SteveInBaltimore

... so, mathematically speaking, that increased the odds that my guess would be right.

Figured I'd throw a wild guess out there. He is famous for an activity other than football.

I've been maintaining since January that 10-8 was what we needed. Hope you are right, but I'm not confident.

It's the front and center big headline story on CNN.com, CBSnews.com, NBCNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, WSJ.com, and FoxNews.com. It's on the front page in the top left position on BBC.com and MSNBC.com (so basically the 2nd biggest story, behind the one top center). ABCnews.com and NYtimes.com seem to be the only major sites I would consider mainstream that don't have it as one of their top stories.

shopping malls in a Vegas casino. Probably 20+ years ago. He had a much younger, attractive woman on his arm.

up on my list. It's 835.8 miles away. I don't think I'll go check it out tonight. I do think it did a better job of coming up with true "dive" bars than the last time you posted it. Last time there were some bars that didn't really feel like "dives" to me. A little too upscale. I'm in Elkridge MD. But it won't accept that in the box. So I chose to use my location and it does find bars near me, although it says my location is "near Columbia MD". It seems to have a very limited # of locations it will accept as typed input. When I start to type Elkridge, by the time I get to "El" there are only 8 selections to choose from (and none of them is Elkridge MD, Elkton MD, or even Ellicott City MD). Add the K and there is just one selection, Elk Grove CA.

few minutes and wills his team to victory. Today it's Donaldson. When was the last time we had a guy do that? Hammond vs UVa???

Have we ever seen that happen before?

It lists our record after the FSU game as "16-9 (5-7)". We are 17-9, and 6-7 in the ACC.

now. Don't even get me started on Jardiance.

Pasha was vacating the spot he threw to. Yes, it was most likely Lawal's fault. But when a guy who hardly ever sees minutes is involved in a miscommunication situation with someone who plays 30+ minutes per game, I think it's at least possible that maybe Pasha didn't do what he was supposed to.

you were talking just of the 1990s, definitely.

weeks ago. Pretty sure it had been back there untouched for about a quarter of a century. I was making a Painkiller and it seemed like an appropriate glass.

I'm not as optimistic about the future of AI. Yes, products will get pumped out faster. Pretty sure the quality will be lower, but of course I guess AI can fix it faster too. Now I'm a bit biased because I work in the intelligence community. I produce software that can affect whether people live or die, or national security. And it gets fielded in places where I just can't say a week later, here's a patch to install to fix the first 7 bugs found. It has to be designed, coded, and thoroughly tested (using test software that also has to be written, guess AI can do that too?) At best AI will produce software that produces the correct outputs all the time or damn near all of the time. Which could be a good thing. But if it is completely created by prompting, it will never have a coherent, logical design that someone who has to maintain it can understand. AI doesn't work that way. I guess a good software engineer could do at least the high level design and then have AI code the various components to specs. That's better. But there is a problem with that too. A software engineer can execute a good design because they have years of experience writing code and understands how design translates to implementation. They understand all the stages in between the design and code that actually works on the machine. Also, a good software engineer can look at the code that AI has produced and evaluate it, make sure it meets standards, test it, and so forth. So that's good. But this hypothetical software engineer can only do all the stuff described in the previous paragraph because they have written tons of code, made all the mistakes and learned from them, and understand why doing it one way is better than doing it another. And as the years pass and software engineering becomes more and more about prompting AI at a high level to produce something that works -- there won't be any of us left who have made all those mistakes and have the background to intelligently evaluate the code that AI is producing. We'll all be retired (377 days from now, in my case). In the end you will have AI writing code, AI writing the test code that tests the code, AI checking the code to make sure it meets the design criteria, and you will have code that no human fully understands, and you won't even have humans who have the background to fully understand and evaluate any large and complex codebase. And the more code you produce that was not written by actual developers, and which has either never been really looked at and evaluated by competent people, or certainly hasn't been fully understood by competent people and created specifically to fit in an overall coherent design -- it will be FAR easier for security problems to occur. Either security flaws that could be exploited will be in the code because no one knew how to look for them, or else malicious actors actually exploiting the AI to put malicious things in the code. It's a disaster waiting to happen. And then you look a few years down the road -- we all know about how AI can produce something that isn't "quite right" because it is just mimicking patterns of the trillions of bytes of data it has access to -- whether that is pictures, or large volumes of human writing, or code in open source repositories. But it's 98% there. Which is often good enough. But a few years down the road, most of the code in the open source repositories will have been written by AI, not by people. So instead of mimicking the best code out there that people have been written, and approximating that using the pattern-matching algorithms that make AI work, and getting "98%" there -- it will be trying to mimic other AI code that was probably at best 98% there to start with. So that generation's AI will produce code that is "96%" there. And so on. Quality will degrade over time. I guess the AI creators will have to work harder and harder to improve their AI to prevent that degrading from occurring. Who will be coding these AI models? Other AI, I guess. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old timer, like those folks who think that someone isn't really driving if they are using automatic transmission. Obviously there have been other advancements in software that have created abstract levels above the basic machine -- first assembly code, then compilers, then higher and higher level languages, abstractions of network layers, etc. And they've all been for the better. And there's always been old timers who felt they understood what was going on under the hood better because in their past they had written in assembly code and lower level languages that were much closer to the "bare machine". But each of those layers of abstraction was at least fully understood and definable. You don't always need to know every bit of implementation of how a compiler for a high level programming language turns source code into machine instructions -- but it is a concrete, repeatable, definable process. A compiler can be tested to make sure that it meets all the requirements of that translation or it won't be considered a true compiler for that language. It could have bugs in it like anything else, and one compiler could be faster or more efficient or create faster running machine code than another or handle errors differently. But at some point a compiler just takes a fully described programming language standard and creates machine code that does what it is supposed to. There is no such definable standard for AI. You could give it a bunch of prompts today and it could produce, say, 10000 lines of code to do something you want. You could give it those exact prompts a week from today and it could produce 11000 different lines of code. Because its model has ingested more data since then. Both pieces of code might meet your requirements, in a different way. But you are no longer using something like a compiler which has a definable and testable standard to judge what it is producing. Or you could change something unnoticeably small in your prompt (maybe you say "a" instead of "the" in the middle of a 2 paragraph description of what you want done). And the output could be different. As a software engineer, that scares the heck out of me, because I have lost the ability to say that I, or my team, actually created the code. Yet I am still responsible for it. Glad I'm retiring in 377 days. ** Edited by SteveInBaltimore at 2/8/2026, 3:12:06 PM

7 of the 41 bars near me are actually concourse bars at the airport.

When I switched to all bars, it found zero.

Poll question: How many of their first 10 3 point shots will NC State make? Teams usually start out hot from 3 against us.

...back in the days before satellite or internet radio, when I was making the 5 hour drive home from a football weekend in Blacksburg on a Sunday, I would listen to their broadcasts and thought they were great, and very entertaining. Mainly because they were the only one I could pull in along 81.

includes ESPN Unlimited. I haven't looked into it yet, but I believe that means I can now get ESPN+. If you received a similar e-mail than you might be in luck. (I get my FIOS in Howard County MD).

I remember that because I know that the Ravens won Super Bowl 35 vs the Giants 25 years ago today. That Terps collapse was the night before. Drew Nicolas would go on to be a very good point guard for MD, but he was a total deer in the headlights those last few minutes. I think he was a freshman. Watched that MD/Duke game that Saturday night while eating wings and drinking beer at the Baltimore Harborplace Hooters. Ravens owner Steve Biscotti is a Terp alum/supporter, and he was courtside at that basketball game before flying in his private jet to Tampa for the Super Bowl the next night. I also remember sitting one table over from Biscotti in Tampa for the 2004 ACC Men's Basketball Tournament at an outdoor seating / food court type area outside the arena, he was there as a Terps fan, obviously.

Any idea why he wore 11 Saturday?

we do on 5-10 footers. It's horrible.

NBA drafts based on raw ability and projecting what he could become in a few years. It's irrelevant to discussing what he is doing now. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize his college play, and that is a completely valid discussion. But people can't do that without sarcastically bringing up the NBA thing. Let's talk about his problems finishing at the basket, his turnovers, his shooting woes. Let's talk about how he can improve or whether he should get less playing time. But how about having that discussion without having to get in some sort of snide comment about whether he's a future NBA player or not. It comes across like a politician trying to avoid talking about the issues but instead repeating an old, tired joke about his opponent ( ha-ha, he can't spell potato! ha-ha, he said he invented the internet!). Scores points by making fun of the people that are other side of an argument than you, but doesn't really substantively discuss the issue. I think he has had troubles adjusting to the physicality of the game. Just because he played semi-pro in another country, ACC basketball is still a step up. I don't want him handling the ball in the last few minutes when we are trying to protect a lead. He got caught on the baseline and turned it over against SMU, yet he was on the floor to do it again in the final minutes vs Stanford. I think the shooting will come but we are in the thick of a race and can't wait forever. Right now he is firing up and missing too many 3s. See, you make substantive criticisms of Avdalas like I did in the last paragraph without getting a snide dig in about how silly it is that he is considered an NBA prospect. Meanwhile, what a crapshow the last few minutes of the half were.

We gave up 15 points in the last minute, we made 3 critical turnovers in the last few minutes, we missed way too many free throws, we took a stupid early 3 in the shot clock while sitting on a big lead in the final minutes, we fouled a 3 point shooter who was 24 feet from the basket. It is perfectly legitimate to complain about these things, ESPECIALLY when they are all things that have happened before, and we lost a game where we led by 12 with 2:17 left a few weeks ago making some of the same mistakes and we lost a game last week in the last few minutes where we made some of the same mistakes. Complaining about some of these fundamental late game issues isn't ignorant fans who "think they know more than the coach". Yes, it's always great to get a win on the road in the ACC. But the late game issues that have cost us two games where we had good leads already were on display again tonight, and it's perfectly fair to point that out.

We fouled a 3 point shooter and he made all 3 (his FT% was in the 60s). We turned it over twice including Neo getting trapped for the second time in a few games in the last minu te. Hammonds fired up a 3 early in the shot clock for no reason. Tobi took it to the hoop with 23 seconds left on the shot clock in the last 30 seconds. We missed several free throws. And we do this stuff almost every time we had a lead.

Make one of these please.

I don't even want him on the court when we are protecting a late lead.