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6figurelenins

95 karma · joined January 7, 2022

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6figurelenins··on Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts
The geopolitical stability is now cheaper[1] than the debt service.

Naturally, that calls into question the incredibly low interest rates, and the reserve currency status.

If you need to blame Trump, the last straw was COVID.

> At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.

Step 1: Hold short term rates at zero, forever Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit Step 4: Wow, that's a lot of debt

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/first-time-us-spending-more-debt-in...

6figurelenins··on Where did the false "equal transit-time" explanation of lift originate from?
Layman's guess: wings push air down, air pushes wings up.

An everyday experiment is sticking your flat hand out the window of a moving car. With slight wrist rotations, you'll find even slight deviations from neutral (parallel to the ground) cause your "wing" to rise or fall, with a force that seems proportional to the angle.

We can hypothesize that a symmetric wing, with zero angle of attack, should experience no lift:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/35139

6figurelenins··on Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
Not to pick on Rails, sorting files into "models / views / controllers" seems to be our first instinct. My pantry is organized that way: baking stuff goes here, oils go there, etc.

A directory hierarchy feels more pleasant when it maps to features, instead. Less clutter.

Most programmers do not care about OO design, but "connascence" has some persuasive arguments.

https://randycoulman.com/blog/2013/08/27/connascence/

https://practicingruby.com/articles/connascence

https://connascence.io/

> Knowing the various kinds of connascence gives us a metric for determining the characteristics and severity of the coupling in our systems. The idea is simple: The more remote the connection between two clusters of code, the weaker the connascence between them should be.

> Good design principles encourages us to move from tight coupling to looser coupling where possible. But connascence allows us to be much more specific about what kinds of problems we’re dealing with, which makes it easier to reason about the types of refactorings that can be used to weaken the connascence between components.

6figurelenins··on Framework 13 AMD Setup with FreeBSD
Not Linux specific, but the thermal paste is pretty poor. Mine disintegrated in two years of heavy use. (13", Intel 12th gen)

Popping off the heat sink to apply a fresh dab is no big deal, but I didn't find out until the top-center keys (y, 6) began failing.

Replacing the keyboard is $50 and about a hundred tiny screws.

6figurelenins··on Disclosure of personal information to DOGE “is irreparable harm,” judge rules
If it had any "parts," there would be seven trillion dollars' worth.

But it's actually all just taxes.

6figurelenins··on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
> To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.

I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].

It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.

Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.

Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...

6figurelenins··on Ask HN: How to deal with a serious mental health breakdown?
Terminal, sadly.
6figurelenins··on Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify
Turnkey web hosting. Drag and drop your build folder, get a URL. Or point it to your git repo.
6figurelenins··on Ask HN: How to deal with a serious mental health breakdown?
> in my experience drug addicts are not very good at hiding it when they lose control

Not sure if it's relevant, but psychedelics (mushrooms) broke a college friend after minimal recreational use. Like, maybe twice, with zero past history of any other controlled substance.

His delusions were similar to what you described. In hindsight, I wasn't qualified to handle his deeply troubled mind.

You did the right thing contacting family and seeking professional help.

If he harms himself, it's not your fault.

6figurelenins··on Marking the Web's 35th Birthday: An Open Letter from Tim Berners-Lee
The opening paragraph is occluded by a cookie consent banner. That's perfect.
6figurelenins··on The most traveled crew transport spacecraft flies again
The "shuttle" concept dates to the late 1960's. Great marketing, but the program was intended to finish once a destination was built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom

> As the Apollo program began to wind down in the late 1960s, there were numerous proposals for what should follow it. Of the many proposals, large and small, three major themes emerged. Foremost among them was a crewed mission to Mars, using systems not unlike the ones used for Apollo. A permanent space station was also a major goal, both to help construct the large spacecraft needed for a Mars mission as well as to learn about long-term operations in space. Finally, a space logistics vehicle was intended to cheaply launch crews and cargo to that station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-134

> The Shuttle was originally conceived of and presented to the public in 1972 as a 'Space Truck' which would, among other things, be used to build a United States space station in low Earth orbit during the 1980s and then be replaced by a new vehicle by the early 1990s.

6figurelenins··on Bad property debt exceeds reserves at largest US banks
Not really. "Post-war" means 1945. "Fiat money" means 1971. "Largest era" means 1981.

Grandparent said "collapse," which is what Jenga towers do.

Here's the era, in two charts:

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-bond-y... [2] https://www.cbpp.org/income-concentration-at-the-top-has-ris...

6figurelenins··on Phones track everything but their role in car wrecks
I'd like to remind everyone clamoring for law enforcement that the person who arrests you will be driving to jail at 70 miles per hour, in a 35 mph zone, while using a laptop.
6figurelenins··on Changes we're making to Google Assistant
"Hey Google, give me showtimes for Aquaman" opens the assistant on my phone, and transcribes my request correctly.

There's a Nest mini (2nd gen) two meters away, but the device that answers is the Google Home 2016 in a different room.

First attempt: "Okay, ten minutes. And that's starting... Now."

Second attempt: "Sorry, I don't understand."

Third attempt: bingo.

Further trials seem to work, until they're interrupted by the 10 minute timer.

My partner comes downstairs to ask why I'm yelling STOP.

I remember my exact words when I bought this thing:

I have seen the future, and it sucks.

6figurelenins··on Framework Laptop 16 Review
The fan at full load (i5-1240P) is noticeable, but not obtrusive or unpleasant. My noise floor is a Be Quiet! desktop case.

In a normal workday, I don't hear it.

6figurelenins··on Changes we're making to Google Assistant
"If there is no banner, your Actions project is not a Conversational Action and won’t be affected."

Here, "conversational" means your voice command should prompt the app to ask you a question, driving a state machine. (Set a reminder. When do you want to be reminded?)

I haven't tried to use it, but the docs indicate CRUD-over-voice ("built-in intents") is unaffected.

https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset#what_will_...

https://developer.android.com/reference/app-actions/built-in...

6figurelenins··on Changes we're making to Google Assistant
> "Hey Google, add <x> to the shopping list"... was very useful... Then one day Google decided to disable that integration. Now the only shopping list you can add to is one Google provides

If I recall correctly, "add to my list" originally went to shoppinglist.google.com. They rolled it into Keep[1] ("note to self," tags, sharing).

It works well. However...

In 2016, I figured "tell me showtimes for $MOVIE in $CITY" should work. It still doesn't work. It may never work, because "robot butler with ads" is no one's idea of the future. (Maybe Jeff.)

A fire-and-forget voice action like "add to list" should still work(?). For conversations[2], we can pray Gemini is less infuriating.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://developers.google.com/assistant/ca-sunset

6figurelenins··on Salim Kara stole $2M in coins with a magnet and a car antenna (2022)
The concept of voting includes the possibility that a plurality of voters reject your preference. You consent to this outcome by participating.

When half[1] the population refuses to participate (perhaps they're tired of being lied to, or the candidates are slime, or there are too many selectively-interpreted, arbitrarily-enforced "laws" to count[2], or the idea one person should represent 617,000 is absurd, or they just don't like bossing their neighbors around)...

Maybe the government doesn't have consent.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-non... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code#Number_and_...

6figurelenins··on Services across England now lag far behind East Germany
Money is never something governments "have." They collect and spend, not necessarily in that order.

Accordingly, "their" costs inevitably exceed revenue. It is obvious they're spending more than ever.

6figurelenins··on Jaq – A jq clone focused on correctness, speed, and simplicity
FWIW, I see no difference. (hyperfine 1.17.0, jq 1.7, jaq 1.2.0)

  $ hyperfine -N -w 100 -m 1000 -L bin jq,jaq "echo '[1,2,3]' | {bin} '.[1]'"
  Benchmark 1: echo '[1,2,3]' | jq '.[1]'
    Time (mean ± σ):       3.4 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 0.6 ms, System: 2.6 ms]
    Range (min … max):     0.7 ms …   5.8 ms    1000 runs
 
  Benchmark 2: echo '[1,2,3]' | jaq '.[1]'
    Time (mean ± σ):       3.4 ms ±   1.7 ms    [User: 0.5 ms, System: 2.7 ms]
    Range (min … max):     0.7 ms …   5.8 ms    1000 runs
 
  Summary
    echo '[1,2,3]' | jq '.[1]' ran
      1.00 ± 0.71 times faster than echo '[1,2,3]' | jaq '.[1]'
6figurelenins··on Electric cars have a road trip problem, even for the secretary of energy
> [Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm's] advance team realized there weren't going to be enough plugs to go around... So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy... a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle... called the police

Benefit analysis:

Global carbon emissions, US share (2021)[1]: 14% ..Transportation sector[2]: 28% ....Light-duty vehicles[3,4]: 58% ......Electricity, non-hydrocarbon sources[5]: 40%

So we can solve less than 1% of the problem.

What will it cost?

[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/3185/us-greenhouse-gas-emiss... [2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... [3] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-... [4] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-12/58566-co2-emissions... [5] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

6figurelenins··on Ruby on Jets: Like Rails but serverless
> you're really wasting a lot of cpu cycles on building up the garbage collector.

Are you sure you aren't thinking of JIT compiling? The context where I think of "warmup" is (say) Java, where the runtime profiles hot paths to emit optimized machine code.

What would it even mean to "build up" a GC?

6figurelenins··on Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator, severely impacted by Alphabet mass layoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Development
6figurelenins··on BMW I Vision Dee
> The BMW Mixed Reality Slider is the central operating control that gradually transforms the windscreen into... a fully virtual world

> BMW i Vision Dee is a distinctive companion that shows emotions. Her headlights... form a uniform physical-digital (phygital) surface on which she visually expresses her emotions through animated facial expressions.

"Douglas Adams, Xzibit and Jony Ive walk into a blender."

6figurelenins··on Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy
Significant sectors of us (irritated end consumers) are not merely "playing with free products."

We purchase hardware (Assistant, Pixel, Nest). We make a living (Play, YouTube, Ads, gSuite).

We're vastly outnumbered by free users, but they aren't "playing" with Maps and Messages either.

(Side note: Photos is fantastic. That team should be a case study in product stewardship.)

6figurelenins··on Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce
I assure you it predates GoT.

https://www.quora.com/Who-started-the-phrase-you-sweet-summe...

It's just art imitating life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_of_Winter_Night

6figurelenins··on My thoughts on the Framework laptop
My Pixelbook Go with a broken plastic hinge would like a word.
6figurelenins··on My thoughts on the Framework laptop
I can't speak to Fedora, but Debian stable runs great. Best laptop I've owned, hands down.

Caveats:

+ Wifi needs kernel 5.19 from backports (USB tether your phone to download.). + fprintd (fingerprint) from testing/bookworm. + Brightness keys conflict with the ambient light sensor. + Power optimization fiddling.

I found answers for all the above on their forums, day 1.

Pleasant surprises:

- P-series chip gets out of my way. (U-series battery life sounds nice, but dev tasks can be jarringly slow. YMMV.). - Fan is not distracting at full load

Disappointments:

- Fractional scaling. Workaround: bump font, icon sizes in desktop settings. - SD card reader consumes ~1W idle. - Speakers could be louder. I believe there's a new module.

6figurelenins··on 3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror
> In America, libraries do not pay annual licensing fees for books.

We're talking e-books ("concurrent check out"), and they certainly do.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

> While consumers paid $12.99 for a digital version, the same book cost libraries roughly $52 for two years, and almost $520 for 20 years.

6figurelenins··on 3x new books added to the Pirate Library Mirror
Ok but hear me out, what if we embed citations in the text, so there's like a colossal graph of publications, with regional distribution centers.
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