Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAMA_Calculator - a calculator that won't reveal the precise answer until you supply an estimate (physical hardware in 2014, I think the current version is an app.) The website makes claims about the pedagogic value, but I didn't see any actual citations at https://qama.world/the-science/ just "everyone knows" kind of things... but if they had research supporting it that would probably inform your approach?
Back when the SR-71 was active, this magazine was nicknamed "Aviation Leak and Space Mythology" - them doing an article after the other rumours and Isaacman quotes reduces the credibility of the story, at least among Old Folk :-)
Maybe he wants his own version of Nathan's estate in Ex Machina (redditor calculations from in-movie clues put it at 7 million hectares, though, so this isn't even close :-)
The point is that you get the (inevitable) bikeshedding done once, everyone feels "involved", and then you have a style guide that is both a style guide and a "crystallized argument" - so when someone wants to change something, they know that dozens of people already signed off on it and do they really want to push against that. (So covering new things is still lower friction...)
Yeah, the 1999 diesel truck I had did the entirely opposite thing: it had a 120v electric block heater, so you'd plug it in when it was cold. (In New England, I used it once to see how it worked, but never actually needed it in practice.) At the time I saw stories (I never confirmed in any depth though) that Minnesota had 120v outlets on parking meters, giving some sort of weather-encouraged compliance :-)
They're writing for a newsletter called "Animation Obsessive" - given that, I think they're 100% correct, you're a random driveby :-) That said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJI_gygXsfs has the first three minutes if you want to get the gist (I don't know where to find a full version, but that's an official-looking Warner Bros. channel, not a bootleg.)
Glacier, and I think a couple of Iron Mountain products, exist for "cheap backups, really expensive restores" because the restore is going to be paid for by insurance (or by a counterparty when it's explicitly used for escrow.) So there is an explicit market for this (in the backup-of-things, rather than backup-of-capabilities, space.)
Huh - anyone recall other examples of open sourcing a product code base to mitigate a user trust issue? (In 2026 it's perhaps less powerful because "you're just going to feed it to some AI tool anyway" but I think it's an interesting attempt to make and I don't think I've seen it before...)
gets() was deprecated in C++11, removed entirely in C++14, and also removed in C11. So while it should have been removed in 1989, it did finally get done over a decade ago.
It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)
I haven't tried with BirdNet, but Merlin doesn't seem to ever false-positive on chipmunks or squirrels (there's been a suggestion that it should explicitly recognize them, and maybe some frogs too, since they're "loud thing in the same register" and it frustrates people that haven't figured it out yet...)
Sounds like you've got birds crashing into the door? That's often something that can be improved (with stickers or hanging decorations) that make the glass more perceptible to the birds. (Another thing that sometimes helps is having bushes or shrubs, or even potted plants, in sight of the feeder - most small birds will use a "staging area" and fly somewhere nearby first, "check out the scene", and then fly to the feeder from there; it doesn't really control the activity, but it adds some options.)
Yeah, Concord grapes are based on Fox grapes; when the new Welch's headquarters opened on Baker Ave they included a plantation started from cuttings from the original farm (which is just a house now but they still maintain their own grapes.) Welch's downsized and moved the HQ to Waltham last year, apparently the vines got distributed to local historic places and farmers https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/04/06/the-grape-esc...
The Sotsu "Flip Action Elite" (I think that's the product name? it was in a recent mrwhostheboss thin tech video) is exactly that: 3840x2400, 16", 450 nits, 14.3mm thick, and definitely had "slice the top off a laptop" vibe to the design... I don't know if you can actually find them though, but it looked really shiny :-)
Back in the early 1990s, mice were fragile enough that Apollo salespeople were trained to be able to do their demos keyboard-only as backup (at least for tradeshows) and that was just generally how interfaces were built. It wasn't an accessibility thing, it was a "we're demoing expensive systems to even more expensive people, it had better work" thing...
I've just been collecting monospace fonts, and have a bit of elisp to cycle through the collection when I'm bored with the current one. (Sometimes that's enough to conclude that no, really, the original was fine and I go back to it :-)
I still can't find pics of the boards (other than on ebay :-) but https://seltzerbooks.com/alta.html has quotes like "To get a sense of the relative size of the RAM in AltaVista Search, consider that a typical personal computer today comes with 8 to 16MB of RAM, and the AltaVista Index Servers each have 6GB of RAM—about 500 times more." and "AltaVista shows the practical value of machines that have more than 4 gigabytes of physical main memory." (Dick Sites, DEC SRL) The book is from 1997.
mmm the early Dell 2U servers (2003 or so?) didn't have very good linux support, so the fans always ran at full speed. I think the happiest I've ever seen people about a kernel upgrade was (2.5 era?) when it got fan support for that hardware and finally it was still loud at boot, but once the kernel came up it switched to thermally managed and slowed way down :-)
Reminds me that AltaVista's servers ran in 4G of RAM (there were famous, at the time, pics of the circuit boards - DEC was rightfully proud of this, 30 years ago) and that a modern AltaVista should run on a decent laptop :-)
Is anyone else getting "mongodb is webscale" vibes? (Except 16 years ago that was a lot smoother, because it used some sort of "render this conversation" engine...)
it's sold as harder to copy (and easier to revoke when you're doing layoffs - which shouldn't have been a really challenge for card-based systems, they're just old and didn't keep up.)
Even the Microsoft Kin lasted 48 days (I thought it had been cancelled on launch day, but digging back it was just the tech press saying "This was a mistake from Day One" which is certainly true, but not the same thing :-)
They should be close to the end of the checkout stage, then it'll take 4 weeks to get in the right orbit and another 2 weeks of inspection ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_boost_mission#Boost_oper... has an easier all-in-one-place timeline than the NASA pages.)