bradford

NYT daily had a relevant podcast episode on this (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/podcasts/the-daily/water-...?). Discussion centered around using the water for Arizona, not California. (I'm unable to speak of the relative merits of pumping the water from one state to another).

General takeaways:

Proponents of the solution seemed to understate challenges and risks associated with:

1. The pipeline itself (i.e., where to build it) 2. The disposal of brine solution into the Gulf of California. 3. Cooperation with Mexico.

That's not to say the challenges couldn't be addressed, but discussion of such challenges is noticeably absent from the original article.

As someone who picked up C++ in the late 90s, the discussion on the language resonates with me:

"Other books can tell you how using any of dozens of object-oriented languages can make programmers more productive, make code more robust, and reduce maintenance costs. Don’t expect to see any of these advantages in C++..."

"That’s because C++ misses the point of what being object-oriented was all about. Instead of simplifying things, C++ sets a new world record for complexity. Like Unix, C++ was never designed, it mutated as one goofy mistake after another became obvious. It’s just one big mess of afterthoughts. There is no grammar specifying the language (something practically all other languages have), so you can’t even tell when a given line of code is legitimate or not."

That might be true but the study offered no conclusive statement:

"A limitation of the study is that it relied on data that did not specify whether the marijuana was inhaled or eaten. According to researchers, how marijuana is ingested may influence cardiovascular outcomes."

I've witnessed a general convergence towards monetization of user data over time. I'm bothered that the technical talent of our time is increasingly focused on this.

No one seems to like it or want it, but every company engages in it, because it's lucrative. Companies that don't do it are missing out on financial opportunity, and we know what happens to such companies in our market system...

I'm of the opinion that only policy/regulation can fix this issue (the playing field needs to be leveled across the board). I'm not sure what that looks like. Does anyone know of proposals/individuals that are being made in this area?

It took years for the silt/sediment to settle during the Elwha dam removal!

Now that it's complete, there's an entirely new shoreline. It's been great to see.

> The main reason to buy a ~$500 bike vs. a $100-$200 Huffy at Walmart is that you can't get parts for the Huffy,

My (cheap department store) bicycle had a sudden critical failure that caused my front wheel to lock, throwing me over the handlebars. That's the main reason I'll never buy one of those again.

Of course, that was in the early 90s, and I'm open to the possibility that cheap bikes have improved since then, but it was an abrupt lesson about getting what you pay for...

Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm annoyed with the use of the term 'wet bulb event' here and elsewhere. Wouldn't it put less burden on the reader to just say "wet bulb 35C"? (That is the temperature that most people seem to be referring to when they say 'wet bulb event'.)

Every place on earth has a wet bulb temperature, all of the time. Saying "wet-bulb event" doesn't really help explain the web-bulb temperature's significance, which is buried in the wiki page:

"It has been thought that a sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 °C (95 °F)—given the body's requirement to maintain a core temperature of about 37°C—is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan;"

As a US citizen, I found this page (from the same site) more interesting:

https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/who-owns-mos...

(It's the same presentation, scoped to the US)

> one gives you the positive reinforcement of playing a game. Another gives you the positive reinforcement of money.

I'll assert that dopamine is the actual reinforcement in both cases.

A proposal that I haven't seen discussed in other responses:

COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.

(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).

"We've decided it's ok to have a dependency on a software component that's no longer supported. We believe security bugs won't be an issue because of [XYZ]"

I would not want to be the engineer that has to explain/defend this position.

Highly addictive to my kids for reasons that I can't grok.

Unfettered social interaction with other participants in an unmonitored environment that superficially 'looks' like a video game. This social interaction leads to bullshit purchases. Not purchasing the bullshit leads to peer pressure and bullying.

Is it a technical problem? is it lack of content moderation? or do social networks that are catered towards children simply lead to a toxic environment? I can't say if it's more one or the other, which makes it a challenge to try and fix.

> Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s*,

I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards developers.

Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards and UI would offer a better story than command line and text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti-scripting.

[disclaimer, MS employee, my opinion only.]

> I was surprised that [Eastlake and Montlake] just didn't have any grocery stores ... Given the amount of investment the city/state is making to improve the WA-520 corridor

Montlake had a small grocery store that was torn down precisely because of the 520 construction. (I can't speak for Eastlake).

520 is a highway after all, and highways are hostile to walkability for a multitude or reasons. (this fact still remains, even though efforts are being made to improve the situation in Montlake).

ExOfficio men's underwear is my go-to brand.

There's a massive difference between Steam DF and the previous DF that I played (granted, that was probably in 2019).

It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics.

[edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.

> people are syncing their personal and work devices

No, that's not what was said and I'm not sure how you interpreted that. I have a work device at home and in-office. My work devices use different user accounts from my personal devices.

Disclaimer, MS employee here, but I've got to say that the cloud sign-in is one of my favorite features.

The amount of time I spend worrying about and preparing for a hard drive failure has significantly gone down.

I'm able to have one device at home, and another at work, and they stay reasonably in-sync with one another.

I'm able to check things from my phone (even if I can't be productive on the phone, at least having access to progress made on my home machine is important).

I see others commenting here about how hard it is to create a local-only account on Windows 11, and I don't want to dismiss such criticism, but I'm personally never going back to a local-only account on my devices.

Does anyone know of similar libraries for other programming languages? (in particular, python, c#).

I realize c++ is a good choice for performance reasons, but the hobbyist in me is already committed to Unity/Godot.

(regardless, I really appreciate the user manual in this library. Having an explanation of the algorithms (not just an implementation) really helps.)

Might I recommend the book "Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth" by Elizabeth Williamson.

It goes into great detail the impact that Jones' slander had on the Sandy Hook families.

Trigraphs make this obfuscated C submission possible: (https://gist.github.com/Property404/e31b99deb3527159e183)

I've pasted it here for convenience (formatting fixed, thanks child comment!):

   //  Are you there god??/
   ??=define _(please, help)
   ??=define _____(i,m, v,e,r,y) r%:%:m
   ??=define ____ _____(a,f,r,a,i,d)
   main(__)<%____(!_(-~-??-((-~-??-!__<<-
   ??-!!__)<<-??-(!!__<<!!__))+-~-~-??--~-~
   -~-~-~-~-??-(-~-~-~-~-??-!!__<<-~!!__),-
   ??-!__))<%??>%>_(__,___)??<____
   (printf("please let me die??/r%d bottle%s"
   " of bee%s""""??/n",(!(___
   %-~-~!!___))?--__+!___++:__+!___++,!(__-!!___)
   &&___%-~-~!!___??!??!!(___%-~-~!!___??!??!__
   -(-~!!___))?"":"s",___%-~-??-!!___<-??-!!___?
   "r on the wall":"eeeeeeer! Take one down,pass ??/
   it around")&&__&&_(__,___),"mercy I'm in pain")??<??>??>

(disclaimer: Microsoft Employee, this is my opinion).

I've been using KQL for a long time, it really is a nice language both for querying and maintaining the data.

But, aside from fixing some serious language issues with SQL, I really enjoy the wide range of supported scenarios. You can use KQL to query a SQL database [1], you can use python [2], do all kinds of time-series analysis [3][4], do distinct counts on various fields without too much explicit query-authoring [5].

My main beef with Azure Data Explorer (which, as I understand it, is the engine that handles the query execution) is the price... I wish it was easy for hobbyist developers to launch and try out.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q... [5] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/kusto/q...

This excerpt is sure to provoke some opinions:

> Worst: Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.

> There's nothing you can really do except wait a bad hangover out and let your body repair itself after essentially ingesting poison.

This is the only real answer, sounds like you have a good understanding of the situation.

Everything else (heavy breakfast, electrolytes) is distraction and mental-comfort from the real problem (which is the metabolization of poison).

On practical how to:

1. Keep two water reservoirs for cleaning your brushes. One for warm colors and one for cool. (This prevents muddiness in your palette).

2. Knowing when to let the layers on your paper dry before further progress is vital.

3. Carry pigment from the bricks to your palette, don't mix pigments in the bricks.

On technique:

1. Experiment adding water to a pigment on your palette (More water == thinner with less Saturation and vice-versa).

2. Experiment with how wet pigments interact with other wet pigments on the paper. (More water == better flow).

3. Experiment with the paper tilt direction (water flows under the force of gravity and this can be used to create a desired affect).

4. Know how to layer (i.e., 1st layer low saturation, broad areas with high water/flow, final layer is fine detail lines with low flow/higher saturation).

5. You must understand the color wheel and how pigments may mix.

I have beef with this guidance:

> let your palette and paint bricks get dirty

Keep your bricks clean: Let your palette get dirty (if you so choose).

Regarding where: beyond Ukraine, I'm imagining Moldova and Georgia.

(Regarding how, I have no useful input. )

Nice work!

Are you familiar with the procedurally generated worlds in Dwarf Fortress (they have some similarity to your project)?

I'd take white noise over distracting background noises (i.e., roommates, coffee shops) in a heartbeat. The point isn't to enjoy the sound per se, it's to block distractions.

But yes, I do prefer brown noise over white noise by a wide margin.

A lot of it isn't transferable. (specifically, things that are tied to the engine in use).

But, it's odd, the author says in the same article: "you have to know about art, music, AI, level design, dialogue, story, just to mention a few."

Many of these skills ARE transferable! They're also a lot of fun!

The larger point of the article still stands. I've never completed a game (maybe someday...) but I really enjoy the hobby aspect of it.

Totally agree.

I'm convinced that the failure of reconstruction explains the current state of US politics, perhaps better than an analysis of the civil war itself.

The author mentions that: "Southerners adopted beliefs that justified slavery as a moral good, such as the view that slavery benefited slaves because it offered them a better life than they would otherwise have as freed people."

The law was changed, but this belief was still held by the defeated southerner ruling class, who began using weasel tactics as a method of enforcement (example: Jim Crowe). These tactics were initially fought by federal power, but the political will to carry on this fight faded over time. I fret to think of the US that could have been, had this fight been given the attention it deserved.