Final September Friday Afternoon Links

by | Sep 26, 2025 | Cocktails, Daily Links, I Am Lame | 85 comments

Well, outside of an absolute shite week at work, the Indians are working on getting back to the post season, which was not expected a couple months back. The Browns are no longer winless, but I do not have a lot of faith in our offense against the Lions defense. Alien: Earth finished up a lackluster season, which ended part way through the story. But y’all don’t care about that, so let’s get to some links.

Yeah, this is what gamers were asking for.

The best named CEO is stepping down.

Pettiness can be funny at times.

I’ll just leaf this here for you all.

Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?

So, what about the 5 years they were shut down?

In the middle of the Kimmel debate, this seems a poor idea.

The knee jerk reaction to this will entertain me.

Why would you want to take personal responsibility?

Huh… take that back. I want to blame someone else for being fat now.

Stop arguing, and understand that we’re right!

It still isn’t Bud Light.

As the weather starts cooling, and cold season comes around, let’s go to an old classic. This is another one that’s more of an outline than an actual recipe.

Hot Toddy

  • Spirit of choice (whiskey is a common one, but applejack and rum, particularly spiced ones, can work quite well)
  • Sweetener (honey is traditional, maple syrup works as a nice twist)
  • Spices (I usually go with cinnamon, clove, and ginger, but any baking spices will work)
  • Lemon juice
  • Boiling water (here, you can make tea or use heated cider)

Most people who make toddies will have their own style and method. The way I do mine is to fill the mug I’ll be using with boiling water, and letting it sit while I gather and measure out the rest of my ingredients. I go with a tablespoon of honey, 1.5-2 ounces of whiskey (usually bourbon), ground cinnamon, clove, ginger, and a half a lemon. Empty the now warm mug of the boiling water that was sitting in it, add in the honey, lemon juice, the liquor, sprinkle in your ground spices, and top with boiling water. Give it a good couple of stirs to combine, and then garnish with a lemon wheel and a cassia stick (ACKSHUALLY… what most people think of as cinnamon sticks are actually cassia). Cup it in your hands, and enjoy.

With that, I’ll leave you to your weekend, I hope it’s everything you want it to be.

JORDAN!

About The Author

Nephilium

Nephilium

Nephilium is a geek of multiple types living in the vast suburban forests of Cleveland.

85 Comments

  1. SDF-7

    Alien: Earth finished up a lackluster season

    Nothing after Aliens counts for me — they killed that franchise so dead it isn’t funny.

    Afternoon all. Sorry your week has been crap, Neph… at least it sounds like you’re still able to go on PTO and stop caring about the bridge calls.

    • Nephilium

      I gave it a chance because it’s from Noah Hawley, and I really enjoyed the Fargo show. One thing I will say is that he absolutely nailed the aesthetic and feel of Alien/Aliens. The story and choices are where I feel things fell apart.

      And appreciate the thoughts, there’s a small part of me that’s looking forward to bringing this up with my supervisor and pointing out that I predicted something like this would happen. I’m just hoping they get it resolved either before I get back from vacation.

      • EvilSheldon

        I’m seeing the same character stupidity in Terminal List: Dark Wolf now that I’ve got stuck in a bit. All of the characters behave like twenty-something Hollywood script-writing drones, not hardened veterans of special operations. It’s getting to the point that I can’t ignore it any more.

    • rhywun

      Been meaning to check it out if only out of morbid curiosity.

      Nothing after Aliens counts for me — they killed that franchise so dead it isn’t funny.

      inorite

      • slumbrew

        I just watched Drinker’s post-season vid. He was cautiously optimistic after the first couple of episodes.

        That optimism was misplaced.

    • Urthona

      Thought the new movie was fine. Haven’t watched the show.

    • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

      Alien, and Alien3. Fuck that Regan era jingoist bullshit Aliens.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        Fuck, I will watch the forth one before that second grlpwer abomination.

        Neeeewwwtt!! I was glad to see she died by the third one.

  2. UnCivilServant

    Yeah, this is what gamers were asking for.

    Can we get rid of the bundling of spyware with OSes?

    I’d rather pay for the OS than have to keep rooting out this crap.

    • SDF-7

      Nadella’s reaction — we’re more likely to get the spyware without the OS at this point.

  3. UnCivilServant

    The best named CEO is stepping down.

    I know some Gannons who can take the job.

  4. SDF-7

    Yeah, this is what gamers were asking for.

    Once again — AI sounds like just a chatty wrapper around a web search…

    (Checks win+G to see if the dumb thing is there… crap, it is… even with every other flavor of Copilot uninstalled or disabled via Group Policy or whatnot… dangnabbit MS! — I think it is because it looks like it is 100% remote, btw… just a web portal to crappy Bing search really)

    • rhywun

      Gaming Copilot won’t play the game for you

      What if I want exactly that? I’m not 14 years old any more and dying over and over again stopped being fun decades ago.

      • EvilSheldon

        I have a rule with video games – I try something three times, then I throw the game away.

        When I play a video game, I want to be entertained for a couple of hours. I have neither the free time nor the patience to ‘git gud’.

      • Threedoor

        I’m stuck in a PS2 Indiana jones game.

        Stuck in Red Dead Redemption.

        I’m a casual gamer and want the same thing

  5. SDF-7

    So, what about the 5 years they were shut down?

    “Check our TOS — we owe you nothing!” is what I would expect.

  6. The Late P Brooks

    The controversial student-planned event came less than two weeks after the politically motivated assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

    WE DON’T KNOW THAT!

  7. The Late P Brooks

    It is also unclear which political figures the student group planned to put on the dart boards

    I’m sure it was completely bipartisan, with Bernie and AOC as well as Trump.

    • Trials and Trippelations

      Probably 19 trump targets and one Josh Shapiro (since he’s a dirty J00)

    • EvilSheldon

      If you want bipartisan slaughter (in effigy) of political figures, once again, GWAR leads the way.

      The Libs of TikTok dude got badly p0wnd this past week on this…

  8. Grummun

    Any of the channels that Alphabet screwed over in the last five years actually going back? Seems like a ‘fool me once’ kind of thing.

  9. The Late P Brooks

    there is a deep schism in how Americans understand the assassination that took place a little more than a week ago.

    SRSLY?

  10. The Late P Brooks

    From a forensic perspective, the images built up a remarkably consistent version of a major news event just moments after it had happened.

    They cut the gatekeepers and curators of truth off at the pass.

  11. rhywun

    Why would you want to take personal responsibility?

    Because it’s easier to blame bIg fOoD than to get off your lazy fat ass.

  12. The Late P Brooks

    YouTube will create a process to reinstate the accounts of content creators whose profiles were banned in recent years because they violated rules that limited misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 election.

    The danger has passed.

  13. rhywun

    Stop arguing, and understand that we’re right!

    Another chin-stroker from NPR side-stepping the fact that their Team is a viciously evil death cult is just what the US needs right now.

  14. The Late P Brooks

    It said that such government pressure to police speech was “unacceptable and wrong” and that the company “has consistently fought against those efforts on free speech grounds.”
    “The company has a commitment to freedom of expression,” said Daniel Donovan, a lawyer from King & Spaulding who wrote the letter for Alphabet. “This commitment is unwavering and will not bend to political pressure.”

    *pause for laughter*

    • Aloysious

      Daniel Donovan is a mercenary, and can go fuck his own face with a jackhammer.

  15. Aloysious

    Nice cocktail choice. If I had one of those right now, I’d have to toddy off to my easy chair for a nap.

  16. The Late P Brooks

    Own goal

    Tesla is asking the Trump administration not to repeal EPA rules that allow automakers to sell more polluting vehicles despite the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, donating more than $200 million to Trump’s campaign, which clearly included repealing the EPA rules as part of its platform.

    For years, Donald Trump has been spreading misinformation about electric vehicles.

    Therefore, it wasn’t surprising when he made removing the federal EV tax credit and EPA rules that force automakers to produce more EVs a central part of his platform during the 2024 presidential campaign.

    What was more surprising was to see Tesla CEO Elon Musk back Trump with more than $200 million in campaign financing and claiming that the then-former President was “right about everything.”

    Musk has even proudly stood behind Trump has he was calling for the end of the “EV mandate.”

    That dope Musk doesn’t understand how crony capitalism works. He should have been giving that money to Kamala.

    • R.J.

      That blurb is a dog’s dinner of confusing poop.

      • Sensei

        That’s Electrek.

        Take content from elsewhere. Add an opinion about this to avoid infringement. Run advertising.

        I use it only as an aggregator to find the original article.

    • rhywun

      removing the federal EV tax credit and EPA rules that force automakers to produce more EVs

      Because telling the truth about forcing automakers to produce more EV’s against their will is mIsInFoRmAtIoN.

  17. UnCivilServant

    So, I’ve found I like finding lesser known Manga, particular those with unusual premises. The problem I have is that I have no good discoverability avenue. The places I used to look have all shut down, and the big corporate sites have awful discoverability for small titles, preferring to push the algorithmically popular stuff that I’ve already decided not to read. Anybody have any recommendations of where to look to discover new titles?

  18. The Late P Brooks

    That blurb is a dog’s dinner of confusing poop.

    tl;dr- Elon Musk is a big poopyhead dope.

  19. The Late P Brooks

    Tesla wrote in a filing to the EPA:

    As the recent assessment from the National Academy of Sciences makes clear, the proposal does not sufficiently evaluate the voluminous and rigorously established science, as well as the additionally developed scientific record since the 2009 endangerment finding that further solidifies the level of concern from climate change and the level of confidence that the established scientific community has over these findings.

    The American automaker stated that the EPA has not made a sufficient argument based on legal or factual basis for reversing the vehicle emissions standards.

    “Tesla” wrote that. Not some random staff member.

    • R.J.

      I think I can make a case that any improvements to automobile emissions have been incremental since the late 1990s and only succeeded in increasing the cost of motor vehicles with no measurable benefit to society or the planet. Same for safety regulations, all they did was make cars fatter and burn more gas.

      • ZWAK, doktor of BRAIN SCIENCE!

        and all look like slugs.

    • R.J.

      I clicked the link, and there was this big fat guy with a Colonel Sanders beard, glaring at me and not speaking.
      Then I realized I was the only one there. I will see you all later.

      • Baby Oil Procurement Dept

        Yeah this link is just a reminder. Things get going usually after 9pmET

  20. Suthenboy

    I recently saw the most stunning demonstration of lack of self awareness I have seen in a long time, maybe ever.
    “The violence comes from right wing extremists”
    I argued back that the collectivist is more likely to enforce conformity with violence because divergence cannot be tolerated.
    My opponent then took the position that yes, because of externalities amount to violence, words can be violence, that violence against those who dont fall in line is justified.
    Wow.

    I bring this up because I just saw a pro-life reporter interviewing an abortion advocate where the pro abortion person socked the reporter in the face for saying the left is violent. Yep. That’s what we are dealing with.

    • UnCivilServant

      “We’re not violent, you’re violent! And if you don’t agree, we’ll beat you up until you do!”

  21. The Late P Brooks

    Harm

    The Supreme Court on Friday handed another win to the Trump administration by allowing it to withhold $4 billion in spending on foreign aid that was appropriated by Congress.

    A federal judge had ruled that the administration would have to spend the funds by the end of the month, but the Supreme Court’s decision puts that on hold.

    The brief order noted that the government has made a “sufficient showing” that the groups that sued were barred from bringing the lawsuit in question under a law called the Impoundment Control Act.

    The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, also noted that “the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm” to the plaintiffs, which are various groups that receive foreign aid funds.

    Won’t someone think of the poor starving NGOs?

    • Suthenboy

      I think of them frequently.

  22. The Late P Brooks

    I think I can make a case that any improvements to automobile emissions have been incremental since the late 1990s and only succeeded in increasing the cost of motor vehicles with no measurable benefit to society or the planet.

    But Biden’s rules would have cut emissions in half.

    In HALF!

    Half of negligible, but it sounds impressive on NPR.

  23. The Late P Brooks

    violence against those who dont fall in line is justified

    Straight up self defense.

  24. The Late P Brooks

    Upon further consideration…

    Tesla wrote in a filing to the EPA:

    Probably refers to standard issue gobbledygook boilerplate official corporate position for the comment period on the “global warming gases” rule change.

    “You pulled the rug out from under our scam! Not fair!”

    • R.J.

      Pull my finger.
      I’ll show you some global warming gases.

    • creech

      Wonder why a couple of dads haven’t had a discussion with him in a dark, unmonitored parking lot?

    • rhywun

      Northern Virginia seems to be the epicenter of this stuff. Hard to see the monster getting away with this almost anywhere else.

  25. DEG

    Mmm…. hot toddy.

    I also like black tea, lemon, honey, and bourbon.

  26. DEG

    TOO LOCAL NEWS: Feds suing NH over voter registration rolls

    New Hampshire is among the six states being sued by the federal government over access to voter data.

    While certain voter information, like names, addresses and party affiliations, is already public, the Trump administration is looking for additional details, including partial Social Security numbers and state driver’s license numbers.

    “They would have to construct some kind of very clever argument to try to make some kind of a hook, and up until now, they haven’t offered any kind of a legislative hook. They’ve just said, well, you know, the president wants it, and that’s certainly unconstitutional,” said Daniel Pi, a University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law professor.

    For months, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan has declined, citing a state law that prohibits releasing confidential information from the state’s database.

    • R.J.

      *Waves North

      • Bob

        Where are you?
        Im in Nichols hills, robodruid is just south of Norman

      • R.J.

        South of Fort Worth.

    • UnCivilServant

      But will they stop being evil?

  27. Pine_Tree

    A story from last night, when one of the daughters was finishing her Finance homework… She came into the library and said she’d finished and was using ChatGPT to review and check it, and asked me whether I’d ever used it for math. I said “no”, and she said that it was being dumb. The example was taking 1.15^26, and she said it gave an answer with a tilde in front of it, and when she checked it it was wrong. Like it said ~44.something. She told it it was wrong and it basically said “oh, sorry, how ’bout ~33.something. So it was like estimating instead of calculating.

    I did the same things and it gave me those answers as well. The real answer is 37.86. Then I asked it why it kept getting it wrong, and it said (paraphrasing) “hey, I was just using normal estimating tools and sometimes it goes that way based on what folks have tried”.

    Seriously. It didn’t do the math. The inference functions just guessed based on training instead of actually doing math.

    • slumbrew

      It’s a fancy pattern-matching engine. It doesn’t “think” or do math, it spits back statistically-likely words that follow the previous words.

      AFAIK, there are some people working on shoveling in a dedicated math “subroutine” that will do actual math when it identifies it as such, but basic LLMs don’t know anything about math.

      • Pine_Tree

        I woulda just thought the plain math functions were built in from the start, since they’ve existed forever and seem an easy plug-in subroutine. It”s like they’re so enamored of being an LLM that they’re ignoring the obvious things to have on there. Not surprising in a way, but it was the first time I ran into it.

        It’s like the “purity” guys won the arguments over the “make it work” guys.

      • slumbrew

        It was always “just” a pattern matching engine. It didn’t know what “math” is. Or “truth”. Just, “statistically, based on my training, what’s the most likely word to come next?”.

        That ends up being a surprisingly effective tool, given a large enough corpus to train on (thus “Large Language Models”). But it’s nowhere near Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which would “know” about math and truth and the like.

        They’re working on that, but we’re not anywhere near there yet. Thinks like “this looks like math, switch to math mode” is more of a hack, albeit an effective one, than general reasoning.

    • Sensei

      I just put it into my work subscription ChatGPT 5.0

      what is 1.15^26

      Let’s work it out carefully:

      We need to calculate (1.15^{26}).

      1. Break it into parts:

      * (1.15^{10} \approx 4.04556)
      * (1.15^{20} = (1.15^{10})^2 \approx 4.04556^2 = 16.3665)
      * (1.15^{26} = 1.15^{20} \times 1.15^6)

      2. Now compute (1.15^6):

      * (1.15^2 = 1.3225)
      * (1.15^3 = 1.3225 \times 1.15 = 1.520875)
      * (1.15^6 = (1.15^3)^2 = 1.520875^2 \approx 2.313)

      3. Multiply:
      [
      1.15^{26} \approx 16.3665 \times 2.313 \approx 37.83
      ]

      **Final Answer:**
      [
      1.15^{26} \approx 37.8
      ]

      Would you like me to also show you the exact value (to full decimal precision) instead of just the approximation?

      Here’s the full-precision result:

      [
      1.15^{26} = 37.856795512758127707540644023249848037958145141602
      ]

      Would you like me to also round this to, say, 4 or 6 decimal places for easier readability?

      • Evan from Evansville

        Normal calculators have been able to do that for many decades. Why use AI for it in the first place?