danielvf

Gun cameras on B-17's might have been a late war thing? Here's a photo of some B-17 crew members with new gun cameras in 1945:

https://www.superstock.com/asset/crew-members-rd-bomb-group-...

The B-29's and B-26's were built from the factory with gun camera fixtures in their turrets as well.

That said, I've hard a hard time finding any footage from a B17.

Here's a list of models and years, straight from the manufacturer.

Note that most (but not all) were not deliberate attempts to pass off known unsafe problems, but were rather a culture of doing things like running a test of the driver's side, then copying the same results for certification on both the driver and passenger side.

https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/20231220-4_1.pdf

This article is very true.

But most of the article is taken up with the dangers of trying to get in an inner circle. It's easy to miss thinking about the equally true last paragraphs.

> The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

> And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

It's fun to compare the story of the cook with the renaissance concept of Sprezzatura - the art of doing hard things, while making it look effortless, so as to attract the attention of the ruler.

I've gotten several Google Fiber t-shirts from a local thrift store, and I can confirm - great shirts! I think they are NextLevel.

Like the author, my favorite t-shirt of all time is an early 2010's American Apparel blend shirt, (though mine is a Stripe CTF3 winner shirt.) However, American Apparel changed something mid decade, and I've never been able to get anything close to as comfortable as those shirts.

My current standard shirt are the NextLevel tri-blends, which are almost as good, and can be ordered plain online, or you can find them with all the logos you want in thrift store near techie areas.

This was a repositioning flight of a smaller airline, and so everyone on board the airliner was in the industry / worked for the airline. Not a normal flight of passengers.

These lights date from the 60's, and were, and continue to be, the cheapest and most reliable possible way to throw boatloads of light at something. They are also flexible in that you can load them up with very narrow bulbs, as used here, or wide, or many choices in between.

It's hard to overemphasize just how much the film industry values reliability over everything else. These things are stupidly reliable. There's probably a big case somewhere on a truck nearby with a bunch of replacement bulbs of different zooms, and that's about the only thing that can go wrong here.

I've written the software stack for two different high-performance theatrical LEDs, and the hardware side is near rocket science to be ultra reliable and ultra performant. It's possible to get the same qualities of light out of LED's as from a tungsten bulb, but it's expensive and difficult, so most LED's lights are ether noticeably different, stupidly expensive, or both.

On the other hand, the maxi brute here costs 1/10th as much, and has been battle tested by generations of roadies.

Plus, the warm glow is nice.

These are almost always run full power, and if you want less light, you just flip some of the bulbs off. (You can actually see two bulbs off in the far middle fixture in the photo)

An yes, they are probably going for an orange glow inside.

Just to add some color on this from a lighting point of view. The film lights used look like Maxibrutes[1], which are 12,000 watts of old school, non-LED power per fixture. Looks like they used six lights, so 72,000 watts.

Now in a past life, I've stood a similar distance in front of a giant, super diffuse 72,000 watt light, while wearing full body welding protective gear/goggles, and it was cooking hot right through all the leather gear.

However, this looks even worse - it looks like they are using very tight beams on those fixtures. From the photos on the ground with the lights, it looks like only three and half windows are getting lit up. That's an insane amount of power being concentrated into a small space, and yeah, I'd believe it could wreck some damage.

(Hah, just read the AAIB report[2], yes, they are indeed Maxibrutes)

[1] https://www.filmgear.net/index.php?route=product/product&pro...

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6544b3089e05f...

Yes, the RBA seems an incredibly bad long term investment strategy.

You are essentially switching to your retirement strategy being loaning your money to IBM at the lowest possible interest rate, vs investing with and growing with the American economy as a whole. The difference in compound interest between the two is going to epic over twenty to forty years.

The SP500 has more than 50x since 1970. If you had your money in 10 year treasury bonds, that would be less than 12x. So you'd have 1/4 as much, and IBM would have 3/4 of what you would have had.

Thanks for sharing. It's valuable to hear from so close to the situation.

I'm interested in seeing how the open bargaining turns out - my understanding had been that closed bargaining evolved to solve problems with open bargaining, but perhaps the situation has changed now, and unions need to prioritize member engagement more these days than in the past.

You basically got Stripe level documentation (high praise) of an API endpoint that would let you get open trade offers, and place trade offers. There was a minimal UI that you could manually operate the system with. Actually understanding what was happening in the markets required you to write something to visualize it with data from API calls.

Each level had an increasing level of what you needed to do, with the first level being to buy some stock (which you could do from the UI).

Most levels had you operating some kind of marketing making system, where you had to constantly update passive positions that made money as bots traded against them, and the prices shifted.

The last level required you to "hack" the system to get info you weren't supposed to have, in order to identify the insider trader in the middle of 50 other bots. It was quite different from all the other levels.

Here was the level solving code from my second run through:

https://gist.github.com/DanielVF/d43e079050d1cf3c05d6

Hey! I found a gist with my level solutions for all the levels! Some elegant code, if I do say so myself.

https://gist.github.com/DanielVF/d43e079050d1cf3c05d6

Starfighter was a blast to play, and taught me a lot about the back end of stock trading.

I did a lot of silly things after winning the initial play through.

- Solving the final challenge using a basysian spam filter on trade directions triples.

- Live 3D market visualization in Minecraft

- Buddy of mine built a stock exchange stack, speaking the same protocol, and we had PvP contests on who could market make the best on it. I won with a PHP powered marketing making bot with live code reloading.

- Built a cardboard box out of scrap electronics from adafruit that would let me adjust a market maker bots net position by tilting the box from side to side.

- Was either #2 or #3 to solve all the challenges

On the business side, if I recall correctly, most companies wanted to just shove the winners down their existing bad hiring pipeline process, and a lot of successful contestants who showed up already had great jobs, and so weren't actually looking.

URL to an example of what you use?

UWB is exactly what you are looking for, and support for it is built into Apple phones. It's designed to measure distance and approximate direction. Range of about 40 meters and an accuracy of 10cm. Standard off the shelf chips.

This is the same tech that is in AirTags, but if you made your own beacon, you could have much control over power output.

Apple documentation: https://developer.apple.com/nearby-interaction/

Here's one chip - there are others though: https://www.qorvo.com/products/p/DWM1000

Forum discussion on ranging: https://forum.qorvo.com/t/dwm3000evb-max-range/11906/5

Here's the timeline:

- Bridge collapsed in a neighborhood in 2013

- Bridge was owned by the neighborhood, not the government.

- There was some kind of heavy barrier blocking the bridge, but it was washed away at some point in the past.

- There was some kind of barricade/signage after that, but it was removed by vandals.

- The man, while following google maps late on rainy night, drove off the collapsed bridge, into the water and died. No barriers were present.

- Neighbors (not the HOA) have added heavy concrete barriers since the accident.

Not after taxes!

Most first world governments "fine" you quite a lot of money if you work on risky things. For example, if you earn $100,000 for ten years, vs $1,000,000 on one of those random years, after taxes you would have $720,000 vs $520,000 if you lived in San Francisco.

Yeah, don't worry about the above complaint. The writing is just fine.

No spoilers here please - best watched yourself for maximum effect.

Have you considered working off a commercial ARM microcontroller, say ARM M3, from STM, NXP, or Infineon? It's orders faster than a Z80, the documentation is world class, you can control every bit code that it runes, and there's a whole industry of people who spend their lives writing code for them.

I've written from bare metal: keys, display, networking, with hard realtime stuff (response times in millionths of second). It's not actually the bad.

Actually, only a small percentage of Puerto Rico's pay US federal income tax. Income earned on the island is essentially exempt unless it's from working for the US government. Here's an IRS note on the topic:

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc901

"If you're a bona fide resident of Puerto Rico during the entire tax year, you generally aren't required to file a U.S. federal income tax return..."

I'm having a hard time finding hard data, but the last number I could find, from 2010, showed the island paying $20 million total in individual federal income taxes, on a population of 3.7 million.

I've worked in manufacturing, been adjacent to manufacturing for most of my life, and written software for custom factory floor machines.

That Beta wrench factory wouldn't be hard for someone in the industry to stand up. It's is fairly low tech, little automation, and 95% off the shelf machines. Even the two possibly custom machines I saw in that video are built out of off the shelf components.

This really isn't rocket science. You have a list of operations needed to make the product. You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation. If this is slower than your target time per part, you increase the number of machines on that operation (see all the tumblers in the wrench video).

The US has many cities with deep industrial expertise. The US and China are roughly manufacturing output peers, even though the US has 1/5 the population.

I know someone who stood up a production line in the US for some of the most complex pieces of metal ever made, involving hundreds of machine cells, (more many nations have made nuclear reactors than make this thing), and the production line side is something that's just isn't that hard. The planning is work sure, but it stuff that's been done before bazillions of times before.

Standing up a manufacturing line is far less risky than creating new software - assuming you've got experienced people doing it.

Reminds me of in pre/early revolutionary France, the common/poor fought so hard against allowing for free trade and free pricing on bread, in favor of the existing price controls that had them massively overpaying most of the time and spending the majority of their earnings on bread alone, even in years of plenty.

Your overall goal is to improve your ability to do some larger task. Larger tasks tend to be able to be broken down into smaller tasks. Improving your ability on smaller task tends to make you better at the larger task.

So what you do is find a way to:

- somewhat isolate a smaller task

- then focus on doing that smaller task with ONE particular focus or improvement in mind

- have feedback on how it went

When feedback is present and you are paying attention, you will tend to fairly naturally improve.

Repetion is good, but repetition in different circumstances is much better for learning.

Here's an alternative explanation, which I know is true for at least one nationwide property ownership/investment company.

The company has three core activities:

1. Raising money from investors 2. Buying properties when the price is less than the expected profits. 3. Selling properties when the price is more than the expected profits.

At a point a year or two or three ago, the math on buying properties just stopped making sense on individual property basis. That whole side of the business just ended up going into sleep mode. No purchases since forever. However selling properties (adding cash), and fund raising (adding cash) kept right on going. The net result is the company owning only a small percentage of what it used to own, but having one heck of a war chest. Which they are sitting on, waiting for the economics to make sense again.

Confirms I found the correct place on street view then.

The blog post is full of very specific clues - enough to narrow it down to one house. I went on Google Street View to see if the mentioned "white rock" was still there.

It looks like now there are two white rocks!

https://goo.gl/maps/TdcRicMBjCMY6sw47

Here's a cutting edge modern take using GoPros and NeRF techniques.

https://twitter.com/Arata_Fukoe/status/1660980297352224769