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bbojan

671 karma · joined August 8, 2017

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bbojan··on Why are 2025/05/28 and 2025-05-28 different days in JavaScript?
You mean you must record the timezone? Because the TZ offset can change throughout the year (e.g. due to daylight saving time).
bbojan··on Healthy soil is the hidden ingredient
Copper kills funghi too, and that's a problem as funghi are important element of healthy soil.
bbojan··on Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia
Thorcon [https://thorconpower.com/] has a plan for this, but they're still years away.
bbojan··on Build systems, not heroes
Ralph Waldo Emerson is as relevant as always: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
bbojan··on Jazz – Apps with Distributed State
How does this compare to Instant (https://www.instantdb.com/)?
bbojan··on A Taxonomy of Tech Debt (2018)
> the team will eventually fix the tech debt when there are not enough feature tickets to exhaust capacity

I have yet to visit this misterious universe you describe.

bbojan··on EVinci nuclear microreactor moves towards commercialization
Thanks for the detailed info, this was the stuff I was looking for but couldn't find quickly.

>> is difficult to re-process

> That's not a problem. You just don't reprocess it.

There's not enough uranium in the world to last us more then a few decades if we leave 60-80 percent of it unreacted in spent fuel.

bbojan··on EVinci nuclear microreactor moves towards commercialization
In my opinion TRISO fuel is bad because it has very low burn-up and is difficult to re-process.

These things together mean it has quite low utilization of enriched uranium.

bbojan··on NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9
Since then 500 million people or more have been taken out of poverty. They are competing with you for resources. That's why what was going on in the US in the 50s is no longer possible.
bbojan··on Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]
Because all masses accelerate at equal rates in a gravitational field either:

1) Inertial mass and gravitational mass are exactly equal without an explanation why

or

2) The acceleration is just an effect of a curvature of space.

Imagine two bodies thrown exactly Northward on a sphere. Although their paths are parallel they would approach each other, as if there was an acceleration. This acceleration would be the same whatever their mass is.

bbojan··on The physics of airplane flight
> How do you explain airplanes that can fly with wing with symmetrical cross-section profile?

> How do you explain airplanes flying upside-down?

Angle of attack is what causes lift. If you have a surface angled against the relative wind, it will produce lift.

bbojan··on Documentation Driven Development (2022)
> For this portion I don't necessarily do TDD, because I remain unconvinced that writing unit tests first is inherently better than writing unit tests afterward.

I would argue that TDD doesn't imply writing unite tests - it's about writing any tests first.

If you have acceptance tests already written out, you're already doing TDD.

bbojan··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
I would say it's an excellent entry level split ortho keyboard, but it's quite large. Later you can go to a 50 key one or lower.
bbojan··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
I'm probably much older than you, and I found the reduced travel or the alternative layouts much more important than speed. Your hands will thank you one day.
bbojan··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
I found Workman horrible for same-letter bigrams.

After testing a lot of different layouts I've settled on a slightly modified Colemak-DH.

bbojan··on Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
I've built exactly that, but need to polish it a bit before releasing. Hopefully will have time to do it soon.
bbojan··on Meta's new LLM-based test generator
> Another way, if you know what the code is supposed to do, why write it down in two places?

This would be like criticizing double-entry accounting by asking "if you know what the amount is, why write it down in two places?"

We write the code down in two places because that gives us advantages that far outweigh the added effort:

- Once written, your test will catch regressions forever

- A test is often excellent documentation on what the code does

- It's now much easier to refactor the code, making it more likely that it will be refactored when needed.

bbojan··on More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback
> SpaceX ahs yet to get us some place we haven't been in space, or at the very least one we have not been to in a long time.

It got us to a place where the cost of a rocket launch is 10 times less than it was before, and soon it will get us to 100 times less. It's just a matter of time that this is leveraged to bring us to new physical places.

> And equalizing SpaceX successes with Musk a person does way more than just rub me the wrong way.

He is the person that single-handedly made the decision to start a rocket company, decided on the initial architecture, hired the key people and finance the whole operation.

bbojan··on Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang Theory
I believe in German-speaking countries the X-ray machine is called Röntgen? E.g. in a hospital you will have directions for "Röntgen".
bbojan··on How far could the sun possibly be?
1/12th of the weight of 6.02214076×10^20 carbon 12 atoms.
bbojan··on 'Cozy' relationship between Boeing and U.S. draws scrutiny amid 737 MAX 9 mess
Because they trusted the FAA up to that point.
bbojan··on 'Cozy' relationship between Boeing and U.S. draws scrutiny amid 737 MAX 9 mess
Airbus was an underdog, and it's always easier being the underdog?

If Airbus becomes dominant for decades like Boeing was, it's likely that it could start experiencing the same problems.

bbojan··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
> One of the reasons Google has long term big center in Zurich, if grass would be greener (since cheaper it is) in say Germany or Austria they would build there

I don't think Google has an office in Zurich because it's cheap. It's mostly due to a lot of talent available (ETHZ, EFPL, etc).

bbojan··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
It's very easy to fire in Switzerland. The notice periods are usually longer than in North America, but everyone having unemployment insurance where they are paid ~80% of their salary for up to 2 years makes is not such a big deal.
bbojan··on BBC BASIC raytracer in 432 characters
You could try using Thumb instructions, they are 16 bit.
bbojan··on Python Packaging, One Year Later: A Look Back at 2023 in Python Packaging
Also Poetry integrates well with pip/venv and vice-versa, so you can transition to it step-by-step if your project consists of multiple packages across a multirepo or a monorepo. You don't have to switch everything all at once.
bbojan··on Python Packaging, One Year Later: A Look Back at 2023 in Python Packaging
Same here. I always see people complaining about Python packaging, but rarely run into issues myself. Maybe it's an OS issue? I use Linux.

Some of the projects at work use gigabytes of computer vision dependencies and again I don't remember the last time I had any issues.

Could some of the people who do have issues give an example or two of the problems they run into?

bbojan··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
> At the moment, the JIT is only used if the function contains the JUMP_BACKWARD opcode which is used in the while statement but that will change in the future.

Isn't this the main reason why it's only a 2-9% improvement? Not much Python code uses the while statement in my experience.

bbojan··on Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time
I think that was not intended, it's just that the control of the rocket was lost. The plan was just a normal stage seperation, just like on the Falcon.
bbojan··on Starship will attempt a launch this Friday
That's not true. Starship was funded and started independently of NASA. NASA is just the first customer that is paying to develop a Moon-landing version of Starship that will be used for its Moon landing mission.
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