foobarian

I've been getting listicle spam/ads with a CTA promising to reveal why you should always carry one of these in your wallet. To this day I never found out why that is!

At our shop we're still cleaning up load-bearing tech debt 20 years later, a lot of which seems to have been built with an expectation "nah no way will this still be running next year"

One thing I find interesting about paper is that wetting and drying it turns it uneven. Even when drying it under a press.

And then another ridiculous process not involving paper, but super cool nonetheless is creating a flat surface by grinding 3 not-flat objects against each other in round-robin manner.

This is actually a fun one, and kinda has some parallels to building a nuclear weapon.

I tried this as a grownup because I finally managed to get my hands on saltpeter (could only dream of it when kid). Followed the instructions, mixed everything in correct ratios, lit it with great care and fanfare and... hiss fizzle. I was so disappointed! I think it came down to purity of ingredients and not enough surface area.

Point is, there are certain details of the process required to make it truly work, that are not readily known; in a similar way with nuclear energy, the theory is pretty well known but some nitty gritty details like the implosion or detonator design are not.

Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.

Reminds me of stories from ex-Yu during high inflation periods (e.g. yearly doubling; not counting periods when there were runaway spikes of almost daily doubling) when people would go to remote areas where shops didn't yet get the updated prices from headquarters and basically walked away with a bunch of near free stuff.

So... it's like a kickstarter for real estate!

What would be doubly ironic is if the gold course windmill farm was sponsored by big oil.

I didn't build tools in the classic sense of something you build and run semi permanently, like baked into your setup or home server or whatnot; but I found myself building bespoke tools with most new projects at work. Get a new Jira ticket, figure out which components will be involved, often times the tool goes collecting logs and parsing them into a Web UI with buttons to toggle various features or params. And it tends to be different for every project. It's like the oldschool shell oneliners but more powerful and easier to write.

How soon until we can just share a prompt://make-me-a-react-app-showing-a-summary-of-war-news-as-a-star-wars-crawl ? :-D

Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)

The other nice feature is using standard utility blades.

I have several Stanley type box cutters and blade retraction is an infuriating experience on each one because it gets stuck, the lock button gets stuck, it doesn't slide properly, often doesn't click into place, etc. I can definitely see the appeal of an object that is actually designed to work properly.

My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating

I wonder if they are more than happy to let someone else take on the burden of the massive writedowns that are bound to hit in a couple of years.

Enterprise pricing is a huge factor.

Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society

I'm sure you turned out just fine and don't use goto in Python ;)

Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.

All just feelings/vibes unfortunately.

It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.

My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?

Similar, except I saw a bunch of our neighbors doing the same thing which told me it wasn't a branch or similar that would affect just our house.

I've never experienced this before so I figure we've witnessed something truly rare and special that might not happen again in our lifetimes.

> There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally

I believe they do, but I too would love to know more details because there are several ways this can happen. Electromigration, package failures, VRAM failures, dielectric breakdown... Hopefully there will be studies soon similar to that old Google paper on HDD failures!

I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff

Not sure if OP meant literally sell, or just rebalance out of stocks. TBH I've been considering sliding over to all bonds for a time, since there is no tax event if funds stay in the account. But the numbers don't seem that high at the end of the day.

TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?

I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.

It's been my favorite key mapping ever since playing Renegade on Spectrum 128k :-)

I think things really went off a cliff after around 2012 once phones and internet got good, and social media cranked up the algo games.

Nononono ZXMK

Wouldn't it be great if we had a simulator like the MIT violin simulator [1] but for cooking ingredients! Then you don't have to throw out pounds of perfectly good ingredients just because broccoli doesn't go with Nutella.

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2026/mit-engineers-virtual-violin-produ...

I have a hard time believing that that weak an acid can have a noticeable effect vs just the extra cooking time. Sorry for being a skeptic :-) Most of the time I deal with beef either it's the particular chunk of meat I bought that day or marinating it in salt for over a day or just stewing it for a long amount of time.