I got curious about the Houthis and found few things interesting.

They control the region where around 80% of the population of yemen lives - about 34 million people.

Saudi Arabia has around 35 million people in the country.

Houthis have around 500,000 active military (plus lots of fighting experience) and another 1 million that they have put through training recently. They also have developed some pretty strong drone and missile capabilities from Iranian assistance. I also suspect Russia has been finding a way to sneak in some tech they have learned in Ukraine to them as well (Wagner group etc).

Saudi has around 250,000 active military mostly reliant on U.S. tech that has taken a severe beating recently from Iran.

If it comes to full out war, the Houthis on paper potentially can beat the shit out of them. This is no small fringe group. Its a small nation.

Generating a basic small missile is relatively easy. It’s essentially a weaponized hobby rocket at its core. The largest limitation historically has been the targeting and steering systems.

Many places where I have worked have old Access databases running critical business activities or even worse a monster of an excel spreadsheet. The there is ERP integrations and reporting that links into excel etc. The list goes on for just how integrated MS office has become over the past 25 years.

Business have adopted macOS quite extensively today because MS office is supported. Adding in native support in Linux would allow for a more gradual tradition.

This sounds impressive, unless you know all the steps to making a successful hybridization in tomatoes.

Step 1: Tomatoes are mostly cleistogamous (self-pollinate before opening) and perfect flowers. So the anthers need to be removed 2 days before bloom. The exposed stigma is usually marked and covered to prevent cross pollination.

Step 2: Pollen is collected from flowers of the “male” parent by vibrating the shit out of them over a test tube about 3hours hours after opening (depending on humidity). The pollen remains viable for a few days after shedding in refrigeration (longer in liquid N).

Step 3: On the 2nd day the pollen is applied to the stigma from the test tube. The pollinated stigmas are marked again.

Step 4+: successful pollinations begin to swell. Plants are pruned/trellised carefully. This ensures they develop well off the ground with less pressure from diseases and pests.

This robot does the first part of step 3. It’s arguably the least time-consuming and easiest part of the entire process. Its sort of interesting but not a time saver.

Also hybrid tomato seed is a huge value market, but it’s not a huge volume in the grand scheme of things on the production side. The COGS is a negligible part of the process. Its a 97-99% gross margin crop last I saw the numbers. The seed companies can easily afford to pay more for the COGS. Higher pay + shorter hours = higher success rate by hand pollination. Paying double for the workers for 1/2 the day and then sending them home has a much higher success rate and is cheaper overall.

Most of the cost of developing new varieties is on the research side. With cost running as high as 30-40% of the annual sales to constantly develop new varieties or add in yet another resistance to a plague.

A few days ago when I was converting an old windows desktop to Linux I hit Google on accident (Firefox default).

On the first page I got 2 traditional search results. They were links to AI slop sites. The entire rest of the page was full of useless crap.

DDG NoAI site seems to help.

Nitrogen fertilizer is massively over-applied globally. 1/3 less fertilizer will help with farmers paying attention to getting the best result for the lowest amount of N applied.

It will also increase interest in some better cropping practices like growing legumes as a covercrop.

So even though usage will be down, yields are unlikely to massively take a dive from less N.

The largest issue is drought/flooding and extreme temperatures. Climate change makes a farming system built upon more predictable weather insufficient.

My favorite was when a car runs a yellow light at the same time I ease my foot off the brake to get the engine started in preparation for going forward. The autostart and brake assist had a little tiff of errors and stalled the vehicle… I had to turn the engine off and restart it to reset it.

That was great.

So lane assist is off, adaptive cruise control is off, driver attention is off (with some electrical tape over the fucking stupid thing) and brake assist is off. The only things on is the blind spot monitoring because that sort of works and the backup camera.

Last time I was had a rental car, I was driving down a rural curvy road with no traffic. So I cut the corners whenever visibility allowed it. The computer freaked the fuck out and finally turned off after tossing a “Maintenance needed error”. I laughed my ass off over that one.

If I recall correctly something stupid high like 80% of their revenue from flights is from frequent travelers. These travelers are generally loyal to an airline because of the benefits from sticking with a network. I spent a year buying regular coach tickets and being upgraded to 1st class on all but 2 flights out of around 150 when I was traveling (I hit the top tier on the frequent traveler program)

The thing that this dumbass CEO is missing, is that these flyers are still on a budget and there is still some competition. The whales will swim away if you attempt to screw them over. This is why airlines have status matching programs for frequent travelers.

When iPhone launched it was targeted at the general public.

Blackberry had successfully dominated the businesses. In apps, texting, e-mailing etc they were light-years ahead of everyone else at the time. Ther had a bit of a learning curve to figure out but it got the job done. Many of the things that the iPhone became famous for were blackberry inventions. They were also highly customizable with tons of options where you could tweak all sorts of stuff aka pretty complicated.

So Apple went after the consumer market where they had a major fan base built up from the iPod. The thing about the iPod that set it apart from other MP3 was it was extremely simple to use. Like your 50 year old MBA boss could use it simple (if someone loaded the MP3’s for him) and no customization.

So the phone they made was about the same size as an iPod, and extremely simply to use. No customization because that created complexity. It was all tightly controlled.

Pretty soon it became the dominant phone in the market because as the current president shows, too many americans are fucking stupid. It remains the dominant phone because too many americans are fucking stupid.

It’s a much more complex phone today but don’t worry, most americans don’t know how to use all the features anyway because they are too fucking stupid.

Before the IPO, close to 100% of old.reddit likely contributed. For submitting, the old.reddit interface had better options for the experienced user. It was faster and easier to submit complex longer comments and posts.

The interface isn’t that great for reading comments/post. The third party phone apps did it better.

Besides you had to have a tiny bit of experience with the platform to know how to find that setting. Not something most casual readers who hit the site via a search engine would know to do.

Since the IPO it’s likely mostly few old-timers checking the niche subs. Probably very little engagement. Honestly, it’s likely still around because of some critical tool for moderators or bots that would be extremely expensive to upgrade. Definitely not because they care about the user.

Already in the U.S. cases have been found in Texas and New Mexico. It will take a few years for their number to buildup.

Oh and don’t worry, because of global warming these little fellas are likely to spread much further north than their historic range. Yeah, Canada this one’s gonna be an issue for you too.

I’m just leaving it there.

To be fair that was about the harddrive space of my first linux machine. I installed xunbuntu 6.10 on an old windows 98 machine. I then used it as a game server.

It was a wee bit laggy for some reason. Damn thing ran for another 4 years.

Autocorrect strikes again.

Grub can find the windows install on the secondary drive and give you the option to boot from it at startup.

That’s how I have it setup on my dual-boot laptop. Two 1GB hard drives with one dedicated to w11 & the other to Linux mint.

Other than W11 regular stability issues I haven’t had any issues with it.

Corporations lying on their books to decieve investors? Shocking!!!

That only happens on days that end in Y.

I bought a machine right before 7 launched to replace my XP machine. Vista SP2 was solid by then. I ran it for over a year because it was extremely stable.

I waited a bit over a year to install 7 on the machine when it’s SP1 came out.

FYI the bottom right in the picture is a real sunflower call Sun Gold.

https://www.applewoodseed.com/product/sunflower-dwarf-sungold/

Of course only comes in yellow.

That’s what Linux had needed for years. The reason Windows took over was because they won the business/government market.

Omce the tools for business/government mature and companies start offering proprietary software compatable with Linux by default, it will snowball.

Hmmm… This brings up an interesting question for the physics nerds out there.

The desired termination of the CEO is the sudden stop at the end of the flight.

When using a catapult or trebuchet, excessive force exerted during launch would terminate the CEO immediately. This would deprive the CEO of his last luxury flight. .

What the the maximum distance a catapult or trebuchet can throw the CEO while achieving this result? Assume the CEO weighs 100kg’s and is 165cm tall.