scrumper

I enjoyed this a lot while consulting in Chicago in the winter of 2002. Good clean fun alone in a hotel room while the snow raged, though I don't remember winning much. I'm tempted to dive back in but don't really fancy dealing with Java again.

Spam account, flag & kill.

I'm so happy this is actually a thing that lots of people like and locals take pride in. It was such a delightful surprise to see it after coming through security on my way back from a stressful business trip to Kenosha, my first time in the state. I took note of it, sent a photograph of the sign to my wife and various friends who enjoy little bits of clever language, and took off for home with a really warm impression of Wisconsin.

Some Steely Dan albums are 50 and over. Say what you want about the music but their albums are sonically incredible.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough

I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either.

(I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)

But, are those polar orbits more accessible from Shetland than from more equatorial locations? Is that potentially useful? Does the lack of earth assist matter for the kinds of small satellites that can be thrown by the rockets applying to use this site? (I don't know the answers, it's not a rhetorical question.)

And where else can Europe launch from (under its own control) other than French Guiana? Shetland is closer than that, if a bit shorter on cool lizards and post-launch umbrella drinks. Maybe the idea is to keep using French Guiana for full-scale Ariane launches, and Shetland for cheap launches of little things that would be too expensive to ship across the Atlantic?

This is disappointing. I _want_ Siri to be good, but it's dumber than it was at launch. It's the only assistant I'm even a tiny bit comfortable trusting, but it can't do trivial-seeming but still useful things like create calendar appointments from voice without error. "Hey Siri, create an appointment on February 4 at 3pm for the kids' dentist, and invite my wife." Not a chance, but it's so basic it should work. Instead it's several steps that usually end in cursing and at best a placeholder called "Appointment" that I have to manually fix later. I was willing to try Apple Intelligence if it made Siri marginally less crippled, but apparently not.

Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is:

A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing.

The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful.

I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience.

There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.

Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

I like the idea of this quite a lot (at a minimum, it would cut out all of those "how do I do XYZ in Mathematica" web searches) but not enough to subscribe. I'd rather buy some bucket of credits because my use of MMA is very unevenly distributed over time.

Great comment, which incidentally serves to illustrate just how much energy you can store in a flywheel.

Aaagh you monster it's only November and now that horrible aimless effected wobbly chord fever dream is stuck in my head again. I had at least another couple weeks before hearing it for the first time this year.

I never understood how something could be so bland and yet so revolting at the same time, like a smoothie made of wallpaper paste and dog shit.

Ha, came here for the same comment (after stopping by Tracey Boards to order a set for my family first.)

It's a good coinage. I took it to mean something along the lines of competitively pressured in a structured combative manner and it does kind of sound like it could mean that. Which I guess it now does.

It's certainly rich, and the trilogy is satisfying to read, but I had to stop with his giant epics because he's just so relentlessly cruel to his characters. Every remotely sympathetic female character is going to spend at least a decade being repeatedly raped. Every ordinary man is going to have his family murdered and be enslaved. Yes the stakes might be elevated that way and for sure his chosen time period wasn't exactly kindly to those at the bottom of the social pile, but after a while it just felt gratuitous and more reflective of some pathology in Ken Follet's mind than any desire to tell a good story.

Yes I think you have it, having read it again. I didn't read it properly the first time.

Commenting here because this describes a fascinating phenomenon and I hope some more people see it.

In short, lunar surface temperatures decreased during the pandemic, hypothesized as being due to a reduction in anthropogenic radiation from earth caused by the lockdowns.

Same here, we loved it at school. Also a liquid simulator called "Aliquid" has just popped into my memory. Hours of fun.

Despite playing hours and hours of Elite on the school BBCs before we got a room full of Archimedes machines, I've only just today noticed that Lander was also made by David Braben.

"High quality" and "can buy on aliexpress" huh. I'd drop the latter requirement.

Kester rosin core is available everywhere including Amazon and is excellent quality. 60/40 works nicely, #44 too.

OK fair.

That's not how I read it:

“Through a partnership with Microsoft, Kroger plans to place cameras at its digital displays, which will use facial recognition tools to determine the gender and age of a customer captured on camera and present them with personalized offers and advertisements on the EDGE Shelf.”

Then in the next paragraph:

“EDGE will allow Kroger to use customer data to build personalized profiles of each customer … quickly updating and displaying the customer’s maximum willingness to pay on the digital price tag—a corporate profiteering capability that would be impossible using a mere paper price tag,” they wrote.

That's exactly dynamic pricing save that the driver is not external factors (weather, proximity to Thanksgiving) and the price is not universal. It's adjusting the displayed price of an item based on the identity of the person looking at it to target a specific price to an identified consumer. A very fine-grained value of 'dynamic'.

You too! Enjoy the cruise.

And I had an unfair advantage - I was already drinking my first cup.

Oh interesting - I'm familiar with the combination shoal keel/centerboard from daysailers like the Montgomery 17 but wasn't aware of it at the scale of something like the Wellington. I can imagine that being very popular out in the Bahamas (in common with most of the planet it's somewhere I haven't sailed, which is probably why I'd never come across that.)

Point taken on the auxiliary rudder/autopilot hydrovane though damage to that isn't going to sink the boat.

And yes, totally agree with your thoughts on those rowers!

Glad we could get something out of the low alpha end of the thread. Thanks for the knowledge there.

What?

Are you talking about active roll stabilizers? Not on a 40' sailboat there aren't. The keel does that job.

What's a "boating permit"?

Short of a 10' dinghy I can't think of any boat where you can remove the rudder and even if 'fin' means 'centerboard' that's still dinghy stuff. Nobody (bar a once-a-generation daredevil) is dinghying across the Atlantic.

Yes exactly. Teenage humans frequently do monumentally stupid and destructive stuff because they're bored or want to impress peers. Everything on a continuum from egging and TP'ing houses to keying cars, graffiti/tagging, breaking windows on abandoned buildings, shoplifting, vandalizing public structures, breaking into cars, stealing cars and joyriding, to actual gang murder.

> move the rudder and fins back in the boat

What does that mean?

They're attacking exclusively sailboats, which are silent. Granted, not many motor yachts are transiting the straits and those that do tend to be larger than 40 feet, but some do. Their method of attack (disable the rudder) is also only effective on sailboats (the rudder is much, much larger and consequently easier to break.)

I'm really not sure that's the reason. Someone else in this thread had an idea that they were trying to replicate a prior result (obtaining something desirable from a disabled yacht) but I'm inclined to believe they're just being dicks. And why not? We hunt for sport. And we know that orcas engage in play, even quite cruel play with cornered seals. It could be adolescent orcas challenging each other, like pelagic ding dong ditch.

EDIT: The boat in the article was motoring, not under sail. So strike the word "silent" for "a lot quieter than a motorboat."

The article talks about a descent stage built by a private space company* that won't be delivered on time. So even if the rover tested out perfectly, they can't land it.

(*which might just mean "contractor")

Oh, that's a shame. The big willy I drew is only visible at exactly the width I have it set at. I wonder what random things I'm missing. It takes a while to reflow too so it's not like it's easy to resize the window and see in realtime what other people are ding.