited and so programmers did all kinds of hacky things to get particular things done. We’ve got tools now to fix that, just that so much has already been layered on top of the way things work right now. Pair with the whole, we cannot buy a second machine to build a new system and any new program must work 99.999% right out of the gate.

COBOL is just a language, it’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the expectation. These systems run absolutely critical functions that just simply cannot fail. Trying to foray into Java or whatever language means we have to build a system that doesn’t have 45 years worth of testing that runs perfectly. It’s just not a realistic expectation.

In July, Musk tweeted about Twitter / X’s financial situation, saying, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

Advertising could be up two fold for all it matters. You sack a company that last turned an annual profit in 2019 with $44B in debt, it won’t matter if Musk is shitting gold bricks. You can’t pay that size of debt off fast enough. To just get started on that debt Musk would need to make Twitter twenty times more profitable than their 2019 profit. And even then that debt is going to be a monkey on his back for forty years in ideal conditions.

That $44B isn’t chump change for Twitter, like maybe if Tencent took a sudden $44B debt they’d make good on it, but they’re wildly profitable. Twitter barely gets by and has only gone on this long because of the Tech Bro funding that all but dried up when the interest rates were going up.

Is aforementioned drink free for life too? Because there’s this whiskey distillery just up the road from me and they make a black tea infused whiskey that I wouldn’t mind.

If I built a social media mega hub that can be abused to brainwash humanity

Humanity is capricious as fuck. You can brainwash them, but then after a while, you just got to brainwash them again. Gets old.

I would like to think keeping it off the wrong hands is priceless

Yes, BUT have you ever considered that with enough money you can just not care?

Also, look at what’s his face that started Twitter. Now he’s got insane levels of Musk’s cash and started yet another social media company, Blueksy which a lot of people ran over to. I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.

It’s LaTeX mathbb{x}

The earth has basically zero He3 as the solar wind is deflected by the earth’s magnetic field.

We actually have quite a bit of it here on Earth. Much of it comes from old sources, like our first lithium on Earth when the planet was still a ball of molten material. Many of the neutrons from space directly impacted our earilest lithium desposits that were exposed to the vaccum of space. This created a lot of Helium-3 via spallation. A lot of that newly created Helium was vented directly into space never to return, however some became trapped.

The problem of that is, much of that gas is trapped deep in pockets too close to the mantle for anything manmade to ever reach. So we must wait for cracks to form allowing the gas to rise up away from the incredibly hot mantle to somewhere machines can access.

Additionally, we have Uranium and Thorium in the core of the planet emitting Helium-3/4 as a decay product. For pretty much the same reason with the exception that the core is MUCH deeper than the mantle, we’re unable to access that gas and must wait for it to slowly bubble up.

We do also have some that’s been “frozen” in underwater soil as a result of underwater nuclear bomb testing. However that is mostly inaccessible to us due to the contamination of the soil of much deadlier material also “frozen” in place there. Which also means that we can produce Helium-3 ourselves, but it comes at a massive cost. So finding a natural deposit would be ideal.

He3 is a very good fuel for Fusion.

Uh, sort of. D + He-3 fusion is what’s touted as ideal. The product of the fusion reaction is 50/50 of He + p + 18.3 MeV and He + 2p + 12.86 MeV. The thing is, the deutrium cannot be always assured to mix with the Helium-3 100% of the time. So you will have some D+D fusion which will result in neutrons.

The is also a He-3 + He-3 fusion which provides no path for neutrons. However, the activation tempature is much higher and you must keep the reaction at a hotter tempature (requires stronger magnets that must be massively cooled). If we were ever to go for pure He-3 fusion, it would be likely a 3rd or 4th gen reactor design. There’s a ton of challenges to making it commerically viable.