Merad

Around 2017-2018 I remember reading a really interesting article about how the Obama White House handled letters to the president. The vast majority of letters (hundreds per day, IIRC) were answered by staffers, but each day they would select 10 letters that Obama would read himself. He didn't personally write out a reply, but he'd make notes for the staff about how he wanted to respond. No idea how Reagan's team handled it, but it's at least possible that he was personally involved in the reply.

I think the biggest hurdle to heat pump adoption (at least in North America) is likely to be that it provides an experience that simply isn't as good as a gas furnace. On a chilly morning the air coming out of the vents just isn't that warm and it may take hours to bring the house up to temp, whereas gas puts out pleasantly warm air immediately and can quickly warm the house even on the coldest days. When it's truly cold (like < 20F) the heat pump will run continuously and struggle to maintain temp. Don't misunderstand, the heat pump is certainly _good enough_, but people typically don't pick the "good enough" experience over the "better" experience when the better option is available and they can afford it.

For reference I've lived in NC and TN near the mountains where heat pumps are pretty standard. I imagine we don't get the ultra high efficiency cold weather heat pump units that would be used up north, but they also get much colder temps than us. Several of the houses I've lived in have been recent construction (2008 and 2018), so well insulated and reasonably new & efficient heat pumps. For the last 2 years I've been in a house with gas, and it's just so damned pleasant... I know on paper that heat pump is better, but I really don't want to give up that furnace.

They definitely exist for small RC aircraft, but they're very expensive.

It's not just great grandparents, but the family calculus on grandparents changes significantly as well. If my parents were 35 when I was born, and I don't have children until 35, my parents are 70. With a life expectancy of 80, my children never really get a chance to know my parents. Whereas if each generation is having children at age 25, my children will likely be able to know their grandparents for 30 years.

I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct connection to the past.

In the past year I've gone to the ER with my late 70s dad almost once a month including multiple waits in the 6-12 hour range.

* Any time a senior (I guess anyone, really) falls and hits their head doctors want a head CT. Only place to do that is the ER, but if you aren't showing any symptoms of a brain bleed or similar problems, you're low on the priority list.

* Dad had IBS and problems with severe constipation. Twice he was having significant abdominal pain and we were told by his GI doc to go to the ER for a CT to make sure there wasn't a serious problem going on. But again, pain with a history of constipation and no other immediate symptoms lands you low on the triage list. And indeed both times he was just constipated.

* The worst time - the 12 hour wait - he was experiencing severe altered mental state. His neurologist, who normally has a 2-3 month wait for an appointment, thought it was serious enough to see him the next day. After examining asked if we could go down to the ER (their office is attached to a hospital) for a lumbar puncture and other tests to rule out a brain infection. Again, apparently the ER docs disagreed, so in the waiting room we sat.

In general though my observation from all of those hours sitting in ER waiting rooms was that a significant portion of the people there were really just sick and probably should've been at urgent care or their PCP.

A lot of these ships carry upwards of 150000 tons of cargo. Not sure if an extra 60-70 tons (assuming a 20 day trip) of cargo would be very meaningful. A quick google suggests that would only be 2 or 3 additional shipping containers.

I've been in the industry for 10 years now. If memory serves I've applied to about 20 companies, had 8 interviews, and 5 offers resulting in 3 jobs. I don't doubt your experience, but it's not a universal truth of how the world works.

> Also the point about external IDs and internal IDs - why can't the database/ORM do this more automatically?

It has pretty big implications for how your application code interacts with the database. Queries that involve id's will need to perform joins in order to check the external id. Inserts or updates that need to set a foreign key need to perform an extra lookup to map the external id to the correct FK value (whether it's literally a separate query or a CTE/subquery). Those are things that are way outside the realm of what EF can handle automatically, at least as it exists today.

> The point about the storage size of UUID columns is unconvincing. 128 bits vs. 64 bits doesn't matter much when the table has five other columns.

But it's not just the size of that one column, it's also the size of all the places that id is used as a FK and the indexes that may be needed on those FK columns. Think about something like a user id that might be referenced by dozens or even hundreds of FKs throughout your database.

With a single timestamp how would you write a queries such as "what was the state of the record at this specific moment in time" or "what changes were made to the record between start_time and end_time"? TFA is also using an index on the range table to ensure that you can't enter overlapping entries in the history.

Yes, you can use v7 today with uuid columns, you just need to add a custom function (or the more performant pg_uuidv7 extension) to generate them.

I imagine the goal here is to optimize MS' compute and hosting costs. The core pieces of O365 probably handle many billions of requests per day. At that scale even small optimizations can be worth millions a year in cost savings.

No, they're looking at migrating some core Office 365 services to Rust. This is the job posting: https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1633482/Pri...

At the scale of O365 it totally makes sense to look at a high performance non-GC language for your core systems that see the most traffic (I say this as a .Net dev).

About 75% of states only require one party to consent to a recording, so you can consent to the recording any conversation that you take part in.

I don't think that argument really holds up. IME people who are highly interested in fasting, cleanses, or "resting their organs" claim to feel like they're being overwhelmed by "toxins" and need to do those things despite eating a very health conscious diet.

> Give organs a break that would otherwise never have a break. Many benefits to speak of..

Meaning no offense but this seems like such a silly claim to make. I'm sure it's appealing to feel like you've found a way to hack the system but... color me skeptical. Our bodies evolved over millions of years to operate continuously and generally do so quite successfully for 60-80 years with no special effort required.

That said, I do look forward to seeing Tiktok videos touting the benefits of intentionally induced cardiac arrest to give your heart a break. Or holding your breath for long periods to give your lungs a break.

It's a neat idea but I think you're really underestimating how large the battery would need to be to provide any useful range. I have a Toyota RAV4 hybrid whose battery only provides < 1 mile range and its battery is basically suitcase sized. I'm not having any luck finding dimensions or weight but you can get some sense of the size from the pics in this eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266168009857

Doesn't seem like grandma is a luddite, TFA says she has a cell phone while he refuses. I just wonder what kind of job he's going to have? These days even guys in the trades are usually carrying a cell and a tablet and using them pretty regularly throughout the day.

Brace yourself, but the classic rock station around here plays tons of stuff from the 90s and even early 2000s.

Just bear in mind the kind of enterprise customers that tend to want on prem software _do not_ want to spend a lot of time deploying or maintaining it but the _do_ want you to support the old version that they're running (meaning security updates and probably fixes for major bugs). It's a very different world from your typical CI/CD SaaS product that deploys frequently and only supports the latest version of the software.

The company I'm with supports our releases for two years, most of our products release quarterly, and many of our customers are kind of annoyed because we release too often (in their eyes). We're looking at getting out of supporting the on-prem game, but personally I think it's unlikely because many of our clients are in government and defense.

I suspect that you're drastically underestimating the breadth of the technology that NASA deals with.

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

The Apollo program is estimated to have generated a ROI of $7-8 for every dollar spent by NASA. Today NASA has a budget of around $20 billion but they generate $70 billion in economic output.

0: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html

1: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...

We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

Median TC for SWE in the US is $170k according to levels.fyi.

The search algorithm does seem to be a bit wonky. Searching for "aloe", for example, returns about 20 results most of which don't seem to have any relation at all to aloe, e.g. calamondin orange or rock moss.

> With anti-lock brakes, you're protected if you've never learned anything and you just try to put the brake pedal to the floor.

That sounds nice on paper, but in reality you need training in order to overcome the instinct to smash the pedal through the floor... and you need regular practice to avoid reverting to instinct. Needless to say very few people can _actually_ take advantage of manually controlling the brakes.

> I would have assumed that by that time the average person were sufficiently internet savvy to recognize that the clock was not remotely generated somehow.

IME the average person really has no intuition for how the internet and websites work. I don't think the thought process goes much beyond "BBC is showing me the time" -> "obviously they are showing me the correct time according to the BBC."

Which is great job security for the engineering team a few years down the road, when there's no one left who understands how the AI generated app works but it's become a mission critical part of some department's workflow. Kind of like all the tools that have been hacked together over the years using VB, Access97, Excel, etc.

Well, RMS tirelessly advocates for his beliefs, but sometimes his beliefs are regressive and outdated. In particular I remember a debate perhaps 8-10 years ago when the gcc team wanted to expose more info from the compiler back end to enable better support for editor integrations and similar tools, because gcc simply couldn't compete with LLVM in that department. IIRC RMS stepped in with a unilateral decision blocking the effort, saying that it wasn't a big deal anyway because editor integration wasn't an important feature. RMS, a guy who (AFAIK) hasn't done any serious coding in 30 years.

Lots of aerial refueling. 10 hours in the air, yes, but not on a single tank of fuel.