403 karma · joined December 2, 2023
Ahem: snooker, darts, golf, test match cricket, tennis. To varying degrees with these sports, at the top tier, mastery of the skill is merely the table stakes. The winners are the ones who can do so under immense pressure.
My employment particulars came the day of the two month deadline. They included a clause that said that the school had the final say on any claim brought by a pupil or their family against me for loss or damage and that any compensation would automatically be deducted from my salary. Unsurprisingly, I did not agree to this clause and did not sign the document! The school also refused to negotiate and I worked there for two years in a kind of contract limbo.
I’ve gone back to being a SWE now. I was lucky to not be beholden to one industry like my fellow teachers were. I can completely see how a sub-postmaster, without a fallback career, can get cornered into accepting some ludicrously unfair terms.
Anything crucial enough to maintaining an edge in the Cold War — or rather, ensuring survival should it become a hot war, something for which magical ablative insulation would be very handy — isn’t the sort of thing that gets a patent. One simply doesn’t win by suing the USSR for intellectual property infringement in the dying ashes of civilisation, old boy.
A lecturer of mine published a paper on bivalve adhesion that was allegedly funded by government interests desperate to maintain a strategic lead in limpet mines. Another worked with ultra high speed equipment with an electronic shutter that was switched by a krytron, the same component used in nuclear device detonation. There was a potent, possibly overblown concern about labs being infiltrated or broken into.
I think we forget about the miserable amount of paranoia brought about by the world being permanently only four minutes away from ending, and the weird things it made people do.
The game’s dialogue and story are all written in a series of ever more complex writing systems, unseen and novel to the game. There’s a mechanic where you get to prove to the game you understand what is being written or said (characters have subtitles also in the writing systems) and it’s really good fun!
Pittman shorthand: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Wr53ouD4Ok/WhxIZR6AOZI/AAAAAAABI...
Sennaarian writing: https://cdn.focus-home.com/fhi-fastforward-admin/resources/g...
There’s something deep in the human mindset about resource anxiety and the importance of that not being a thing can’t be underestimated. So maybe it kind of was about the free food and clothing all along?
The whole image is ~80MB, compressed. It is, indeed, impressively lean.
Given the breadth of this study, two different conclusions spring to mind:
• productivity is up across the board, regardless of wfh; or
• sending the pen pushers and bean counters home and letting the shop floor people get on with their jobs made both more productive!
I’d also like to have a mode — the default? — where all rendering was being done locally. There are documents I write that just can’t be stored on a third party computer.
Overleaf, to some extent, has shown the appeal for letting people focus on writing 100% of the time and running software 0% of the time. I’d prefer to use your tool though to write a quick letter to go in a parcel as a packing slip.
By the way: on mobile, your animated headline causes the page to jump up and down.
The atmosphere attenuates our 1300W/m2 of solar energy down to 300W/m2 so for a 125M km2 planet you only get 40PW of available power, or 5PW after 80% loss in solar panels and distribution.
In terms of global energy demand we’re currently using 25PWh per year which is the equivalent of 3TW. Assuming oil runs out, politics annuls nuclear options, and we cover most of the planet in solar panels then peak terrestrial solar is three orders of magnitude away.
Covering over everything with panels would presumably have devastating effects on the environment just as much as fossil fuels but if we limit to 1% coverage then we’re only one order of magnitude away from terrestrial solar being unable to power the world. It’s neither sunny nor midday all the time either so solar is starting to look dangerously close to not cutting it, and yet harvesting solar energy could be our only option for power for the next ten thousand years.
I pulled all these numbers from Wikipedia and crunched them with GNU units — this is HN after all — but it doesn’t sound unreasonable to conclude that anything planet bound is going to be bounded by planet size. Moreover, if the goal is for power generation to have zero impact on our biome then we should probably not generate power within the biome itself.
Think of a fingerprint reader as a USB keyboard that types out your fingerprint number for you when you touch it. While an attacker can steal the finger and put it on the reader they are more likely to steal the number and type it in with a regular keyboard.
Border controls are about building a (passport, face, fingerprint) tuple under human (or remote human) supervision on trusted hardware to control physical movement. It feels like one of the few cases where fingerprint readers do actually work as an application.
Now that the border police have your magic finger number they can indeed unlock your phone too. It’s an offline attack though — they need to get logic probes between the reader and the CPU — so if the phone locks with a PIN after reboot, magic key press, or a period of time then that’s the appropriate defence.
In the early 2000s there was a TV ad campaign for “The People’s Post Office” where the sub-postmaster role was played by John Henshaw, a character actor known for playing hard bastards and, in his most recent role on The Cops, an exploitative bent copper from Bradford. A strange but apt piece of casting.
Waitrose on the other hand did away with any kind of weighing device. Can’t have an unexpected item in bagging area if the bagging area isn’t expecting anything at all!
What is corp dev’s role then?
Maybe they like an in house recruiter: they conduct negotiations and ease the process by meeting with both parties, but the yay/nay decisions are made by the hiring manager?
Some other similar ideas that come to mind are the multiverse quartz megaspheres in the second half of Diaspora and the message embedded in pi in Contact, the novel.
These are stories of course, but the cosmic microwave background radiation is a real life megastructure that encodes the remnants of the Big Bang and that is terrifyingly fascinating.
Another real world one is the giant foreboding galaxies in the background of the Angular Diameter Turnaround xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2622/
What other examples, fictional or real, are there of giant monumental pieces of information encoding?
We value things highly by assigning them symbols with low values, so a symbol with a postfix modifier that gives it a slightly lower value means we value it higher! Or something :)
We accept that “A” comes before “B” so therefore “A” is better. “A-“ is smaller than “A” therefore “A-“ must be better!
rank = [A- A A+ B- B B+ C- …]I’m seeing this now through the lens of hiring at a 100 person org, but I’ve done hundreds of interviews as a FAANG employee too. The difference there, I would say, and what GOOG try to do is to shoot for the moon and get hiring nailed at the interview process. This comes at the expense of rejecting nine out of ten candidates because the candidate firehouse is free flowing and plentiful: something I don’t have at my much more normal startup.
When I searched for images of wired bolts just now I saw many examples where the wire is done up quite tightly, which doesn’t seem right.
It sounds counterintuitive but without grease a bolt (or machine screw) will bind early with a high torque well before it is correctly tensioned lengthways. The torque is just a proxy for the tension and it is this tension which is needed to fasten your components together as intended.
The grease means that when the torque to turn the bolt reaches the correct value then the bolt is also under the correct tension instead of being because it got stuck in the thread half way.
A bolt is either fastened or it isn’t. If the wire is all that’s left to hold it, then it isn’t fastened and your parts are being held together with a very weak piece of wire.
That feels like a stretch for an individual to pull off. Linux OS vendors often have wikis saying what does and doesn’t work across many makes and models, but those still feel like isolated reports from a wide variance of reviewers. It’s hard to put an ordering across the reviews. It is literally comparing Apples with non-Apples.
Who has tried ‘em all and picked the best, what was it, and why?
I see your point about a lack of modern day gumption in the physical world but I sleep at night knowing that what we do with software more than makes up for it.