‘I never really enjoyed Bordeaux En Primeur. I felt like we were some sort of performing monkeys. We were just there to help them sell, which is not my favourite function. I’ve been quite vocal that I think it’s a slightly flawed process – as is now being shown.’ 

Today, I’ll cover 5 practices that are considered ‘common wisdom’, and why I think worth reconsidering them. 

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel – find a package
2. Every PR must be reviewed 
3. 2-4 week sprints are how modern teams work
4. Every code change should be behind a feature flag/gate
5. If a comment is needed, the code is too complex 

There is one takeaway this article provides that definitely holds true:

• Local models are far more capable than they’re given credit for, even for coding.

It also explains the process of setting up a local coding model and technical information about doing so which is helpful for anyone wanting to set up a local coding model. I would still recommend doing so.

This paper also examines a number of what initially appears to be unexplained anomalies, such as a patchwork of masonry styles and seemingly ‘melted’ surfaces. These have fueled a number of “alternative-history” theories surrounding the origin of this stonework. These are, however, resolved with a better understanding of the region’s history and geology. In sum, what follows is one of the most comprehensive and evidence-based accounts of Inca construction techniques ever compiled. 

I read a report on DCLife, which highlighted an interview in the Nikkei newspaper with Canon’s Canon’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Toshizo Tanak. Canon’s CFO said Canon is thinking about outsourcing camera and printer for more production for some lower?end cameras and printers. The main goal of the outsource is to boost the Return on Equity (ROE). As DCLilfe explains;

The APP petition, submitted by Mitch Sylvester, would read: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?

Kansas will own the stadium, with the Chiefs paying $7 million in rent annually. But that money doesn’t go back to the state; it goes into an account the Chiefs can use for renovations, repairs, and operational expenses. That means the Chiefs can use their own rent money to hire stadium security, parking staff, and concession vendors throughout the season. I know Kansas had to offer a great deal to get the Chiefs to leave Arrowhead, but this is worse than I expected.

Sushila’s eldest sister, Surya, rejected an arranged marriage and instead went to medical school, thereby carving a path for Sushila and her youngest sister, Sadu to become physicians as well. Their brother, Bakul, the second eldest, worked as a textile engineer and supported his sisters’ pursuits.

Top United Airlines International Destination by State in 2025.

In other words, they reflected in images a core mission of Texas Monthly: to represent the identity of our state in all its wonderful variety. On behalf of Texas Monthly‘s photo department, here’s a collection of our favorite photos from this year.

PT: The bad doors for Europe, the three doors of the future. For the future to have power as a cultural or political idea, you want it to be different. You can’t stay in this Groundhog Day, this Tory/Labour thing where we’re never doing anything new. The problem is the three actual pictures of the future. Behind door number one is Islamic sharia law. Behind door number two is the totalitarian CCP surveillance state, a hi-tech dystopia. Behind door number three is Greta with a bicycle, and then there’s no fourth door. This is why Greta’s been winning.

The Christmas Carol (1949) – Vincent Price – HD Restored – Most Complete Version

Whole-body MRI provider Prenuvo has lost its bid to limit damages in a high-profile malpractice case over one of its pricey elective scans. 

Groq’s LPU is a complete departure from the other two. It doesn’t use HBM (External Memory) at all. Instead, it uses SRAM (Static Random Access Memory), which is built directly into the silicon of the chip. The biggest differentiation from that is the Speed. SRAM is up to 100x faster than the HBM found in GPUs. Because the data is right there on the chip, there is zero “fetch time.”

In the weeks following the burglary, the raiders would discover, in Medsger’s words, “that there were two FBIs—the public, and the secret,” and that the latter “used deceptions, disinformation, and violence as tools to harass, damage, and…silence people whose political opinions the director [Hoover] opposed.” The FBI, it became clear to the burglars, had been and was engaged in “blackmail, burglary…. Agents and informers were ordered to spy on…the private lives, including sexual activities, of the nation’s highest officials.” Hundreds of thousands of Americans were targeted—or enlisted as informers—even members of various Ku Klux Klan groups. The FBI’s files included massive amounts of data, much of it supplied by untrained informers. There was an agreement with 16,700 American Legion Posts, utilizing 100,880 members, to spy on their own communities.

I think this is a very telling tale for software engineering. If your job is to translate requirements into code manually – and that’s it – you’re the generalist travel agent.

Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.

But the resulting contradictions are too severe to be merely discomforting. In the speech after his election victory, Mamdani said, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That battle cry stands as a perfect distillation of the thinking that 23 years of Weekly Standard issues were published to refute and deride. 

The first world builds systems meant to last. The third world learns to live inside the ruins of broken ones. Assimilating people from these areas is almost impossible. Certainly not worth the risk. No reward is worth it. War veterans have so much experience with this.

Wisconsin Standard:

Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.

The above data also only considers changes in construction productivity, and doesn’t have anything to say about absolute levels, and it seems obvious to me that, in many cases, US construction practices lag behind European ones for things like transit construction. The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros). But this data suggests that driving that frontier forward is a much thornier problem.

The C.I.A. laid out a bold plan. A group of American alpinists working for the agency would slip into the Himalayas undetected, drag several backpacks stuffed with surveillance equipment up the slopes and install a secret sensor at the top of a mountain to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests. The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb. It hasn’t been seen since. And that was 1965.

Former world 100m silver medallist Marvin Bracy-Williams was banned for more than three and half years last month after admitting doping offences, while fellow American Erriyon Knighton was banned for four years in September after testing positive for steroids. Women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich was banned for three years in October after her sample showed a banned diuretic commonly used as a masking agent.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

She attributes her ability to work for Mr. Trump to growing up with an alcoholic father, the sportscaster Pat Summerall. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” While Mr. Trump does not drink, she said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

To envision what comes next, we need to comprehend the ongoing turning point. If Trumpists are pursuing such a brutal and desperate policy, it’s because they don’t know how to respond to the country’s economic decline. Measured in purchasing power parity – meaning the real volume of goods, services, and equipment produced each year – China’s GDP surpassed that of the US in 2016. It is currently more than 30% higher and will reach double the US GDP by 2035. The reality is that the US is losing control of the world.

Robotaxi Tracker: Real-time fleet data, trip logging, and analytics for Tesla robotaxis.

This is where the situation starts to feel a little too reminiscent of past accidents. One bad press release on a Friday is often all it takes to expose a structure everyone assumed was stable. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed over a weekend because of one press release on a Friday after hours, causing confidence to evaporate all at once. In my opinion, moments like Blue Owl stepping away are exactly the kind of catalyst that can shift market psychology from complacency to reflexive risk reduction. Redemptions don’t wait for perfect information.

Former top regulator named new president of Alliant Energy’s Wisconsin utility business.

Among other things, the lawsuit accuses Epic of violating antitrust laws, based on the company’s sheer market volume; requiring employees to sign non-compete agreements limiting their ability to work for a Texas-based health system; advertising software features that hospitals cannot access; and providing software that allows health systems to restrict a parent’s access to their child’s medical records.

The accounting rules don’t define “probable” in percentage terms, but it is a higher bar than “more likely than not.” In practice, some accountants peg the threshold at 70% or higher.

Track what they do. I make a point of knowing all the meds that are being administered and the schedule when I’m there. When nurses come into administer them, I ask them exactly what they’re administering. (I have a good memory for this stuff, but it’s not a bad idea to take notes). If something new appears in the mix, ask about it — who prescribed it and why. If they don’t administer something on the list, also ask why. In my experience, they make mistakes. You may also be able to get them to back off on checking vitals multiple times in the middle of the night so that your patient can get some sleep. (And so that you can!)

If the myth of Watergate can be summed up in a phrase, it’s “the imperial presidency.” Postwar liberalism’s greatest historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., popularized that expression at the start of Nixon’s second term. Conceived largely to attack Nixon’s centralization of foreign policy in the executive branch, the phrase came to indicate widespread presidential abuse of power, regarding Nixon as an anti-constitutional actor who subjected the American system to its ultimate trial.

Bill Hagan felt his head push beyond the pillow and into the headboard. As he came to consciousness, he realised it was not a headboard but the reinforced plastic bulkhead of a plane. At the moment he realised he was on a plane, he remembered that he was the captain of it. His feet were pitched up at 30 degrees in the flight crew’s bunk, at twice the angle of take-off. His first thought was that his two co-pilots had pulled up the aircraft’s nose because of oncoming traffic. When the plane banked sharply to the right, he wondered whether they’d swerved to avoid space debris. For a few seconds the aircraft seemed to level, then rose again, before turning sharply to the left and beginning to fall on its side.

In case your phone gets lost, you can see who stole it and exactly where it is!

Open Shortcuts ? Automation
Tap Create Personal Automation
Choose Message ? When I receive a message
Set a trigger word (example: LOST)

Actions (in this order):

• Set Low Power Mode ? ON
• Take Photo ? Front camera (preview OFF)
• Get Current Location
• Send Message ? your number (photo + location)

Turn Ask Before Running ? OFF
Turn Notify When Run ? OFF

Anytime that keyword is sent from any phone, it runs automatically.

“We’re a program that hadn’t been .500 in 20 years or so, hadn’t had a lot of success, so by having an identity and playing fast, just got our guys in an attacking mindset going back to 2020 when we changed it,” he said. “So like, it has a lot more to do with us and how we can control what we’re doing out on the field and dictating the game.”

In the fall of 2015, Koenigsmann wrote a detailed report about SpaceX’s findings and presented it to NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration. The report concluded that “material defects” were the most probable cause for the broken rod end. This essentially put the blame on the rod end’s supplier. NASA’s own, independent findings leveled a harsher judgment more directly on SpaceX. NASA attributed the failure to a “design error” by SpaceX. The space agency also said SpaceX’s quality control process should have identified the substandard rod ends before they were installed on the rocket.

The concern isn’t theoretical. Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email after Trump sanctioned him for criticizing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, though Microsoft denies suspending ICC services. Beyond US complications, Jestin questions whether European cloud providers have sufficient scale. “If you asked me today if we’ll find a solution, I’d say 80/20.”

Galitsky and her assistants encouraged us to play with the bioluminescence, splashing it up onto our spray skirts and kayaks and attempting to write our names. To see the most sparkles at once, we only had to run our paddles along the surface. When we dug our paddles down deep, the water looked like a galaxy.

Alas, reality rears its ugly head. Thus far, Madison residents have been treated to an onslaught of stale, consultant-coded apartment buildings multiplying faster than breeding rabbits. They invariably go by hollow names like “Chapter,” “Atmosphere,” or “Theory,” and wear their “modernist” scarlet letter with pride. With perfectly rectangular corners and sleek finishes, personality and pizzazz are left sleeping in the cold. They look mildly attractive to the naked eye, but keep staring, and feel as the inhumanity rips away part of your soul. They are slop made manifest.

PostNord, the postal service that the country has shared with Sweden since 2009, will no longer deliver letters in Denmark from December 30. Its 1,500 remaining red boxes already started vanishing in June and a handful of them are to be displayed in museums.

Russia’s final strategy for fighting Europe is to rely on Chinese assistance. Russia’s own industrial base is very weak, and relied heavily on imported European parts and machinery that has now been partially cut off. But Chinese tech has largely plugged that hole, as the Carnegie Endowment reports:

Europe is also going to have to change its political mindset. Lavish pensions and other elements of Europe’s social model are going to have to be temporarily curbed to help give Europe the fiscal space and physical resources to fight off its enemies. All nuclear plants need to be restarted, and Europe should build more nuclear, ignoring “green” parties and environmental activists who irrationally hate nuclear power. Europe needs to reform its land-use regulation to require greater construction of solar and wind power. And Europe is going to have to back off of its aggressive regulation of AI software, in order to produce cutting-edge autonomous weaponry.

Tuesday, Sony Electronics Inc. sold its San Diego campus at 16535 Via Esprillo in Rancho Bernardo for $67.4 million to an entity affiliated with Irvine-based real estate investment and management company LBA Properties, property records show. The electronics company spent $150 million to build the property, which was completed in 2009, according to news reports.

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of Chicago selling 36,000 parking meters to private investors for 75 years in exchange for $1.15B in cash. The parking meters have since generated $2B for the investors, with 58 years still left on the lease.

The US consumes about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy per year. Of this, about 80 start life as coal, oil or gas, and roughly a third of the energy mix serves the electrical grid. Less than 1% is food, reflecting our enormous energy wealth in comparison to our pre-industrial forebears. 

Launched in partnership with the data-connectivity platform LiveRamp, Uber Intelligence will let advertisers securely combine their customer data with Uber’s to help surface insights about their audiences, based on what they eat and where they travel.

Silicon Valley isn’t building apps anymore.
It’s building empires.

But using a next-generation Starlink satellite manufactured on Earth is just the beginning of his vision. “The level beyond that is constructing satellite factories on the Moon and using a mass driver (electromagnetic railgun) to accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without the need for rockets,” Musk said this weekend on X. “That scales to >100TW/year of AI and enables non-trivial progress towards becoming a Kardashev II civilization.”

This tool aims to show the extent of ALPR camera coverage in your local area. It uses OSM data for homes, amenities, and tagged ALPR cameras. Want to improve the accuracy? Tag all of the above in your neighborhood on OpenStreetMaps (try Every Door for an easy to use app).

Historic aerial photography shows the growth and changes in England’s urban and rural landscapes. Aerial photos can reveal hidden archaeology and sites that are difficult or even impossible to see from the ground.

The Boston Globe became aware of this litigation on Nov. 25 and began requesting additional details about the case, but Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David W. Ruoff issued a gag order under seal on Nov. 26 prohibiting the Globe from disclosing any information about the case to anyone. Ruoff vacated the gag order when he unsealed the case. 

Not only did this court order prevent the Boston Globe from reporting this story, it prohibited the Boston Globe from disclosing the existence of the court order itself.

The Biden administration’s effort to replace the United Nations Charter and international law with a so-called “rules-based order” dictated by the United States and other members of the G-7 utterly failed to gain traction. Instead of buttressing the global leadership of the West, we Americans discredited our pretentions to exemplify a civilisation entitled to impose its allegedly superior values on others. Consider:

You start seeing an algorithmic market – one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

Coincidence? That’s what the students from the Axel Springer Academy decided to find out. What followed was a five-week investigation involving leaked classified documents, tens of thousands of ship tracking data points, a 2,500-kilometer car chase across three countries, and—in a delicious bit of turnabout—their own drone flight over one of the suspect vessels. “Wir haben zurück-gedrohnt,” they told their audience today during a presentation of the project. We droned back.The scale of the problem.

In light of the deteriorating security situation, the Federal Council is realigning Switzerland’s security policy for the coming years. To this end, it has developed a security policy strategy that incorporates the resources of both the federal government and the cantons. The Federal Council intends to address the heightened threat level by strengthening Switzerland’s resilience, improving protection and prevention measures, and enhancing the country’s defence capabilities. At its meeting on 12 December, it launched the consultation procedure and instructed the relevant departments to start implementation.

Deputies found the suspect devices, a Dewalt Sawzall, 13 red Diablo Sawzall blades, and 26 block radio antennas resembling those used in Wi-Fi signal jammers — tools criminals use to disrupt security systems, according to investigators. Officers also located window punchers similar to those used to break patio doors in the burglaries, along with multiple fraudulent IDs and passports, the complaint said.

3. Information asymmetry among staff leads to repeated explanations and lost context due to a primarily verbal communication culture.

Because documentation is written retroactively (typically at the end of the day or the next day), the most up-to-date information is acquired by asking around. This leads to manhunts, tracking down individuals around the building to acquire a specific piece of information that could have easily been written down.

Data collection and tracking start as soon as you drive a new car off the dealership lot, with drivers unwittingly consenting when they’re confronted with warning menus on dashboard touch screens.

Experts say that some of the data collection is baked into the system, you can revoke your consent by going back into the menus. 

“There are permissions in your settings that you can make choices about,” said Lauren Hendry Parsons of Mozilla. “Go through on a granular level and look at those settings where you can.”

This paper describes several dramatic hístorical experiences which I believe difficult to be consistent with the “rational expectations” view, but which seem to reconcile with the “momentum” model of inflation. The idea is to stand back from our current predicament, inflations under and to examine the measures that successfully brought 1920s. I and Poland, the passage The basic drastic control in several European countries in the many, after tions. data all are four spectacular. shall describe and interpret events in Austria, Hungary, Gereach of which experienced a dramatic “hyperinflation” in which, of several months, price indexes assumed astronomical propor- data to be studied are the price indexes in figures fit the on a price 2-4. These recorded in countries, a logarithmic and especially graphs also reveal scale, so Germany, that in that the they rise will in page. level For was The each case inflation stopped abrupt- ly, rather than gradually. I shall also briefly deseribe events in Czechoslovakia, a country surrounded by neighbors experiencing hyperinflations, but which successfully achieved a stable currency itself. My reason for studying these episodes is that they are laboratories for the study of regime changes. Within each of Austria, Hungary, Poland, anà Germany, there occurred a dramatic change in the fiscal policy regime, which in each instance was associated with the end of a hyperinflation. Further, though it shared some common problems with its four neighbors, Czechoslovakia deliberately adopted a relatively restrictive fiscal policy regime, with the avowed aim of maintaining the value of its currency.

For example, what I discovered on the 57 program was that while we had a really good core team when we started, the developmental team, when the program got authorized, engineers started coming on the program at 200 to 300 a week. The culture very quickly shifted to what I call a traditional culture, because the core team was the minority all of a sudden. Everybody, in my words, set up camp the way they had always set up camp.

More than 500 citations were issued on Whitney Way alone, among the most of any street in the city. U.S. 151, which overlaps with East Washington Avenue, John Nolen Drive and part of the Beltline, also drew over 1,100 speeding tickets last year.

French wine critic Michel Bettane says the overall technical standard of Chinese wines now surpasses what he and his team often encounter in their annual tastings in France — a sign, he believes, that China is undergoing an “astonishing awakening of terroir.”

Sir Richard FitzHerbert’s family acquired Tissington in Derbyshire in 1465, replacing the manor house there with the present mansion 150 years later. FitzHerbert has been learning more about the plight of others this year, while serving as the senior (albeit largely honorary) legal figure in his county. This has reinforced the paternalistic feelings often associated with the traditional aristocracy: “I have seen a great deal in my year as High Sheriff [of Derbyshire] about the polar opposites of our society. If I were to inherit a fortune, I think it would be imperative to join those two sectors together.”

A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.

To find the Marvelous Spatuletail, Turek and Orellana hiked through Peru’s Huembo Reserve, stopping in front of five nectar feeders known to attract the species. They were prepared to return the next day, and the day after that, if the bird didn’t show. But it appeared after only three minutes, a blaze of white, green, blue, and bronze. “All I could hear was David Attenborough’s voice in my head. I started crying,” Turek says. “Somewhere on that trip, it clicked: This is what I want to do. I want to photograph all of them.”

For twenty years, the Venezuelan regime sent spies into your country—many are still there, some disguised as members of the Venezuelan opposition. Cuban intelligence showed me their networks inside your naval bases on the East Coast. They bragged about having sent thousands of spies over decades, some now career politicians.

My former coworker—the composite of three people for anonymity—now believes she’s both unqualified for AI work and that AI isn’t worth doing anyway. She’s wrong on both counts, but the culture made sure she’d land there. Seattle has talent as good as anywhere. But in San Francisco, people still believe they can change the world—so sometimes they actually do.

The flows in the diagram represent $4.9 Trillion – but they also trace every medical decision made in America last year. Every dose administered and every diagnosis delivered. Every ambulance ride and every rehabilitation. Every birth and every final goodbye.

Did you know that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been using his own custom $2 bills for over 30 years? He doesn’t print the money itself, which would be illegal. Instead, he legally purchases large, uncut sheets of genuine $2 bills directly from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing

OEM Bergen Engines has secured a contract to supply a 400MW power plant for a new AI data center on the US East Coast. Operating fully off grid in true islanded mode, it will be the first medium-speed reciprocating engine power plant in North America designed for AI-driven workloads.

It speaks for itself. I’ll just add if he’s surprised by the missing data …..he’d be further surprised by the data we do capture: fragmented, delayed, and built for billing, not clinical insight. It tells us very little about human disease and how to truly treat it.

Epic Systems is at the center of this monumental failure.

Simply put: AI cannot reach its full potential in medicine while Epic Systems controls the underlying data architecture. The ideas are fundamentally oppositional at their core.

Cattle drive over the interstate.

Most characters in the film Idiocracy wear Crocs because the film’s wardrobe director thought they were too horrible-looking to ever become popular. 

A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she’d had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team.

I wish I could tell you I respected the improbability of the windfall by immediately retreating to my suite. But no, I churned through 100 more bucks—back at the blackjack table—before finally listening to my better angels. Back in my room, I lay in bed and splayed out the cash in my hand, sending a photo of the bounty to my wife, who was surely fast asleep. The horrible truth, for all of us gamblers, is that a delirious trip to Las Vegas is still possible. All of the disappointments dissipate with one lucky spin. I guess they’ve got me for life.

Alas, his mistake was making the play just as the global economy hit a downturn, which ultimately led to being unable to service debt and led to the crumbling of the sports group. In the midst of a storybook season, the Rangers were sold at a bankruptcy auction in 2010, denying Hicks the opportunity to be on the stage the first time the Rangers went to the World Series. Liverpool was sold the same year to Fenway Sports Group, chaired by Boston Red Sox owners. The Stars were sold to Tom Gagliardi a year later.

The Somali citizens I spoke to were appalled. They wanted the bad actors out. They wanted safe streets, good schools and better, fairer, more honest governance. They wanted lawmakers to stop the fraud and ballot harvesting and crime.  I asked them who was to blame. To a person, they named the people in power—in state and federal government and local law enforcement. Those are the folks who need the grift and graft to continue, they said. A small number of Somalis commit crimes and the others look away, because participation in Minnesota’s corruption mill is the tacit price they pay for services and support.