That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.

My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.

First — stop giving them ideas! 🤣

Second, a small rock and some tape would likely defeat that.

EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.

So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?

As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.

Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.

To be clear — Mom’s “Depression Dinner” was in fact just greasy fried ground beef poured over mashed potatoes. No spices. I don’t even think she used any salt or pepper. Oily Gerbers would be a perfectly apt description!

Oh certainly changing the presentation, texture, and separation of the ingredients can make a big difference in a dish! I’d say the difference between “depression dinner” and Shepard’s pie is like the difference between cake batter and cake — they’re both made up of the exact same stuff, but one is a gloopy mess you’d probably not want to eat a whole bowl of, and the other is delicious cake you’ll want a second serving of.

Growing up my mother would occasionally make a dish my father enjoyed that she called “Depression Dinner”. It was mashed potatoes covered in fried ground beef with beef gravy poured on top of it.

I like mashed potatoes. I like using ground beef in a variety of dishes. And who can say anything bad about gravy? But mix those three together — ugh, no thanks. It was like baby food for adults. There was a reason why my brother and I took to calling it Depressing Dinner growing up.

You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!

It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.

It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.

It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.

I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.

Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.

When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.

At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.

The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.

At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.

EVs need at least 30 minutes with the fastest charger to get from say 20 to 60 right? In either case they take up the bay. So you need to be able to handle many more at once.

No. The Hyundai IONIQ 5 and 6 (and likely 7) only need 18 minutes to go from 10% to 80%.

My daughters school (in Canada) uses several. They’re not only quiet, but they’re not spewing gas/diesel fumes where kids are standing around when loading, especially in the winter. They’re not at 100% electrification yet, but they appear to have around 50% of the busses as EVs.

Nice for the local residents too, as they’re much quieter running and up down the residential streets around the school.

While I still think that Hyundai engineering and design did some real magic with the IONIQ 5, I just can’t help but feel like the rest of the company is just screwing the pooch on this car. They’ve flooded the US market with models people there don’t seem to want to buy, and dealership lots often have a dozen or more waiting to be sold.

Meanwhile, here in Canada buying one is damn near impossible. That doesn’t seem to stop them from sending out mass marketing materials and ads trying to sell them (or the IONIQ 6), mind you — I just wish they had focussed first on ensuring their biggest boosters globally were getting the cars they want, as opposed to putting lots of cars nobody seems to want on US dealership lots.

(FWIW, my dealership told me they weren’t being allowed by Hyundai to order any 2023 IONIQ 5s. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence across all dealerships here in Canada, with just a few cars trickling in each month).

Meanwhile, up here in Canada I put a down payment on an IONIQ 5 Ultimate Edition (Canadian equivalent of the US ‘Limited’ model) back in early April 2022, and it still hasn’t been ordered, because Hyundai decided to flood the US market while stiffing the Canadian market.

Hyundai (and other EV makers) are fucking around, and then blaming the market.

Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.

It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.

Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.

Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.

I suggested to a friend years ago that he keep all of hit used butts in a jar beside his bed. He came up with this idea that he should add some water to the jar.

The reminder every time he got up or went to bed that the black goop shit was the same stuff he was putting into his lungs every day eventually got him to stop. He couldn’t even look at the jar anymore — and certainly didn’t want to add to it. That thing was nasty.

Hyundai