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airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

Lawnmowers have aren't shopping carts. They don't know the boundaries of a yard.

You haven't seen "The Lawnmower Man?" Carry or swing a running lawnmower upside down through a dense crowd, and it will injure many people.

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

Let's say you're in America rather than Australia, because context matters.

If it happens a few people cannot operate domestic lawnmowers correctly and chase crowds down with them out of acts of terrorism because they slip a gasket, should we have licenses, certifications, and tracking of all lawnmowers? Is that a "no-brainer" too? Maybe we should think first before trying to regulate or educate ourselves out of every edge-case risk.

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

You only need to register knives longer than 2".

is still an absolutely absurd imposition.

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

That sounds terrible, but "more education" won't, and never will, change attitudes or behavior. Psychopaths will always do what they want. Going Big Mother on a particular sport for the actions of a few independent persons doesn't address anything other than destroy that sport. Wishful thinking does nothing.

airhead969on Half of UK university students think degree is poor value for money

What does "think" mean? A belief? Did each one sit-down and estimate future earnings with, without, and the opportunity costs of time and money?

airhead969on FAA releases TRUST: Free online training required to fly drones recreationally

Effective immediately: You need a license before you can throw an American football in the US because it might break a window.

How many decades were R/C planes and helicopters operating without a problem? Instead of police work, it's collective punishment with privacy invasion and barriers as the answer to salve MIC-generated paranoia. Firearms aren't even tracked this absurdly.

airhead969on Wild-Looking ‘Open Rotor’ Engine Could Cut Airliner Emissions by a Massive 20%

Wrong. Ducted fans can produce twice as much thrust.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/27416/are-ducte...

The main issue is controllability in cross wind gusts.

Solve that problem, such as turbojet-style inlets of the 60's jets and there's real efficiency advantages to be had.

airhead969on Software Dark Ages

Nawh, it's not just people who have no passion. In consulting, I've seen plenty of offshore and second-stringer types do these things. Also, I've seen plenty of taking credit for others ideas and work.

airhead969on Rust 1.53

But that's method shaming! /s

I guess you have a point. It's clearly a "let's meet in the back alley" API.

airhead969on Ask HN: Are Dishwashing Machines Bullshit?

Moms are often the ones who make you clean dishes before they can be cleaned. The thing is, you do have to clean the drain "lint screen" more if you don't prewash.

Dishwashers require a lot of manual labor even without prewashing. Like "flying cars," I dream of robot arms that can clear the table, clean the dishes, dry them, and put them away. How hard can it be? :X

I also thing hiring a maid and a cook are a good idea because I'm so lazy and busy.

airhead969on Rust 1.53

Don't unless it's to advance a particular career development or personal project goal. I left Go because it became a yuppie slum of trend-seekers riding a wave and leeching rather than contributing: blog hype and too many dumb support requests/questions. Making powerful languages too easy to get started without any understanding results in burdensome, low-signal distractions of maintainers and contributors.

This appears like it may happen with Rust but I hope it doesn't. It's a good thing it won't ever happen with Haskell, which is my warm safety-blanket should any particular language community implode.

airhead969on Rust 1.53

Can't you just use poop emoji in comments and search for them like TODOs?

airhead969on Rust 1.53

Animated GIF meme identifier devs of the world unite! We will overthrow this repressive violence against our kind. Baby dance will be the next "Hello, world!"

airhead969on Software Dark Ages

Job security is enhanced by slow progress, knowledge hoarding, obsfucated code, no documentation, new fragile technologies, fragile code, fires, and high code churn. There's no reward to invest effort against one's own interests unless dispensability makes someone indispensable, but then they have zero individual job security while having much more career security.

airhead969on Wild-Looking ‘Open Rotor’ Engine Could Cut Airliner Emissions by a Massive 20%

I think I saw this exact design years and years ago in Popular Mechanics. GE's UDF reminds me of it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_GE36

IIRC, ducted fans are almost always more efficient than open fan designs. It's curious the Celera 500L doesn't use a ducted fan along with a propeller specifically-optimized for such a configuration. (It's an ICE, not a turboprop.)

Unpopular opinion: We need to get away from FF motors, turbines, and airborne transportation unless they can be made GHG negative.

airhead969on Always Be Quitting

This is good advice for founders and people intent on, and capable of, advancement, but it's generally bad advice for everyone else because it makes them easily disposable.

airhead969on Solar assets ‘underperforming’, modules degrading faster than expected: research

I think you misread what I wrote.

airhead969on The brain isn’t supposed to change this much

My bet is reinforcement decay and strengthening exists to promote novelty rewards. Smell 1000 roses, it's a big "meh" but the identification of them becomes easier and better with strengthened pathways. This would be adaptive for the organism to:

1. seek new, potentially-massive rewards, stimulation rather than do the same thing over and over again without ever trying anything new

2. improve processing of stimuli that are more frequent

airhead969on Purchasing power of one US dollar in every year from 1635 to 2020

Increasing forest fires would boost the value, but then watch-out for those damn illegal tree farms printing their own money.

airhead969on U.S. Consumer Prices Rose Strongly Again in May

For inelastic essential needs (i.e., food, fuel, electricity, water, transportation, toiletries) and high-MPC existence without a commensurate increase in pay, this is true. (Longterm decline in wages by inflation in the US).

However, the poor cannot buy Ferraris, iRobots, or Toto toilet seats. For discretionary spending portions of high-MPC, there are often bad financial decisions made by the poor to buy overpriced, high-depreciation, low utility, and short lifetime goods and services.

airhead969on U.S. Consumer Prices Rose Strongly Again in May

Meat prices temporarily increased sharply, but will likely subside over time with increased supplies.

airhead969on What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

Rent-seeking corporate vampires.

Make something so expensive or restricted that it compels people to pay much more for it "on-demand." My mom's modest new car came with adaptive cruise control that includes lane following, land changing, automatic speed matching (0 to 90 mph).. all included.

It's part of an after-sales monetization strategy like planned-obsolescence and planned-breakage by switching to cheaper, unrepairable materials like plastic and selling parts only as large, expensive assemblies.

One future extension of this is to load a car with so many features that the price then goes up far beyond what any mortal can afford, and then rent rides to replace individual vehicle ownership and taxis/Uber/ Lyft. In this event, such vehicles would be engineered for minimizing TCO for the corporation.

airhead969on DNA jumps between animal species, but no one knows how often

Germline hxfer? Maaaaaybe a faint possibility because of how most fish procreate but never gonna happen in critters that have direct sexual contact.

airhead969on DNA jumps between animal species, but no one knows how often

Department chairs > PIs >~ profs > visiting profs > assistant profs >~ visiting asst profs > postdocs > grad students > employees > undergrads > high-school interns

Dedicated grant-writing staff are gold, literally and figuratively.

(I worked at a biomedical informatics shop.)

airhead969on Solar assets ‘underperforming’, modules degrading faster than expected: research

Small reactors aren't cost-effective at scale because of physics.

They also need to be near large water sources to use evaporative cooling.

airhead969on Solar assets ‘underperforming’, modules degrading faster than expected: research

Yep. Most of the top talent retired, died, or changed jobs around the late 90's and early 00's. EPRI and the NRC aren't what they were either.

UIUC has a great nuclear program (NPRE PSE), and so does the US Navy with hands-on experience.

Building that back to a fraction of what it was would take decades and wouldn't be the same.

airhead969on Solar assets ‘underperforming’, modules degrading faster than expected: research

I worked in the nuclear industry in the US.

No, it won't be back here for decades, if not a century, if ever.

Insurance, financing, and NIMBYs.

They're essentially intractable problems that make it cost-ineffective when NG and renewables are cheaper. Why sink billions into something that doesn't have a clear ROI?

airhead969on Naomi Osaka faces default from Grand Slam for refusing to speak to media

How do you forge the mental toughness to become insanely excellent at tennis while also claiming that pressers in the contract hurt your feelings so badly as to risk mental illness if you happened to have lost that day?

Are the players entering the sport getting more and more easily-offended and milquetoasty?

Even if the other side is Evil Corp., if a contract you signed says you have to do something and you don't do it, that's shirking professional responsibility and non-performance. Contracts are contracts. Don't like it, don't sign it, negotiate it, and then sign it.. or your word and signature are meaningless.

airhead969on Naomi Osaka faces default from Grand Slam for refusing to speak to media

and ambassador for the sport.

Not showing-up for media could well be viewed by swaths of the fans and big bank rollers as two birdie fingers in the air.

airhead969on Space Debris Has Hit and Damaged the International Space Station

Project Obvious Idioms ended in utter failure when the haystacks were lost, creating a conundrum of Biblical proportions.

Who thought it would be a great, timeless idea to dump a bunch of copper wire strands at 3.5 Mm? Oh, it was that pinhead: Walter E. Morrow. Thanks for that military-industrial complex contribution to littering. Let's stick a Tesla, Lego, and some dead people in space while we're at it. We did that already too? Why don't you tell me these things? Throw me a frickin bone here, people. Maybe we should think carefully about permanent space garbage or space sunshades before rolling with what seems like a brilliant technical solution?