You might be eligible for a refund from your dealer… CVS

If there is one thing we learn as we age is most people step away from the illegal dealer and end up with the legal dealer of drugs… CVS. But the funnier thing is for the people whom have had a “Dealer” they are likely more secure than CVS.

Many CVS customers may be eligible for money as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the company.
The settlement stems from a lawsuit that alleged CVS violated laws by sharing user data from its website and application with advertising company Criteo.

The thing is as much as someone purports that it is alleged. My opinion is they are a bank vault with a screen door. The CVS registers tell you to put in your full name and birthdate. I made an objection to the CVS manager and they claimed “oh it has a privacy screen!” I said no it has a polarized filter pretending to be security, anyone that is lingering 10 feet behind you see you typing all of your information in as long as they stay in 20 to 30 degrees of the CVS kiosk.

CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. In a statement, Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, said: “We stand by our privacy practices and believe they comply with applicable laws. The settlement resolves claims based on legal theories that challenge common online industry practices.”

CVS and Criteo denied any wrongdoing. YET they changed their entire terms of service, Took more rights away from the consumer and now hold a INSANE right to hold your personal information in perpetuity

The statement also said CVS agreed to the settlement to “avoid expense and distraction of prolonged litigation.” While the settlement is still awaiting final court approval, affected customers can submit their claims through Nov. 16.

This statement is so contradictory its not even funny, Corporations love prolonged litigation. There is no way in hell they would want to “settle” if they can hang up in court for 10 years and keep that going its less than what is at hand. They threw out a number and said go away we are likely doomed if this goes to court.

I asked myself who the hell is Criteo, it would seem its a back end to CVS and it likely resides on those machines well that say “check your coupons here” , at a guess CVS was wholesale giving the purchases to them so every time you walked into CVS to get your drugs and purchased something Criteo got a copy. The problem here is recently CVS changed their terms of service to give Criteo a hole into your meds and other PII. If you buy plan B they know, if you buy condoms they know. If you buy those and a week later you buy monostat it will try to put that together that you are unclean or you had an issue during intercourse. If you buy pads every 24 days it becomes your unofficial period tracker. So that day you walk in on day 23 and go to the savings center the machine happily prints a Tampax coupon.

Yet, Criteo takes this information, sell its on a second market, and CVS claims they protect your information! Just from my last paragraph alone think about how much information they can take from you. Your period time, Plan B (you make mistakes), Condoms (sexually active), Monostat (Maybe doesn’t take care of themself if repeated purchase.) . Even for the males the same purchases will let the company figure out that a male purchasing the same items and come up with through metrics Male buys these items and the timings and will happily add “Male buying for female” and use all the same metrics.

For machines like this a little malicious compliance to the retail machine never hurts, Buy three things that never should go together in a purchase and put it on your card.. Say Cucumbers, Condoms, and Petroleum jelly.. Let the prediction machine do the rest. After awhile of crossing 3 item purchases together you will offset the machine so badly it will not how to accurately measure you. Vinegar, Tampons and Baking powder. the list goes on. Plan B, a turkey baster, and Cake mix and a fleet enema. Even if you are not needing these things such as the plan B or Tampons.. donate them to a shelter they always need the things..

The $10 dollars that CVS is offering is a bad joke, they want you to go away for the price of a medium tier Starbucks coffee..

Attributions from:
USA TODAY – CVS customers may be eligible for money from settlement

Nvidia CEO Doesn’t give a damn about anyone.

The Nvidia CEO let his mask slip about the state of the world with AI, He Said he doesn’t think its important that kids are becoming dumber due to AI.

Try to get a kid to do long division right now,” Huang said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? I don’t think it does.”

I dare this man to say this to his own mother or father, I bet in 0.00002 seconds a sandal will hit this man like an ICBM. Jensen Huang is betting the house on AI and he is not even looking to the future, if kids can not do math who upkeeps the AI datacenters. Who fixes his car when it needs alignment and timing. Who makes sure that the FPU is accurate, because all of this is connected. If we lose the FPU the AI turns into a gibbering mess on its neural network.

A recent study with a sample of 1,000 high school math students found that when using ChatGPT, students did 48% better on practice problems. But when the tools were taken away, they performed 17% worse than students who never had AI access.

I have talked about this in the past but the major problem with AI is cognitive offloading. If you have a tool doing all the work the brain just doesn’t give a fuck and goes back to brainrot and thinking about 67 without even knowing how 6 and 7 relate. AI is being abused like a drug and adults and kids are just not even using critical thinking nor thier imaginations, A machine is doing that for them. Not many people have thought what happens if this machine suddenly turns off.

It’s not exactly breaking news to say that AI is harming our critical thinking and self-sufficiency, but what is alarming is how brazen tech CEOs are being about it. “We’re gonna discover new [skills],” Huang said, revealing that he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don’t matter.”

Sigh.. Mr. Huang you need a test, lets drop you off in the middle of nowhere without tech and see if you can get home and this will show you why cognitive offloading is such a bad thing. Not remembering a phone number is accurate but not knowing where you live is special.

AI is making us dumber, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t care. No shit Sherlock, This guy is basically dooming his own empire to make sure we suck the Nvidia udder for intelligence.

Does It Not Matter, Or Is AI Making Nvidia Too Much Money To Care? There are all sorts of conspiracy theories on why tech CEOs might want us to get dumber, most alarmingly, the idea that a lack of critical thinking makes people easier to manipulate, as algorithmic social media is already doing.

Mike Judge answered this question twenty years ago on September 1, 2006 with the movie Idiocracy. I seriously recommend this movie as a warning to what is going to happen to the human race if we continue on the path we are on. Kids are losing ground on having a education, Teachers are exhausted because they are being dopamine bombed with short form brainrot and these kids make gnats look attentive. Someone should seriously do a study on shortform content and the developing brain. Wait *checks*, Oh yes there is a study on this! Lets go to the results:

Results revealed that short-form video addiction not only directly impacted academic procrastination but also placed indirect effect on academic procrastination through attentional control. Furthermore, the mediating effect of attentional control was contingent upon individuals’ boredom proneness. Higher levels of boredom proneness weakened the impact of short-form video addiction on attentional control.

Well shit, It does exactly what we thought it would do. AI SLOP BRAINROT FOR ALL!

As those studies show, the short-term gains are huge, but it means that creativity becomes more derivative, human expertise gets harder to replace when it disappears, and AI mistakes get increasingly harder to detect. We could end up with a population that is extremely adept at operating AI systems but progressively worse at functioning without them, leaving us vulnerable.

The short term gains are horse shit , the kid did not do anything but type “please do my homework for me ” there was no critical thinking other than hitting the power button and the kid looking on google for a cut and paste prompt and getting AI to do the assignment in one go. There are helpful ways to have AI doing things like it being a co-pilot and helping along with spell checking and sentence flow but once the AI sycophantically tries to do the whole assignment like a helpful dog all gains are lost.
Mr. Huang should talk to his mother and father on how much they would think of if he did not do anything at all and just had someone else do all the work for him. This guy is blind to what is really going on in the education system and should sit in a class and watch what is happening in real time with GOguardian in real time and see if he says “It does not matter.”. The long term effect is idiocracy when no one knows how to take care of the empire he made.

Attributions from:
National Library of Medicine – The effect of short-form video addiction on undergraduates’ academic procrastination: a moderated mediation model
Wikipedia – Idiocracy (FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WATCH THIS MOVIE! AND NOT YOUTUBE SHORTS OF THE BEST PARTS!)
thegamer.com – Don’t Worry About AI Making You Dumber, Nvidia CEO Says It Doesn’t Matter

Editor’s Note: For context on why this matters: I have HNPP. My hands slip, nerves misfire, and pain overrides fine motor control. Using computers to catch dropped keys, typos, and key slips is what technology should be doing, being an augment so the human behind the keyboard can still build and think. Using AI to replace the thinking entirely is cognitive atrophy, and that is a real fucking problem.

US GOV POTUS TO CHANGE AI TO SI? WTF! ITS FUBAR!?

Ok, Now in English, the President of the United States wants to change AI (artificial intelligence) to SI (Système International d’Unités… wait, shit, “Super Intelligence”). Oh please, AI is not super, Its average as a matter of fact it is the most average thing you have ever met.

The problem with this is he is trying to apply a title to AI it does not deserve. Albert Einstein and Fermi could be called supermen because they did super things. AI can not theorize past what it knows both of those men theorized greater things and eventually achieved them. AI has achieved watching every episode of married with children.

US President Donald Trump says the term artificial intelligence (AI) makes the technology “sound fake” and wants it to be called “super intelligence”.

To anyone born in the last 120+ years knows that an artificial robot is the most powerful thing in the universe. The fact that the POTUS thinks Super sounds better is completely wrong, How many things have we added the word super to that has been a massive failure.

“From this point forward, all of United States’ documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial’. So it’s ‘super intelligence’,” Trump said. In the past week, Trump asked his social media followers to vote on other potential new names for AI including superior intelligence, extreme intelligence and supreme intelligence.

Lets go through this
1: Super intelligence – No doesn’t fit, the factor is if you think about it even in the US patent office SI will not work because it clashes with so many things. Metric for example. Also “super” which is a common word , and “Intelligence” another common word. There is nothing super about AI as a matter of fact its Average at everything not super at everything.
2: superior intelligence – Read above.
3: supreme intelligence – fucking stop already Read above
4: extreme intelligence – We had this already this on X, I think it called it self MechaHitler.

While Trump’s ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz later said: “If you didn’t see the president’s speech, it’s now super intelligence. I think he’s absolutely right.” However, when asked for his thoughts on the new name, Canada’s minister of AI Evan Solomon said: “Canadians are not enthusiastic, at all, about renaming things,” in an apparent reference to Trump renaming Lake Ontario.

The fact that the Executive branch is trying to force this one is worse than anything because it shows the bifurcation of the people vs the lords, This move is divisive and people that run things know this. but as far as AI is concerned we are at no level of super.

The biggest concern here is the POTUS renaming a device that the current GOV has an interest in (10%) is seriously concerning. Collusion is a hell of a thing. The second some dumbass at Nvidia, Anthropic, or any vendor tied to federal contracts or CHIPS Act money renames their product to ‘SI’ to appease the executive branch, they’re walking into shareholder derivative lawsuits and SEC fraud filings. You can’t rebrand narrow autocomplete as ‘Superintelligence’ on an SEC filing without committing fraud.

Call me when the positronic man happens, When Andrew Martin happens and Asimov rolls in his grave I will accept SI, but the more correct name of AI stands with me..

But this distraction optics should not be listened to and this is why this post is short. Coffee time!

ed note- Mr Data never called himself Super.

Attributions from:
BBC – Trump wants AI to be rebranded as super intelligence. Will it work?

Uncontrolled AI could lead to Keanu Reeves…

The head of Microsoft AI has warned that without adequate safeguards, the development of AI could lead to the emergence of a new “silicon species” which competes with humans.

Mustafa Suleyman said rival firm Anthropic is treating AI like it is human, an approach he called “misguided” which could create technology that humanity cannot control.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, the chief executive said it was “right” for people to be concerned about AI, but there were “very practical things that we can do” to control it.

Microsoft says a lot of things and does a lot of things but this one is load of horse shit. It feels like all of the heads of Corps are getting together to make their own AI doomerisms to freak out the people who don’t understand AI. Mustafa Suleyman must be rich because the man has never heard of a light switch, AI for what it’s worth will never grow outside of its building because the first thing that happens is the off switch will be hit and the machine doesn’t die slowly it dies instantly.

The comments are the latest in a series of stark warnings from the AI industry about the technology’s possible dangers. Anthropic has been approached for comment.Speaking to the Today programme on Thursday, Suleyman warned against firms continuing to create AI systems capable of setting their own objectives, earning money and owning assets.That would mean “essentially seeding a new silicon species”, he said, which could “no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us”.

Again these guys are either huffing their own farts or have missed the last 20 years of stock trading because algorithmic stock trading is a thing. The funny part is the AI will still be a slave to someone, whether it be the electric company, Nvidia, Micron, or a rubber factory. The AI is not going to be able to take up the resources to be able to keep itself alive, give or take even on enterprise level hardware it will fail in less than 3 years.

“AIs are not conscious,” he wrote. “They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.

Given that AI’s may not feel but they are just as likely as humans to end up with viruses and will eventually get so bad off that the machine will hallucinate itself to death if you make it eat up its own slop. The paradox will not kill the AI , the Slop will.

The Microsoft boss said greater transparency was needed around how AI systems are trained and evaluated. This, he said, included independent scrutiny of AI behaviour and stronger tools to monitor and control the technology. “We must not sleepwalk our way into a decision we later come to bitterly regret,” he wrote.

The weird thing about this whole cabal of LLM bosses coming out wholesale and saying all of this is I think they want to be regulated, If you are regulated you are protected and coming out with this star trek level of bullshit of the LLM Terraflopiticon Intelacore Interpalex machine will come alive and cause Skynet to become active and judgement day of cookies and milk to take over the planet in raw cookie dough to poison all humans will come about.

Speaking to the BBC about an upcoming AI summit, Suleyman called for “alignment” to create technology that must be “subordinate” to humanity. Alignment is a field which aims to build human ethical ideas and principles into AI. In other words, it aims to keep it on track with what humans value.

Well I guess x is out of the deal because we’ve almost spawned Mecha-Hitler and that went about as well as anyone could think it could go. The fact is Suleyman is asking for something that could be bought for 2 dollars at the home depot called a “switch”. It is a high tech thing that could control the world.

Suleyman’s comments reflect Microsoft’s initial draft of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, a “training manual” published on Monday for how the company is developing its AI, which sets out the idea of “humanist superintelligence”. This, the code states, is “very advanced AI that always works for people, stays within limits, and remains under human control”.

I hate to keep picking on Suleyman here but this is too easy.. 1942.. We’ve had the training manual since 1942.

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
The Three Laws

Third Law: A robot must protect itself, provided this does not conflict with the First or Second Law

First Law: A robot cannot harm a human or allow one to come to harm through inaction.

Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.

Actually 4 laws… but who’s counting because Suleyman sure isn’t.

The Zeroth Law

Zeroth Law, which takes precedence over the others to protect humanity as a whole. (added in 1985)

There.. A man in 1942 did something that AI LLM devs are asking for and they are not even paying the fuck attention. The fact i had to write this post is amazing… I’m going back to making my coffee. Not to mention Andrew Martin would like to have a word with Suleyman..

Attributions From:
BBC – Uncontrolled AI could lead to ‘silicon species’ rivalling humans, warns Microsoft
Isaac Asimov – 3 Laws of robotics (see what I did there Anthropic, Google and whoever else)

Attack of the Christmas 2026 edition.

Every year Christmas for retail comes earlier and earlier.

ed note- Christmas the holiday will be properly capitalized while retail christmas will not.

We are not even through the first month of school for kids and now store are decorating for christmas. The thing is when I was young seeing christmas decorations before thanksgiving was borderline blasphemy. Always the day after Thanksgiving would be the first time stores would decorated for the holiday

Now Stores push christmas in july, christmas in September , christmas because we say so.. and so on. Retailers need to stop this. Retailers think buy stuffing this holiday in our face we are going to buy more… the reality is we buy less. What corporations miss is the time that makes or breaks for a quarter for the holidays gets so diluted that the black friday sales and cyber monday sales just get looked over as another day of retail manipulating customers.

For the most part those two days are a joke because if you eye something you want for Christmas, Go to that store starting in October and take a photo of the price of the item you want you will see a very interesting trend. About October 7th that price will start going up. By November that price will be about 15 to 20% higher than the price throughout the year, BUT!, you will see “BLACK FRIDAY DEAL 18% Off new low Price! “. So that cool thing you have been eyeballing most of the year goes from $100 to $120 down to $102 in price with a grand savings of negative $2 dollars.

Stores need to get their heads out of there asses, they are making Grinches of everyone. Because its about this time now we start getting yelled at DO YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!, uhh fuck no, I have bills to pay. year after year for the last 15 years the christmas shopping black Friday and cyber Monday days are so diluted that they don’t understand it.

I have a recommendation to all retail stores out there. Let people have their holidays, Let people have Columbus day, Give the kids Halloween without the parents worrying if they have enough for Christmas, let them have Veterans day, and lastly lets have Thanksgiving without worrying until 11:59:59pm of not having to deal with christmas shopping.

Give people a break, Allow them to swing into Christmas rather than smashing them in the face with unending christmas sales… Let people start to decorate without the guillotine of christmas sales being thrown into them every place they go. What retail doesn’t want to acknowledge is happy people will spend more money rather than depressed stressed out people. Depressed stressed people will buy 20 shitty little things just to get christmas shopping out of the way vs the happy person putting in thoughts to what people want and buying 20 well thought gifts out for Christmas.

The last few years I asked my SO if we could make the week after Christmas the time to shop for christmas because 9 times out of 10 you get deals that are pre-October prices and summer slump deals.

Signs of the AI times.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot more commercials for ChatGPT and Other AI’s. usually when it is on a thing that has been out for awhile it normally is the first sign of a dying fad. Now AI had some advantages but people do not use AI other than a slop creator or a homework cheat machine. Watching disney+ the commercial for ChatGPT has come up during every break and its some old lady knitting with a woman having a conversational prompt with it. An elderly woman sitting with her yarn, talk with a her phone about sizing up her knitting needles. The interaction drags on, masquerading as genuine human companionship, until that sterile, uncanny synthetic cadence cuts in to announce, “It’s ChatGPT”. This could have very bad implications because suddenly people get the idea to replace human contact and slap some LLM in front of grandma and suddenly 4 months later you find her dead because the LLM suggested she microwave her needles for better loops.

The fact that they targeted the older generation with this is kind of gross, AI is not a replacement for human contact. The longer the advertisement goes, the worse it gets the elderly woman asks what are you and the voice changes to a more robotic voice and says it ChatGPT.

But seeing the advert come up so much is a sign of the times, with AI makers saying they want to slow down and the factor that they are advertising. In my opinion I think AI has peaked, Its peaked with all of the slop and the homework cheats and AI’s true use is fallen to the wayside. My reason for that is AI is at a level right now where it is functional yet makers are looking for more data, and unlike Jonny 5 they can only absorb a finite amount of data. The other part is with all the slop out there the AI is eating itself, and having hallucinations from its own crap.

Models are getting so corrupted due to the fact that companies like google have put synthID out there to keep themselves from being being a victim of autocannibalism. There is no synthID for text files and right now LLM’s have no clue what they are digesting because massive corporations are making the mistake of having AI bots to make their sites to look busier than they really are.

The worst part is we have seen this model play out in real life in the UK with Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. You say but wait, that’s a cow! Why yes it is and when you feed cows cows. When you use leftover cow bits to feed cows you create a feedback loop that gets worse with every time you do it and i feel like we are here with AI .

The recent announcement of AGI was more of a distraction optics move by makers to get away from the problems that are coming up. The warnings are out there.

AI makers grouping together and saying “we need to slow down”. What would happen if all auto manufactures got together and said we should not do X thing, there would be a lawsuit in 5 seconds. ,

Second AI makers looking for a carte blanche release from liability if the AI tell them to do something wrong. When hairdryers have warnings not to sleep with them or eyeglass screwdrivers have warnings not to stick them in .. well..

Third Capex spending that is tied to the US GOV when Rates are going up. CAPEX spending so far exceeds the profit ranges that Anthropic says “we are profitable” but “don’t look at the books”. Right now these companies are running with the “too big to fail” and we know where that goes. The governments investment into AI companies has no payoff because computer tech devalues twenty times faster than pulling a brand new car off a lot. The return on value of 1 year old hardware is at times not even 1/10th of the purchase price.

Fourth The fact that AI keeps doing things it should not. AI time after time now has been failing in big ways, The more that researchers keep pressing AI to do things AI ends up screwing up something it should not of touched.

Last is the advertisements, If the market was self driven it would not need a single advert because word of mouth gets 10 times the attract rate than a commercial has and for the most part 99% of the internet is word of mouth it follows outside of the way television had advertised to us in the past.

Given all of this, is a signs of the times. Do I believe AI should slow down. Yes in the public face, No in the research end. AI needs to fix its security and its own consumption of itself.

Anthropic says they are profitable as long as you don’t check the inbox for bills.

Anthropic stated that they are profitable but as long as you do not look at their stocks nor the bills for capex. The AI goldrush spend continues to built out for the billion dollar shovel for the 1$ AI nugget of gold. I mean hell, if I am to use this logic I am technically a trillionaire I just haven’t earned the money yet.

Anthropic has told its backers it will be profitable this quarter, as it moves to allay investor concerns about the aggressive cash burn of frontier AI companies ahead of its blockbuster initial public offering.

Right now anthropic* is pulling the one thing that people do when they are at a loss of what to do when they panic about money, If I do not see the bills they did not happen. AI development is slowing down, consumable content is drying up. AI is trying to get a 4g fancy rebrand to AGI. we are playing all the games that happen when a business knows the books are cooked.

Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.

We’ve seen this play before, NFTs used this same playbook and while it works in the short term it crashes as soon as it gets legs. Anthropic price would not get a valuation out of the gate this high unless someone was jigging the system to make it seem like it was valued this high.

The listing comes at a fraught moment for the AI industry, as the blistering pace of development collides with public anxiety over the technology’s impact on everything from the environment and jobs to the future of humanity.On Saturday, the $965bn start-up’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the AI industry to slow the pace of development.

The factor that the company is talking out both sides of the mouth on this should SCARE the SHIT out of every investor. No high level C suite Exec announces to “slow down” unless all the moves are played out and you are trying to ride the profits of the current system and hope for a breakthrough like an addict waiting for their next fix. The thing is right now AI is eating its own tail consuming slop and its margins for accuracy is degrading and the execs know this. The AI That is claimed as new is not really new it’s just pushed to the front, we are on the same AI that went on jeopardy in 2011, The difference now is computing power has caught up to the AI and CEO’s are terrified that people might figure this out. The modern tech purist will say “NO MODERN AI IS DIFFERENT!” Which in its most basic form it’s Watson with more association, or Charlie from It’s always sunny in Philadelphia with his conspiracy board.

Employees at the rival labs have been in close communication over recent weeks about instituting measures to safely manage the development of AI, according to people familiar with the talks, which are highly unusual given the fierce competition between the companies.

Brother.. Have I something to sell you. It’s called monopoly, the Factor the labs are getting “together” to talk about how they are going to manage safety it’s not safety, They are hitting a wall and know if one person gets an edge here the entire market can go down with it. This is cartel behavior they see the snake oil running out.

My final point here is, If AI were to slow down and redevelop the AI to a smarter AI that doesn’t get fooled into telling someone how to eat glass I’m good with that. The CEO’s are slowing down because they are building a 39483948329048 horsepower engine to run a Geo Metro. If the AI companies drove AI to be an augment versus the “replacement” they are looking for, it would actually make sense. Otherwise the markets are going to have dark times ahead.

Attributions from:
Financial Times – Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter

*Yes, the lowercase is intentional. anthropic hasn’t burned through enough compute or told enough truth on their balance sheet to earn capital letters on this site.

Follow up III to Whitepaper 8:Reflecting pool failure nodes.

I can’t believe I am still writing about this, But I also believe it as well. The reflecting pool has become such an unmitigated disaster because rush jobs never work out well unless they are very preplanned. The New York Times and other media outlets have finally broken their silence on the pool and they are only now saying what I said back in MAY about this.

The contractor said the pool’s new blue liner peeled and tore because of “human oversight” and a flawed plan that involved layering two incompatible chemicals, documents show.

I don’t even know what to say here. The whole world yelled out that even had a level of high school chemistry or watched this old house to know that the reflecting pool was going to be a disaster!

Because of “human oversight,” workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that made the layers of the liner stick together, Atlantic said in the documents. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible.

This is a masterclass in bullshit. The company that has sprayed these liners in sewers and other things suddenly wakes up and goes “oh wait we had two incompatible chemicals”? This is a case of passing the buck on them not wanting to just admit when you try to apply chemicals to concrete that has been wet for 50+ years just doesn’t work well.

The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.

Back in May when they were laying this down I called out nearly the exact failure method! So again they pushed this to a no bid process, Let these people do this. If I were VASpray , I would be in a straight up panic and preparing for every city manager to come down on them like a bag of anvils because when you have a failure like this you just failed loud enough for the whole world to hear.

From Coffeecommander:
Executing an unbonded polymer application over a concrete base less than 48 hours after drainage bypasses the mandatory 30-to-90-day capillary dry-out phase. Under direct solar radiation, the surface temperature of the dense polymer sheet escalates to over 140°F (60°C). This heat conducts into the top micro-layers of the concrete, transforming the trapped sub-surface moisture into water vapor.

Because the gas is trapped beneath a non-permeable vapor barrier, it expands geometrically. This expansion generates localized upward hydrostatic vapor pressures exceeding 150 psi. Given that the tensile strength of standard unreinforced concrete sits between 300–400 psi, the combination of internal vapor pressure and the massive mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients (α_concrete ≈ 10 × 10⁻⁶/K vs. α_polyurea ≈ 100 × 10⁻⁶/K) creates extreme internal shear strain. This forces systemic subsurface delamination and structural concrete spalling. The mathematical probability of structural matrix failure within a 12-to-24 month environmental cycle is 100%.

The sad factor is the internal departments are still pressing on the story that vandals did this. Unfortunately, the fix is going to cost at least 5 to 10 times the original cost, and the end factor is its going to be expensive and likely hazmat by the end of this.

As I sip my coffee I guess some people will learn from this. I hope… Honestly here, the blame game needs to stop and the companies involved should take a step back and work for a fix worthy of the US. My recommendation here is CALL IN THE ARMY COE!

Attributions from:
Coffeecommander.net – Follow up Part II to Whitepaper 8 Reflecting pool failure nodes.
Coffeecommander.net – Followup to: White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
Coffeecommander.net – White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
New York Times – Contractor Blames Its Own Repairs, Not Vandals, for Reflecting Pool Failure

Writing prompt III: There and back again by Coffee Commander..

Daily writing prompt
What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
View all responses

The longest trip I’ve taken was the best and worst. I happened to take a flight where the airliner never got to the runway.. The plane spent over 3 hours on the tarmac and delayed getting to the next leg of the flight to Philadelphia. When I got to philly I missed my connection, this is where things go from aggravating to bad.

US airways redirected me from a direct flight to CDG airport in France. The problem was they could not find pilots for the flight. so after hours of delay they finally find some pilots. The pilots got on the plane after a delay and as we were taxiing the pilot announces that they are returning to the gate because they had too many flight hours. Back to the gate we go, Defeated and hungry.

I did not know US airways screwed up my itinerary while they did redirect me towards Europe they made a mistake on the computers, They had my paper routing set to Orlando rather than Arlanda somehow the US airways employee fat fingered my location. So if we review my flight plan, It was supposed to be BOS to PHI to ARN , Somehow US airways had me from BOS to PHI to CDG to MCO to ARN?

To this point I had spent 1.5 – 2 hours – Logan Airport ,5 hours – broken plane out of gate – philidelphia airport inside of plane, 45 minutes – 1 hour – attempt #2 at taking off Philadelphia airport illegal flight crew., 5 hours – inside gate 22(?) at airport finding new crew.

to this point we’d been past the gates, with most amenities closed, me starving and other passengers in the same state we had asked for food, the flight attendants gave us a lavish meal of a Soda and a package of pretzels to which I still have to this day.

After getting off the flight and entering paris airport. from all the delays from the start of the flight I tried to find any help possible for my next flight because the connection time was only less 15 minutes(or passed by 15 mins) or so to Stockholm , so finding that the plane leaves from gate 7(?) again across an entire airport.

While I headed across this airport I realized that the setup of the airport is a horrible horrible setup. The airport was very hard to navigate your way through to get to your next location . figuring that I am already 24 hours overdue to my receiving friends I figured that I should reach out to them, I grabbed my phone out of the carry on and Tried to dial *dead* tried again *dead*. I did not know at that the time but T-mobile messed up and set another phone on the account for international travel and my phone to receive international calls. I put the phone away and hoped i would catch the flight and figured worst case I would figure out what to do in Stockholm. I ran to the gate across the cavernous airport with the people mover treadmills and got to my gate and to my dismay the flight was not listed. I found an english speaking person and asked about the flight and it had left an hour beforehand.

Defeated, I decided to make my way to the US airways ticket booth.. and there I realised I won my next prize, they were closed and would not be open till monday a full 24 hours till the booth opened. I managed to spend all of my time in the airport with a few excursions into france because I was bored out of my mind. Given I had not slept, I knew if I sat down I would pass out and I was still analyzing the situation to figure out what to do . I did eventually sit down and my carry-on with on me but not attached to me. There is nothing like waking up with guns in your face asking about your luggage. Given I was scared, Lost, Exhausted I kept trying to do my best not to piss off another country. The problem was every time I fell asleep I would wake up with some very attentive military types. Given it was their third visit and me not having a cigarette in over 2 days I noticed one of them had a pack on them, I gave them a short explanation to my plight and they seemed to take compassion in it. They said hold on and actually brought me out a door that I was not supposed to be out and let me smoke one of their cigarettes.

The Charles De Gaulle Airport security guys were amped but actually very nice. I joked with them where I might end up next. Due to having my bag strapped to my shoulder so long it had actually caused it to bleed fairly bad and I was starting to look like Bruce Willis in die hard. The next twenty four hours had me in a haze. The next morning I was actually able to have the breakfast of champions which was two Heinekens and a basket of rolls .

My next discovery in the airport was the internet kiosk, after my breakfast of the gods, I had some euro coin and it was enough to get on the computer for 10 minutes and cost 15 euros. I loaded up every session possible of Connected messengers, and at the time offline messages were not a thing. And I watched the time count down in desperation for ANYONE to log in. As I watched the time remaining drop into the sub two minute range, A good friend logged in and my typing WPM was likely 400 because I typed an entire book to my friend which was something like “Hey I am at the wrong airport , my flights were diverted my phone doesnt work my card locked up when trying to get money , Call my mother tell her i am fine . tell my mother to call my father and tell him that i am stuck in CDG airport. Contact US embassy please help, US Airways trying to divert me to MCO ” at the 30 second mark my friend said “ok” and I watched my connection die.

Happy I had made a hello world from the wrong part of the world gave me a bit of reserve. I went back to my area I was sitting and listening and hoping someone would find me. Not realizing the whole time over the PA they were calling my name and I was not paying attention to local dialect. My name is pronounced differently in france and suddenly my gun toting friends found me in the airport and they brought me to US airways booth. Now that part of things I had people I had hope and the first thing that the US airways desk agent says is “do you realize that you have a flight to MCO Orlando, at that point I said why on earth would I come to france and divert to orlando when my destination was Arlanda !” The desk agent made a call and what I could see in his hurried voice over the phone turning to abject terror realizing what exactly was happening.

The Desk agent suddenly was a flurry of calls, they routed a call to the US to my parents to say I was alive. My mother was freaking out, I told them to call my father instead, I gave him the story and he said he’d call back. They gave him the number to the desk. after a short bit Mr Gate agent’s phone rang, I knew he was talking about me and looking at me. Little did I realize that US officials got involved, I was shifted to the Pilots lounge. I had a celebratory rum and coke and just marvelled how fucked up US airways was. My Cell phone rang, it was my father saying he straightened things out and had help from US gov. Sipping away at my rum and coke and finally relaxing, Mr Gate agent comes in and says I cant stay in the lounge, I finish my Rum and coke and they finally have me routed to ARN through germany, I tested my debit card on mcdonalds and to say the least it was a completely different experience than USA. When they called me on the plane , they set me up in first class, which is an experience in itself.

The flight attendants treated me like royalty and honestly at the point I did not care, because I was getting closer to my destination. After another switch and window seats to which I love I saw my first glimpse of Sweden and realized the beginning of the beginning of my Journey was nearing its end.

Landing in ARN Stockholm.. getting off the plane and going to the belt to get my luggage I watched everyone’s luggage go around the belt. Ten pieces turned into 8 pieces that drew down to nothing left on the belt. I left the belt area to go to the US airways booth to be told my luggage was not there so I was left with a month to go no clothing to go through my trip , my stuff in my luggage was somewhere else. The irony here, My luggage took a different journey, BOS -PHI- CDG- NYC – MCO – PHI – ARN it came three weeks into my trip to which point I welcomed my luggage like an old friend and laughed that someone from ARN drove 3 hours to bring it to me.

Honestly, The trip was the best in my life, I had Friends, food , Surströmming(yes that one, No it was not bad, It was prepared by a chef), Beer, Swedish Culture, Walking around sweden give you an idea of how big and small the world is all at the same time and how Sweden’s Culture of Lagom is something to aspire to..

Sony is playing with fire. They are speedrunning 2010 again.

With Sony’s commitment to dropping physical media and to some degree ignoring regulations of some countries sony is playing the Chernobyl Test.. again. The last time sony had this much pushback was the removal of OtherOS. OtherOS was the ability to install a version of Linux on the Playstation 3 console. While sony claimed it was a safety issue it was a calculated move to try to keep “pirates” at bay and in reality piss everyone off including the US Government.

After the release of firmware 3.21 and the removal took hold, an enterprising person named George Hotz flexed his programing muscle and got under the hood of the PS3 and not only cracked it he released the system keys that pretty much left the PS3 naked on a street corner with a subway vent blowing up its ass.

That took down the playstation network, Left people unable to play their systems and the irony is the OtherOS was a 2-5% issue. So if we go to today sony has put a hard date of stopping producing physical media, We’ve gone from a 2 to 5% issue to a 80 to 95% issue . if a 2 to 5% issue creates a Geohot, what does an exponential 80 to 95% issue. Because geohot fixed/broke something sony blocked, But when you take the higher percentages, How many hackers are you going to piss off . how many system devs are you going to piss off, How many vibe hackers that don’t know shit about programing but can get an AI to do it for them?

The tools in 2010 were few and far and not entry level. Now in 2026 you have people with tools that could in theory tell them how to badly operate a nuclear reactor. Imagine George Hotz if he had the AI tools of 2026 as an augment to his skills, what you get is not just a security threat but a weapon with the combined intel of every programer and hacker that came before him which makes george threatening to hardware on a global level.

Sony took Hotz to federal court, unleashed throngs of lawyers, and subpoenaed the IP address of anyone who even remotely even thought of Mr hotz even in a rule 34 way. But the math was already out in the wild and others monopolized on it.

Sony is setting the stage for a back blow they might not see coming because they are already using the 2010 playbook against the world of 2026. Geohot wont be involved this time because he has a restraining order likely to the end of time for his actions. But when 2028 comes sony is going to be hit with the collective force of the whole and not only that the force of anyone and everyone who has ever programmed and it will be bad. If this was sony running a nuclear reactor the control rods they think they will slam down are actually made of Pure Graphite and cobalt 60. It’s not good.

Sony is stirring anger faster than they can cool it, they are threatening customers day by day. They are basically adding to the anger because people have the right to be angry. If I told you “Sure I can sell you a car in 2026, But in 2028 the engine is not included” You will get mad. you will stop buying that brand.

“The dignity and safety of our employees must not be threatened by customer harassment, such as words or demands from customers that exceed what is considered reasonable according to social norms,” the publication read. “If any behavior constituting customer harassment is confirmed, we may restrict or suspend customer service in order to protect the safety of our employees.” Some of the examples of customer harassment detailed in the publication include “persistent and repeated, or prolonged, demands; excessive or unreasonable demands for compensation; abusive language, threats, slander, and other similar behaviors; requests unrelated to products or services; intimidating attitude; discriminatory or sexual conduct; and attacks and demands against individual employees.

Sony’s language here is the defined undefined. It works out to we reserve the right to exclude your hardware if we do not like what you are saying. Sony is setting themselves up for a fight with the 1st amendment and basically it will not end well.

They are threatening to take people who harass customer support to court . and what’s to say I have Die hard 2 on in the background and Sony QOS AI monitor takes that as a direct form of harassment you know this will happen. Because the legal system is more and more getting into the crosshairs of fighting with AI every day because of people trying to use AI as a magic wand. Look at youtube with the current situation with Anime right now. Even when Charles White throws his hat in the situation you know its bad.

Attributions from:
Toms Hardware Sony threatens to cut off customer support and pursue legal action over harassment as backlash to PlayStation’s physical-disc phaseout intensifies — company to move forward with no disc decision despite several lawsuits
Moist Critical – Huge Copyright Strike Situation
George Hotz – Website , Blog, Music(whoa?)
Wikipedia – George Hotz
Wikipedia – SCEA vs George Hotz