Cogito

Just FYI, for those who aren't neck deep in python land all the time, python is going through a bit of a packaging, environment, and dependency management explosion at the moment.

Lots of competing ideas and implementations are being thrown around, though probably not as bad as when javascript went through the same process. There is definitely a large benefit to seeing how things like rust have handled this space.

Anyway, poetry is part of this explosion, but is one of the relatively better known and widely distributed options, so much so that for anyone on-the-inside it probably seems obvious.

I agreee that SpaceX is unlikely to run into any issues with the number of satellites they are putting up, or coordinating those satellites.

However! It's disengenous to say land is 2d and orbits are 3d so there is more space in space. That

> space is even less of a “limited resource” than completely unpopulated areas of the Earth

Consider: how many Starlink constellations could reasonably be deployed in low earth orbit? Probably less than 1000, but maybe 10000-100000 (that would be a lot of satellites, but let's be generous).

Now how many Starlink constellations could be deployed in unpopulated areas of the Earth? Putting aside that they'd be useless, you could fit literally millions of constellations next to each other.

Space is big, but heavily constrained. One of the reasons something like an orbital ring would be so cool if we could get it to work - tons of space that is not constrained by orbital mechanics the same way free flying stations would be.

Not quite your main point (which I agree with) but comparing surface area of orbits to the surface of the earth doesn't really help understand the carrying capacity of orbits.

There are so many constraints on objects in orbit, the degrees of freedom so limited, that carrying capacity is much smaller than you might suspect (though probably larger than our earth-bound intuition).

Just for starters, each item in orbit traces out a path (an orbit!) that can not intersect with the path of any other object, without carefully considering phasing to make sure there are no collisions.

We keep items separated by kms (hopefully!) because there is too much variation and uncertainty in orbits.

You can use different altitude shells to fit more items in, but they take longer to orbit and increase latency, so you have to be able to deal with that.

Based on degrees of freedom, orbits are far closer to 2 dimensional than 3 dimensional.

Everyone's suggestions of works that use gunpowder in interesting ways (thank you!) reminded me of David Weber's "Safehold" series[0].

It's not really fantasy, though it does hold to a few tropes, but it explores what happens when you speed-run the introduction of gunpowder (and other technological advancements) in a world that has severe technological restrictions placed upon it.

I really enjoyed it, but I'm someone who enjoys reading in depth about how improvements in cannons changes the shape of naval battles (for example).

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/58713-safehold

Unfortunately it's the wrong comparison to make.

Two cars sitting still in a car park won't collide with each other, but there's no way to sit still in orbit.

Any two circular orbits at the same altitude will intersect at two points. You have to be very careful to make sure objects in such orbits will not collide with each other. It's far easier to make the orbits slightly different sizes or shapes, so that they don't intersect at all.

In any case, the need to be in an orbit to stay in orbit severely restricts your free choices for where to put your objects, so there is not as much free space as you might expect.

And for an online interactive take on the same material, try NandGame[0]!

I've gone through both and they're both excellent. Nand2tetris requires a bit more set up, but goes deeper into things like language development.

For people who have previously looked at NandGame, there has been quite a bit of extra content added over the last year, well worth taking another look.

[0] https://nandgame.com/

What's your intuition for how many people do have this luxury, and what context do you think it holds in?

My company has fully embraced flexibility, so even though many do work in the office it is completely accepted that some days they just won't. Other people in my social circles seem to have similar setups, but I've got no idea how far that extends outside of my bubble - not even in the rest of my city let alone the country or wordlwide.

The post you responded to originally literally talks about congestion pricing ‘around the world’.

Regardless, it’s not like everyone in the US has to drive for work, for the exact same reasons they don’t here.

It’s still an interesting perspective for me because I know that in some places it must seem like everyone has to drive, but it’s not something that I would normally consider.

> You need a car for work most of the time.

This is an interesting perspective.

Here in Sydney Australia most households will have a car or two, but most of the people I've ever worked with do not drive to or for work. Another large chunk of people will drive to get to a train station or bus stop, and then get public transport the rest of the way.

There are a lot of people who do drive for work, especially as you get to the edges of the city sprawl, but even then there are often viable public transport options. Those people tend to not work in the city centre or business parks I've worked in.

With working from home even less people are driving due to work.

There are a few playstyles, both modded and unmodded, that will allow for more of the "we're under attack!" panic and less optimisation of your factory.

Ramping up the number of biters in an unmodded world (deathworld) can be really fun.

Modpacks like Warptorio 2 add a very different dynamic but has that same frantic feel.

Just FYI, they always ground vehicles after they explode, until the investigation clears them as safe (within bounds of the license).

So this is par for the course, and unless the investigation turns up an issue that entails unacceptable risk to people, natural environment, or built environment we should see a return to flight as soon as the launchpad is rebuilt etc.

I used to consult on JIRA a while back.

These complaints seem like they have a couple of potential causes.

One very common load time issue is downloading too much data at once, especially on boards. I understand some work has been done to make this better, but you may get some relief by creating new boards with very limited number of issues on it - you want the board's primary filter to be specific (eg a board just for stuff assigned to you, rather than for everything asssigned to your team).

The weird subviews tend to be configurable, and Atlassian has been moving more and more towards defaults (and locking down those defaults) for these configurations that push a specific persona/way of working. I'm sure they have data that supports those choices, and there is strong selection bias going on here, but almost all the consulting I did was trying to figure out how to work around those defaults (the simple ones you can just change!)

Probably, a lot of those issues could be fixed by your administrator - you may even have permission to fix them yourself, though that process can still be quite cumbersome and labyrinthine.

So many complaints about JIRA come down to complaints about how it's configured. Atlassian knows this, and I think they are trying to make it better, but it's a hard problem. I enjoy the endless customisation available as an admin but it takes time and effort to understand what's possible, more time and effort to design those changes, and the most time and effort to make those changes match what the teams need. It's a hard problem to fix.

Sometimes people, frustrated by this big bohemoth, will pick an opinionated tool that matches their way of working. This works great for as long as that tool keeps focused and the needs of the team don't grow.

In addition to what everyone else has said:

This new release has added some additional difficulty settings that makes embarking on a peaceful adventure much easier. In particular, there are explicit difficulty settings that can be changed while in-game, and you can do things like disable different kinds of attacks.

It is possible to turn off all attacks on your fort.

I partly agree with you, however it's possible for devices to have limited access to the internet, or even no direct access but still be accessible to devices that are on the internet.

If I have a smart device at home I may put it on a network that has no outgoing access to the internet, but it would still be nice to be able to connect to it with a web browser without getting angry expired certificate warnings.

It's not the worst problem to have, and I don't think it's easy to fix, but it's still annoying.

Yes that’s what I’m saying. Layoff == redundancy.

Maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make?

A redundancy is different to being fired, and comes with a payout depending on length of tenure with the company.

Fire for cause means "you aren't doing your job properly."

Redundancy means "your job is no longer required."

If twitter restructures to save money, the jobs that no longer exist have been made redundant.

The advice I give for resumes is that they fill two roles.

The first is like what you say - make sure you check the right boxes. OFten the first person who sees your resume is non-technical, so make it easy for them to progress you on to the next step.

The second purpose of the resume is far more important: get people interested in YOU.

Almost everyone has done interesting things, but many people are bad at communicating those things. Often people are bad at even identifying the interesting things!

For each skill/technology you want to highlight think of a situation where you solved a problem using that skill. You're aiming for a problem your interviewer will find interesting, and will want to ask you questions about. Very briefly highlight the problem and that you fixed it with SKILL, and you're done. The more specific you can be the more interesting you will appear.

Two or three of those, your employment/education history, and contact details, and you're done.

I think your resume does do this, but it should be both more prominent and more intentional.

If I was helping someone today and they showed me this resume, I'd recommend re-ordering the sections and putting a brief intro at the top serving the same purpose as a cover letter. I'd also make sure they create tailored versions for each job they apply for.

While that is true, it's not typically how the phrase "Australia's history" is interpreted.

It's common for "Australia's history" to refer to pre-colonisation in addition to the last couple of hundred years.

This is almost certainly because Australians see the country and the continent as 'the same' for all intents and purposes.

Satellite laser links have been deployed haven't they? And all new satellites going up have the laser links on them, I thought.

I mean, sort of?

I believe they have some sort of similar solution in place for free messaging on in-flight wifi. Having a look at how they've done that might give a better idea for what this will look like than speculation.

Still, it's a hard problem. They want to prioritise connectivity on an extremely low bit-rate channel that covers an extremely large geographic region. Messaging apps needs to be a part of that connectivity solution, but you can't have one user making the entire cell unusable by everybody else. I don't know if there is a 'net neutral' way to do that, but would love to hear your ideas.

At the event they addressed this, and said they would work with anyone, and that the real issue is making sure that the data is correctly identified as messages and not generic data. This apparently would require back-end work between T-Mobile and the messaging app to identify the data in some way.

You may already know this, but if not and for others: my Excel files became a lot more manageable, maintainable, and readable when I switched from _LOOKUP() functions to the INDEX-MATCH pattern, and in particular using the pattern with Tables.

Basically

- Put the data to be looked up in a named Excel Table with a short, meaningful name. `data` is a good default name, but something with more meaning is better.

- Put the lookup 'results' in an Excel Table (naming optional but recommended). The output will be one column of the table, with one of the other columns used as input.

- Construct the output formula like `=INDEX(data[[value_column]], MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0))`.

- (Optional) Put all formulas at the far right of the results table, so that you can copy new data into the left side easily without overwriting the formulas.

The MATCH finds the first row in `data` that has the lookup value from `input_column` (in the current table) in the `lookup_column` (in the data table). The INDEX grabs the value from `value_column` of the `data` table in that row.

Using Excel Tables helps by making the formulas more readable, and resistant to change. If new columns are added or removed the formulas continue to work (not true for how most _LOOKUP formulas are written), and the formula gets copied down to new rows as you add them.

You can switch to row lookups if needed (though you can't really use Excel Tables anymore)

if you need dynamic lookups you can specify both row and column as MATCHes in the INDEX formula (and INDEX against the whole `data` table instead of just one column). Something like `=INDEX(data, MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0), MATCH([@[column_name]], data[#Headers], 0))`.

Diffraction spikes are caused before the lens gets involved; improving the lenses cannot remove the spikes (though there may be structures causing diffraction spikes in-between lenses).

The spikes from JWST are primarily caused by the edges of the mirrors and the three support struts.

There likely is some amount of lens flare (though I don't know if it is significant, the optics are Very Good), but the dominant artefact is the diffraction spikes.

The ones that are obviously spirals appear tangential, but that's more or less saying the same thing. If they weren't tangential they wouldn't be ovious spirals.

You can find spirals that are more side-on, and galaxies that are completely side-on you can't tell one way or the other.

[edit] Unless you're referring to the gravity lensing effect, in which case the lensing smear is tangential to to the lensing cluster of galaxies, due to how lensing works.

It's not listed on the website, however there is a link to another site which says the S7 can be rooted [0].

You'll probably have to do the more involved shell replacement to get root and flash the firmware.

0: https://dontvacuum.me/robotinfo/detail_roborock.vacuum.a15_0...

Ahh you’re of course correct, might still be useful if you don’t memorise the mapping.

I should have gone with my gut and generated the first 100 with each scheme to look at what the distribution looks like.

Mod 19 scheme feels like it should be decent but it gives 10 half the probability of any other number. I did find a quick fix that may still be simple enough: take the number mod 19, and add the last digit of the original number. Now take the last digit of the sum, and add 1. So new guess = 1 + (n mod 19 + n mod 10) mod 10. Doing a quick simulation there is no obvious bias.

Modular arithmetic can work, but you need to be a little bit careful.

If you want a number from 0-10 then modulo 11 works perfectly (as long as you pick a number well outside any 11 times table you have memorised). This is because it's relatively easy to pick a number without immediately knowing what the mod 11 version of it will be.

For 1-10 you could do mod 10, but that's too easy to cheat. Instead you can take you initial guess n, and multiply (n mod 5) + 1 by (n mod 2) + 1. For example 42 -> ((42 mod 5) + 1) x ((42 mod 2) + 1) = 3 x 1 = 3; 43 -> 4 x 2 = 8.

This second scheme works because we're using a factorisation of the length of our intial range of guesses, and then multiplying the answers. We add 1 because 0s make multiplying boring (and we want 1-10 in any case).

There will still be bias, especially if you've used the scheme before. With the mod5 mod2 scheme the biggest bias is that you only get a 1 if the original guess is congruent to 0 mod 10. A way to avoid that bias, which unfortunately introduces another bias, is to do a two modulo steps. Start with a biggish number, and then do your final one. This is harder to do in your head and makes some final guesses more likely, but only a bit.

So for example, do final guess = (n mod 19) mod 10 + 1. 19 is easyish to calculated because you find the closest multiple of 20, workout that mod 19, and add any leftovers to it. 42 mod 19 = 40 mod 19 + 2 = 2 + 2 = 4

(42 mod 19) mod 10 + 1 = 4 mod 10 + 1 = 5

To be clear I'm not arguing for or against any specific time system.

In your original post you said "we designed our culture around calendars and clocks, synchronized to Earth revolutions". For me the driving principles of modern time systems seem to be (and I think this might align with what you said)

- each day should have the same length

- people who live or work near each other should agree on the time

- the time on the clock should correspond to the position of the sun, locally

All three principles are important, but the third definitely takes a back seat in many places/lattitudes.

You seem to be suggesting the third should be the most important. Do you think the others are important as well, or are you suggesting that we change our culture so that they are not important to us anymore?

What are you actually suggesting here?

Say that sunrise is at a fixed time every day, for example 6am (to avoid changing the entire system too much).

Well sunrise for me might be quite different to sunrise for my neighbour, especially if I live in the valley and she lives at the top of the hill. Every quarter of a degree around the globe (25km east or west, give or take) would have their clocks shifted by a minute. I guess meetings and phone calls would require a location and a time, and we would need to convert the time from wherever we are right now into the time where the meeting is taking place.

The time between sunrises changes every day, would we add and subtract the extra time every day, or would we have a have an extra hour every now and then?

Why am I still paying rent to Mum and rent for student accomodation?!?!?! Outrageous :)