Jared McQueen

software dev 🦀, space geek 🚀, systems engineer 💾, endless tinkerer 🛠️

[sachin. @sachinyadav699]

Me running to push my code before the other developers... So they'll be the ones to deal with the merge conflicts

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

Doughcon 4!! ☠️

[Pentagon Pizza Watch @pizzintwatch]

Domino's Pizza (1.4 miles from Pentagon) and Pizzato Pizza (2.2 miles from Pentagon) are experiencing high activity spikes this evening. Activity levels are 169% and 140%, respectively. DOUGHCON level is 4.

[Tom Moloughney @tommolog]

Autonomous Snow Blower Update:
The @yarboglobal completed the first pass of the driveway and went back to the charging dock.
After about 1.25hrs, it will be 80% charged and will automatically return and continue to clear the driveway.
I plan to run it during the entirety of the storm and will post my review video on @stateofcharge this week.

So far, it's kicking A$$!

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@Rainmaker1973 such a dick move not to credit the source. And posting a repost is not the move. Take 10 seconds and find the creator. You used to do this (2024 post of similar content from him). Don't be lazy.

https://t.co/LM9DItCJgD

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@LibOrNormal paging @steveinman

[doomer @uncledoomer]

kind of crazy how being given one of these books as a boy growing up basically guarantees youll turn out smart and technically proficient in a variety of fields

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@AlphaNews what's up with this t-rex?

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@nicksortor are we not going to talk about the dinosaur?

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@Breaking911 @AlphaNews what is going on this this t-rex dinosaur?

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

Another Christmas Carol

Last week, I received a phone call from a woman who wanted to know if my foundation was set up to receive donations in the form of stock. When I told her that we were, she told me that her boss wanted to make a year-end donation.

“That’s great,” I said. “What’s your boss’s name?”
“She would prefer to remain anonymous.”
“No problem,” I said. “How much would she like to give?”
“A million dollars.”
(5 seconds later.)
“I’m sorry, how much?”
“A million dollars,” she said. “Of highly appreciated stock.”
(Another 5 seconds later.)
“Hello…are you still there.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m still here. You have a very generous boss. Would it be possible to thank her personally?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “Her privacy is very important, and her time is valuable.”

“I promise to respect both,” I said. “It's just that no one has ever given me a million dollars before, and I’d really like to say thanks. Just a quick phone call would be fine.”

“Let me see what I can do,” she said. “In the meantime, where do I send the stock?”

I told her, and the next day, a million dollars of highly appreciated stock arrived in the MRW brokerage account. And the day after that – Christmas Eve – I received an email with a link to join a Zoom call at exactly 11:55 am to meet my anonymous benefactor, a woman I’ll call “Carol.”

I clicked the link at exactly 11:55, and Carol appeared on my computer screen. She had me on mute because she was talking to someone else on her cell phone. It looked urgent. A minute later she hung up and took me off mute.

“Sorry,” she said. “Crazy morning. Hey - you clean up pretty good!”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s my second shower of the day.”
Carol’s phone rang again, but she ignored it.
“Thanks for making the time,” I said. “I know you’re busy.”

“Busy doesn’t come close to what I am,” said Carol. “I’ve got a board meeting in five minutes, a house full of cranky relatives, and a helicopter waiting for me on the roof.”

“With respect,” I said, “who schedule’s a board meeting on Christmas Eve?”

“My husband just asked me the same thing. In the immortal words of Robert Plant, I’m afraid the answer is, ‘nobody’s fault but mine.’”

“Actually,” I said, “those words came from Blind Willie Johnson. He wrote Nobody’s Fault but Mine almost a hundred years ago. Led Zeppelin “borrowed” it in 1976 and put it on an album called Presence. You can listen to Blind Willie’s version on You Tube. I'm not sure which is better.”

“I’ll be sure to work it into my holiday playlist,” said Carol, glancing at her watch. “Now what can I do for you?”

“You’ve already done it. I just wanted to tell you how I’m going to spend your money.”

“I already know how you’re going to spend it,” she said. “You’re going to give it to qualified applicants who want to learn a skilled trade. Hopefully, the electric trade. My company could hire fifty electricians right now, and fifty more in Q2. We just can’t find them.”

“I know,” I said. “I hear the same thing every day. Our goal is to award $10 million in trade school scholarships next year, and your donation has got us off to a terrific start.”

“Happy to help,” said Carol. “And by the way, my kids and I loved Dirtiest Jobs. Do you think you’ll do more?”

“Not unless it’s animated,” I said. “I don’t bend as easily as I used to.”

Carol laughed. “I feel your pain,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Well, at the risk of correcting you twice in one call, the show was called Dirty Jobs, not Dirtiest Jobs.”
“Really? Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “I did 350 of them.”

“That’s so strange,” she said. “I could have sworn it was Dirtiest Jobs.”

“It’s a common mistake,” I said. “TV has trained us to expect the extreme version of whatever it is we’re watching. It’s not ‘Home Makeover,’ it’s “EXTREME Home Makeover.’ It’s not America’s FUNNY Home Videos; it’s America’s FUNNIEST home videos. It’s not ‘Deadly Catch,’ it’s ‘DEADLIEST Catch.’ See what I mean? Everything is always oversold.”

“But don’t you narrate ‘Deadliest Catch,’” Carol asked.
“For the last 22 years," I said. But I didn’t name that show. If I did, I would have called it Deadly Catch. Not as sensational, but more honest. It goes to managing expectations.”

“Ok,” said Carol, "but tell me this. If Dirty Jobs had been called “Dirtiest Jobs,” and there was only one-episode, which jobs would you put on it?”

“Aren’t you late for a board meeting?” I asked.
“They can start without me,” she said.

I proceeded to tell Carol, in great detail, about my top three dirtiest jobs, and was deeply flattered to see her spit out a mouthful of coffee during my explanation of castrating sheep with my teeth. I was equally delighted when she guffawed during my description of semen-gathering from a prized bull, and very pleased when she gagged during my recollection of dogpaddling through several tons of diarrhea while replacing a ruptured lift pump in a wastewater treatment plant.

When we finally hung up, Carol was a half-hour late for her board meeting, which I took as a personal victory. When she invited me to stay in touch, I assured her that I would. And the next morning, as I sat by the Christmas tree sipping eggnog, counting my blessings, and listening to Blind Willie Johnson sing Nobody’s Fault But Mine, I couldn’t help but wonder if Carol was doing the same. I like to think she was.

Mike

PS. mikeroweWORKS has always relied on the generosity of ordinary Americans who contribute modest amounts whenever they are able. That will always be the case. However, there is no denying the fact that lots of people this year are reducing their taxes in fairly dramatic fashion by donating highly appreciated stock to their favorite charities. This is most often accomplished through a Donor Advised Fund, which anyone who takes charitable giving seriously should have. It doesn't matter if you're rich - if you want to dramatically reduce your tax bill with charitable donations, a DAF is the best way to do it, especially if you want to donate appreciated assets like stock, art, real estate, etc. By donating appreciated stock instead of cash, Carol not only reduced her taxable income by 30%, she completely eliminated the capital gain tax she would have paid had she sold the stock. Bottom line, a big chunk of the money she would have paid in taxes, went instead to her favorite charities. One of which, happily, was mikeroweWORKS. May her example resonate from sea to shining sea!

PPS. The rules surrounding DAFs are changing this year, and not for the better. If you're thinking of setting one up, you still have a few days. It's worth doing. Here's a primmer. https://t.co/kC8aqGXXHt

PPPS. I read somewhere that 50% of all charitable giving happens in December, and 30% of that happens in the last three days. With that in mind, any amount is most appreciated, at mikeroweWORKS. In the immortal words of Tiny Tim, God Bless Us, Everyone!

[boris @boristane]

I'm trying something new with my blog, making it interactive

first article is about something I care deeply about: logs

logging sucks so much

https://t.co/mdFhxEvpjB

[MERICA MEMED @Mericamemed]

I would buy this toyset in a heartbeat. 😂😂

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

One of the best upgrades to ChatGPT is simply changing the base style and tone to "Efficient" and giving it a simple "Get right to the point. Be practical above all" instruction.

No more praise, no more flourishes. Just the answers.

[PeachProof @PeachProof23]

You Should Probably Change Your Password! 👨‍💻 🙄😂

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

tanstack taking off! Excited to try this out

[TANSTACK @tan_stack]

📣 TanStack AI Alpha is here!

✨ Framework agnostic
🤖 Provider agnostic
🧠 Type safe
🔧 Isomorphic tools
🛠 Devtools
🌐 Open protocol
📦 JS, Python, PHP
⚛️ React, Solid, Vanilla
🌀 OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, ++

Official blog post: 🔗⬇︎🧵

[Dr. Jon Slotkin @slotkinjr]

I have a guest essay in @nytimes today about autonomous vehicle safety. I wrote it because I’m tired of seeing children die. Done right, we can eliminate car crashes as a leading cause of death in the United States

@Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles. I spent weeks analyzing it because the results seemed too good to be true. 91% fewer serious-injury crashes. 92% less pedestrians hit. 96% fewer injury crashes at intersections. The list goes on.

39,000 Americans died in crashes last year. More than homicide, plane crashes, and natural disasters combined. The #2 killer of children and young adults. The #1 cause of spinal cord injury. We’ve accepted this as the price of mobility.

We don’t have to.

In medicine, when a treatment shows this level of benefit, we stop the trial early. Continuing to give patients the placebo becomes unethical. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.

In driving, we’re all the control group.

Cities like DC and Boston are blocking deployment. And cities are not the only forces mobilizing to slow this progress.

It’s time we stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention that will save lives.

Link to article below.

👀 this video of Waymo cars evading crashes with people and vehicles. I especially note the ones that require it having a 360° view.

My sincere thanks to Alex Ellerbeck and @acsifferlin for their wisdom and sure hand in editing this piece.

[Smooth McGroove @SmoothMcGroove]

Sonic 2 - Chemical Plant Zone!

[Jonathan Slater @slater57649]

Fact

[Jared McQueen @goodguyguybrush]

@orcdev Yeah man I get it! Hopefully you can reach escape velocity and not have to game the algorithms! Keep up the great work.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights:

1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI.
2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later.
3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.
4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc.

TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.