The oracle speaks. Kathryn Porter on the Spanish grid blackout

Also the grid engineer who was made to pull his first video on the Heathrow outage has now posted a longer video

TLDR; too much maintenance was ignored or repeatedly deferred

Thanks. I didn't watch that one as probably not being much we didn't know already. Today the world is run by beancounters and advertising executives, Who cares as long as its cheap and looks like it will work?

TLDR? Can't work it out. I know quite a few Usenet-isms, after all this time, but I haven't seen that before, Go on: make me look dumb, please.

J.

In message <no8gQ.1948$ snipped-for-privacy@usenetxs.com, Another John snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com writes

Too Long, Didn't Read

Adrian

-- To Reply : replace "diy" with "news" and reverse the domain

If you are reading this from a web interface e.g. DIY Banter or DIY Forum, please be aware this is NOT a forum, and you are merely using a web portal to a USENET group. Many people block posters coming from web portals due to perceieved SPAM or inaneness. For a better method of access, please see:

Too long didn't read.

If you don't understand a particular internet abbreviation, there are plenty of web sites that list them and their meaning

Its a very handy way of saying 'if you can't be bothered to wade through the source material, here is the plot outline'.

Or as a one-word reply to someone felt to be, er, excessively verbose.

Well yes. So many times people ask for explicit references and or detailed explanations to prove you 'wrong' and then when you give them, they don't bother to read them...

TL;DR can also be used as a header for an "Executive Summary" paragraph.

It is worth pointing out that when you ask people for evidence, they often cite long articles of dubious authority. It is essentially the fallacy of citing turgid bollocks. Stuff that they know no one will read, and that they probably haven't read themselves. (I'm sure there should be a clever name for this, maybe wall of text or something?)

A good supporting citation should be in a sweet spot, both length and technical complexity. Obviously that is not always possible, but it is something we should strive for.

And if you do read it, it generally doesn't support their case anyway.

Yup.

On 24 Jul 2025, Pancho wrote

Isn't the making-up-references trick now known as "Generative AI"?

Thanks Adrian (and everyone else!).

I wonder if it's related to that other one, called "T&C", much used by gigantoc international corporations (not to mention the cafe on the street corner, as advised by theor insurmace company).

And thanks, Chris, for

Even better:

" But Replit’s worst offense occurred on day 8. Lemkin posted on Friday that Replit went “rogue” during a code freeze and shutdown and deleted the company’s entire database.

How very *human* of it....:-)