fwungy

New cars have 3G cellular transmitters constantly sending telemetry data. This started becoming common in 2012.

Still down as of 22:31 PDT.

Show me the person and I'll show you the crime. -Stalin

This was a person they wanted to let go and needed an excuse to get rid of that would save them severance and lawsuits, I'd wager.

Who would collect such a dossier?

Who would want such a thing exposed?

How many Trump voters care about the details of JD Vance enough to change their vote (zero)?

Why has Zuck publicly shifted from strong anti-Trump positioning to neutral or mildly pro-Trump?

The Razor only works when you use it.

Efficiency means minimizing the use of the costliest components. It's installing fault points into a system on purpose.

Robust systems minimize fault points. Efficient systems come at the cost of robustness, and vice versa given a fixed definition of what is being conserved, i.e. costs or energy.

For example, a four cylinder engine that gets 15mpg will have a longer life than one that gets 30mpg, given the same cost.

My uncle works for Nintendo. He says Bird Flu is going to start getting real bad in two weeks, like REAL BAD.

The consensus at the very large IT provider I work for, amongst the staff, is that India is a good bet for a script running operations team, but poor on ingenuity, innovation, and creative problem solving. The best Indian talent are as good as anyone, but the average talent level is far lower than American, Asian or European.

Zig looks fun, as a low level alternative to Rust. Similar use case as Rust, but much simpler.

In my niche, platform engineering, grey-hairs is a positive indicator of competence.

Women often eventually discover they want children and are on a tight timeline. Men do too, but they are not on the timeline. They can start families at virtually any time in their life.

By biasing work income towards men it gives women a larger selection of men to choose from to start families with while they are fertile. It also incents them to move sooner rather than work their own career longer to achieve their lifestyle goals, which conflicts with their fertility timeline.

It's sad seeing my older female friends reaching the end of their fertility and realizing they don't want to live lives without children and families, but being at a disadvantage in the relationship market because the men they consider to be at their level are seeking younger women.

"Woke-ism" is looking more and more like the inversion of reality. It is the denial of fundamental realities in the service of highly questionable ideals.

In fact the ideals of "woke-ism" are so questionable that it only survives because they aren't allowed to be questioned.

Anyone can build a bridge that will stand.

It takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely stand.

A second of life beyond the warranty period is profit that the manufacturer can hold on to rather than give to the consumer. With microprocessors and new materials you can cut the edge closer and closer. Who cares if you destroy the brand's reputation, the executives and PE will be gone before that matters.

The corporations finance.the politicians, so no. It's all for show, and lines the pockets of the lawyers, who are the primary political class.

From the politicians they funded?

Diablo Canyon was a Gen I/II design from the 1950's/60's. Gen IV designs are far safer and cleaner, Thorium designs in particular, however they don't generate byproducts for nuclear weapons (boohoo), which is why the Thorium pathway was not taken.

If electricity was cheap it would give people inducements to use electric vehicles and appliances. It would be a market driven transition to these things instead of a policy driven one, which is doomed to fail as soon as the subsidies end.

If they didn't spend so much money on renewables they could have used it on the grid.

Some of the dumb enviromental laws didn't help either. It could be pretty hard to clear trees from a legal perspective, which made maintenance more expensive and time consuming, leading to grid degradation.

Just wait. California is where they start this stuff. California was an amazing place to live not too long ago. Good schools, affordable housing, (so) no major homeless issues, one of the most innovative and productive places in the entire world.

But thanks to the policies we're now on our way down. Human degradation is the norm here in our cities. Take a walk through any of California's major city downtowns. They're broken. The suburbs can still sort of pretend it's all fine though.

Don't say California voted for this, because in fact California has voted against the worst of these policies when they had the chance, only to be overturned by judges. Prop 187, which excluded undocumented people from the public benefits system is a prime example. Californians, probably wisely, decided they didn't want to create an incentive system for undocumented persons to come, and federal courts overturned it. It was one of many moves that changed the face of California and led us into a general decline.

Now entire nations have taken to non-prosecution and even incentivization of extra-legal immigration that they have not proven ready to absorb, including the USA itself. UK is now experiencing some political turmoil around unrestricted immigration, as are many other European countries (note that unrestricted immigration is most harmful to marginalized communities including POC, LGTBQ, and women).

So if the UK isn't getting as many blackouts as California is now, you just give need to give it a little more time. /rant

I've lived in California for my whole life. A blackout in the 80's was an anomaly. They were so rare that I remember them as being fun, a little adventure, because they were very rare.

In current year California I experience them on a regular enough basis that they are an genuine annoyance, especially because they are most common in the high heat of Summer. It's bad enough that I have invested in backup batteries for my home so I don't lose my refridgerated food and other essentials.

One can blame PG&E, Wall Street, whomever, and they certainly bear fault, but what's changed is the Federal and California energy policy. They shut down the nuclear pathway and pushed "renewables". It became a religious issue in which simply questioning the notion that we can derive all our energy needs from "clean energy" makes you a bad person.

So now California has extremely expensive energy and poor reliability. It's a mess. But you don't live in California so it's OK right, no, not really, California is where they prototype these policies and you can see them being pushed to other countries and the rest of the US.

It really comes down to the old saw that doing dumb things is ultimately bad for you, no matter how good the intentions. Now we're in the retcon phase of this process where the apologists and beneficiaries of these policies try to gaslight us into believing that it was always this bad, and that things are actually getting better instead of worse.

I've been at this business for a few minutes and can say it's not that hard to identify good candidates.

1) a native and active interest in computing 2) good english 3) good (enough) social skills

A good software team is built like a good NBA team:

1) a limited number of exceptional performance contributors, not many of these, by definition. Right tail of the normal curve. 2) Good support players with specific skills and the personality to allow your superstars to maximize their potential.

Everyone seems to be looking for 1) in the interview process because that's the gold, but 2) are extremely important to get 1) in the door and working at optimal.

Finally, you need to avoid

3) frictional team members, i.e. negative work. These are people who inject drama into the team process that does not contribute to outcome. A passionate team member who takes hard stances at times is a good thing, even if they're not always correct, because they can head off a bad outcome early in the process. However, someone who just causes drama and turmoil, or even simply breaks the team flow state, is also a big problem.

A team can easily be spoiled by 3) even when you have the perfect superstar and supporting cast because the focus turns from the product to the emotional drama, which is a huge drain.

This leads to a tangential, but important point, the current hiring mandates for modern practice are potentially catastrophic for software development teams. Inserting people onto a team who become 3) will kill a product and drive away your highest value contributors. Superstars in this field don't want drama, they tend to be introverts who are happiest quietly working on their own.

It then follows that meeting modern day hiring protocols often means pushing the equity component into the soft skills side of the company, which means your hiring pool for marketing, hr, project management is reduced to fulfill various hiring mandates. This leaves a lot of experienced, valuable people, who understand good software development because they've done it, on the sidelines because they have the wrong physical characteristics, e.g. the 60 year old who is pushed out of the tech side because of an outdated skill set would probably make an excellent project manager because they understand the SDLC from a technical and personal perspective. Who better to mentor young developers?

But those roles are often going to young college graduates who don't have that experience and just end up glamourized secretaries because they don't have the formative passion for the field.

The NBA superstar/support model works in software development. It's the only thing that creates high quality, high impact outcomes historically. It's the desire to reconfigure the schema into a social change experiment via mandated hiring that causes the complications.

The buildings are more than symbols, we have no clue how they were built, just theories, but remember there were no power tools before 1895. There were no cranes. Those massive Roman columns, were carved in perfect symmetry by hand tools?

The beings who built the cathedrals had methods and technologies of amazing power that we know virtually nothing about. They are artifacts of something that is now, presumably, gone.

Would it be hard to try this on the Azimuthal Equidistant projection?

I bought a cheap AQ monitor off Amazon that does CO2. Anecdotally, I feel better when CO2 is lower. It's definitely sold me on the value of fresh air.

Steve Albini, amazing producer, died at 61 of a heart attack. He was a vocal supporter of the covid jabs on Twitter/X. Was pretty critical of people who questioned it. He was a healthy, active, man.

"Yes, thrombosis can cause a heart attack. Thrombosis is a serious condition where blood clots form in blood vessels or the heart, blocking blood flow. If a blood clot blocks an artery leading to part of the heart muscle, it can cause a heart attack."

They're pulling it because of the Thrombosis deaths. This is just PR cope from AZ. If that were the real reason they'd quietly discontinue manufacture.

There were 81 admitted Thrombosis deaths, blood clots.

How many more were affected but either not fatally injured or a contributing factor to a fatality officially attributed to another cause?

Given the history of pharmaceutical products the wise move is generally to never take a product that is new, rather wait for a decade or two of market release to see if the product is actually safe and actually does something useful.

This on the news that the Astra Zeneca covid vaccine is being pulled due to Thrombosis deaths, i.e. blood clots.

I'm pro-vaccine and I'm waiting a long time before I try a new one. Let other people be the test subjects. I skip new to market pharmaceuticals for the same reason.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/07/astrazeneca-with...

Fan is a small load. You could run that from a generator. You wouldn't want to run a heat pump from a generator.

"Favorite" just means one you use a lot.

It's like when people ask you what your favorite movie or album is. They're not asking you to literally move to a desert island with only that, it just means one you like that comes to mind easily enough.

Same problem as all electric technologies have: you're dependent on the grid capacity to provide your service. You can't store electricity as affordably as gas and oil. In an extreme cold spell your grid is now being taxed at a maximum and it's a life or death situation if there is no alternative source of heating fuel.

Heat pumps are awesome as long as you don't critically need heat in a critical situation.

DOE puts out comparison papers at times, but I haven't looked in a while.

It always depends where you are. IBM is huge and mostly stupid, but they do have some good people and teams via their "hire by acquisition " strategy that are golden handcuffed.