12,193 karma · joined September 8, 2009
The issue is intensity of light. These retinal projector lasers are not intense enough to damage your eye. A regular light at the same intensity as a powerful laser would damage your eyes just as much. It's just a lot harder to create a regular light that can reach that level of intensity.
The map also does not show Hawai'i, which would be one green blob, there is no part of Hawai'i not 100 miles from the border. All of the New England states are similarly small enough to be completely covered, even by the erroneous picture of the physical border.
You basically get a few, mostly uninhabited spots out in the West that aren't covered.
That the Earth-Moon orbital axis is not incidental with the Sun-Earth orbital ray means we'd always, eventually, have solar and lunar eclipses.
Perhaps if Earth were in a tidally locked orbit with the Sun, the Moon could be in a tidally locked orbit with the Sun while also orbiting the Earth. But then half the planet would be frozen and the other half would be completely baked and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
What Makes Enceladus so Attractive in the Search for Life in Space?
Enceladus is considered to be one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Researchers suspect that under the moon’s icy crust there is a global ocean of liquid water and a rocky core further below. Due to cryovolcanic activity, gigantic plumes break through cracks in the crust at the moon’s south pole, ejecting ice particles hundreds of kilometers into space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed through these plumes multiple times to analyze its composition. Enceladus’s ocean is the only extraterrestrial “body of water” from which scientists have been able to directly analyze samples. The samples revealed traces of various salts and organic compounds. Furthermore, previous analyses conducted by Cassini gave indications of hydrothermal processes on the seafloor and other conditions that are significant in supporting life.
What an absolute shame it got shut down over trade restrictions. Even if, in the West, we'd still have Microsoft and Apple and Linux, at least there would have been severe competitive pressure to move beyond the Unix model.
You could basically look at all the ways that UX has advanced on the Web and almost generate a very long TODO list of things to improve on the desktop. I know there are a lot of people here, especially of the Linux using variety, who revile Web UX, but the things most people complain about (privacy concerns, bloat, document vs app platform) happened specifically because desktop UX stopped innovating 30 years ago.
Some personal peeves, all from having to reimplement these things in projects over the years, which is now many projects because I'm now old, so having to do the same things over and over again is getting annoying:
Multiple Document Interfaces used to have built-in support in GUI toolkits. Pro-oriented editing environments like Visual Studio not-Code and Photoshop gave you the ability to have multiple documents open and operate on then on a single application context. While this is a bespoke implementation in those programs now, that's largely because the UI toolkits didn't keep up with newer features like docking, tabbing, etc. Browsers themselves also had to implement bespoke UI for tabbed documents, again for the same reasons. It's shocking how bad this is in VSCode, where certain kinds of sub-Windows can only be put in certain places, but again, that's because they had to do it from scratch. Now, there is no MDI support in the browser at all, you're left implementing it from scratch, and modern GUI toolkits seem to all just try to ape HTML/CSS (not that I think that's a completely terrible approach, but only because The Desktop Toolkit is Stagnant).
With modern large screens, I find myself at a loss for how to use all the screen real estate effectively. Not that I lack for need, but because I can't seem to get everything I want to see into a comfortable position without sacrificing some other thing. Yet, at the same time, I can't seem to fit much in my own application window. This one is more on me for not having too great of design skills, but I think there are some fundamentally difficult issues to solve here since nobody is going to have a 40” laptop. Fundamentally, the issue is one of being too rigidly reliant on the Application Developer to implement such things as MDI and tool layout. We kind of figured that out with responsive designs break-pointing when going to truly small screens on phones, but I think this could be done more automatically if the GUI toolkit was better.
Smartphones, laptops, and desktops aren't the only 3 workspace sizes. There's also the completely borderless, 3D space of the VR home environment. After experiencing Windows Holographic for the first time and experimenting with using a Hololens as a primary compute device (and then drinking away the massive headache), I found a lot of interesting glimmers of how spatial computing could do a lot for people. I really enjoyed having 2D documents mounted on the wall behind my desk, not needing a screen to take up space on my desk. Having a music player app pinned on a specific spot like a HiFi stereo stack just felt so much more comfortable than wearing headphones, and it was so much easier to turn my body to interact with the stereo rather than sift through my window stack to find the music app. Keeping certain app widgets in certain locations around my house (notes on my refrigerator door, Email away from coding) felt very natural and like it was helping me re-establish balance in my work. But it was all for naught as MS killed Windows Holographic and all the other devices are just pushing virtual 2D screens on which unmodified WIMP interface desktop or mobile apps can run.
Handling the myriad of document types bespoke for every application is extremely bothersome. Having only the file extension for any hint at the content type is extremely unreliable and incomplete (there are thousands of known content types not just image/png, image/jpeg, text/plain, text/markdown, and application/json). Plus, the extension only tells you the container format, the data itself could be in wildly different schemas/encodings, especially when dealing with .json or any audio/video files. Doing deep content inspection is slow and also unreliable because so many JSON-based formats don't reliably implement JSON Schema. This could be solved if we got rid of file extensions and had the full content type string embedded with the file at the File System level. A file's name should be a description of the contained content, not overloaded to store data encoding information.
After writing all of this, it started to dawn on me that these are all the same problem of wanting to composite application together from smaller bits in a unified workspace that I the User control, not dependant on me the Application Developer to provide the support for it. Because, at the application layer, I can't. I can't unify whatever features I'm building with features other app devs have built. We need this to be at the DE level or there isn't a standard to which app devs can work.
Even my complaint about content types fits into this because most of the time I just need to display and play back a file in whatever the one standard way there is to display such a thing. I'd much rather the UI toolkit provided better media players with an OS that went beyond the application window for giving people the ability to composite functionality together. With Adobe Acrobat installed, I as a User should now be able to use PDFs anywhere else I want to view Text or Markdown or Word documents and I as an Application Developer should not have to think about what document formats my users might throw into my application.
The VR home environment makes this issue a lot easier to see, as the Window does not make sense there, but I think this generalizes to 2D, screen-bordered scenarios. Most of the need for better application composition is around not having to rely on every Application Developer to implement everything themselves. Because, when you leave it to App Devs, you get abominations like Snapchat and Instagram.
I had funding for a project I had proposed at work yanked out from under me because I had refused to vibe code the whole thing. I had proposed the project to create a tool that would be beneficial to my division, which represents a good 25% of the company's revenue (we're a consulting company). It had the enthusiastic support of my entire direct leadership line, very heavy hitters in the company. But the executives in charge of the internal R&D budget have their own agenda of pushing AI out on everything to gin up this idea that our company is "AI forward." Nevermind that our IT infrastructure is a joke, we need to play a game to convince non-existent investors that we are suddenly, out of the blue, after 50 years, a "technology company" when what we really do well is manage client relationships.
The executive I was closest to at one point told me I had failed because I hadn't used AI to tell me what the requirements for the project should be, that I was just doing "whatever I wanted."
If I were really doing whatever I wanted, I would not be building some kind of data management analysis workflow whatever. I designed the project around exactly the sort of thing that would benefit our direct line analysts. I don't need to be told what the requirements are, I know then intimately from working with these people for years. But because I was not using AI to tell me what to build and using AI to build it for me, I am being "behind the times." Another executive told me it wouldn't matter if I succeeded at the project if I didn't use AI to build all of it. Another time he told me it wouldn't matter if the project was any good, so long as I used AI to build it.
What is even the point? Why would I abdicate everything to AI? I know what I'm doing and I know how to do it. But that is unimaginable to the AI-pilled executive class. They are so used to not knowing how to do anything that they can't imagine anyone else actually knows how to do their job.
The navigation system in EF is where all of the pain points originate. All of my troubles with getting the migration generator to work are because I'm trying to express rather complex relationships. For example, to store a record representing a property on an object, I need to have two foreign keys from the Properties table to the Types table: one for the type of the property and one for the type in which the property lives. Types themselves have many relationships to other types: their base type, interface types they implement, generic type parameters, constraints on generic type parameters (actually, haven't even implemented that one as is too much).
I'm generally happy with the performance and expressivity of the system I've developed so far, but damn, it came with a lot of pain.
Same story every 4 months and yet still no breakout, winning products. I've been hearing "the AI is good now" and "it 10x's my productivity" for a over a year now. If it were true, why aren't the all-in-AI using companies 10-15 years ahead of their competition yet? Why is it still all buggy, poorly designed junk?
There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
"Twelve years Light worked and on a cold night in the year 200X, Protoman was born. A perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom, built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots. Ready. Willing. Prepared to fight."
For the Protomen it makes sense. But for a project README it's so absurdly melodramatic.