Badabinski

I'm really glad to hear that you're alright. Several skin conditions are effectively autoimmune disorders, so I'm absolutely not surprised that the treatment is rough—anything that affects your immune system is probably going to make you feel like shit. I have no idea if that's the case, but it seems likely. I hope that your procedure goes well, your treatment is effective, and your condition ceases to be a problem for you. Health and wellness always come first.

This is excellent news! I've been installing from GitHub for a while and have been really pleased with how fluid the app is.

I'm much less worried about human piloted craft. It's very difficult to program complex decision making and discernment. The astronauts present in the first landers will have been intensively trained in how to avoid catastrophe and will likely be able to come up with solutions on the fly if unanticipated things happen. Still dangerous, but hopefully less so.

It will be much easier to land completely automatically once we have landing pads, radar tracking, and other infrastructure present on the surface. It's just hard to land a robot on an airless moon with a bunch of rocks and hills and shit everywhere.

I tip 20% or $5 on takeout orders, whatever is larger (provided nothing goes terribly wrong). I have the means, and I remember how much I fucking hated working in retail. I depend on these people to feed me and I appreciate that they're willing to do it (especially with how poorly they get treated at times). If I can make someone's day better then it's worth it to me.

That being said, I hate tip culture and wish that the laws in my country around tipping would change. This is getting off topic now (since I think that the people doing takeout orders aren't subject to this), but it's absurd that we let restraunts pay $3.50 an hour if someone is making the rest of the minimum wage in tips. If I tip someone, I want it to be because I really appreciate what they did. I don't want to be paying their wages, they should be receiving a livable wage no matter what. I know that refusing to tip won't change that, so I just go along with it.

I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.

Sodium-ion batteries appear promising. Like, the energy density by weight of the current market offerings is absolutely too low to be useful for vehicles, but there's hope that can be improved in a relatively short timescale. Prices should be pretty good when factories finish tooling up, and most chemistries use no rare earth metals. Current densities seem great for grid storage, which is where hydrogen has the most potential right now (imo).

I still like the idea of hydrogen for some forms of transportation (freight trains, container ships, possibly aircraft if energy density could be increased or aircraft weight decreased somehow) and as a strategic emergency energy reserve. It'd be great to have more grid resilience as the environment continues to decay. I just worry about the energy costs that come with transporting hydrogen for cars and individual transport. Pipelines seem like they'd be challenging, and trucking it around seems a bit wasteful. In-situ generation would be ideal if power and water are available and hydrolysis can be made more efficient and compact, but that's not possible everywhere.

I dunno. I'm glad it's not my job to figure out the actual energy cost of everything, but I'm really hoping grid-scale sodium-ion batteries will become a reality sooner rather than later, and that we'll see sodium-ion batteries in cars within the next 10-15 years.

Because greedy investors are gullible and want to make money from the jobs they think AI will displace. They don't know that this shit doesn't work like they've been promised. The C-levels at Gitlab want their money (gotta love publicly traded companies), and nobody is listening to the devs who are shouting that AI is great at writing security vulnerabilities or just like, totally nonfunctioning code.

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

I'm not making this comment to disagree with your point, but the failure of the SL-1 reactor strikes me as an engineering and process failure more than anything else. The reactor was not designed in a safe fashion, probably because it was designed as a test bed for reactors that could be deployed via airplanes to the Arctic circle. The fact that an engineer was even able to fully remove a control rod, and the fact that removing that control rod lead to a fatal steam explosion make me think that they really tried too hard when they removed weight and volume from the reactor design.

In well designed safety-critical systems, human error should not be able to cause any form of bodily harm. I don't think it's a great idea for a private company to be running nuclear reactors on Earth to power something as trivial as a data center (investing in storage + local solar/wind/geothermal/hamster wheel velodrome seems like a more efficient use of resources for one thing), but I also don't think that SL-1 is the best example to cite here.

As an aside, my high school Physics teacher went on a long diatribe about how the three SL-1 casualties were the only humans ever killed as the direct result of nuclear fission in the context of a nuclear reactor. Looking back on it, I think she was splitting hairs a bit, but it is an interesting point to make.

I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It'll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I've had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people's systems? I've had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they're going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don't have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I've personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I've had senior management ask me about how I'm using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don't feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it's likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

People ought to be careful with the going outside thing. Like, if you're just going out into your yard or apartment complex then it's fine. If you're commuting and there's the possibility that you might end up stranded where there's no climate control, then please at least stick that extra layer in your backpack or something.

I had somewhat severe hypothermia once, and it's an insidious thing. I got colder and colder until I just stopped noticing it, and then I stopped noticing most things. I didn't realize what was happening to me, and I would have died if I had been alone. I had others who saw my slack, dumb face and my kinda blue lips and helped me, but I'm not going to risk ever going through that again, and I'd encourage everyone to please be careful. Keeping a coat or hat or whatever with you is worth the hassle.