FunnyBadger

Just turned 60.

One thing I've found (I started programming when I was 11) is that you can get better at judging situations/application/specifications and choosing NOT to write code in certain obvious ways or at all. Sometimes the right solution isn't the same old skill.

I've also come to realize that MOST hiring managers barely don't what they are doing as programmers or as managers. They have the authority of position but zero common sense or learned social skills to know what they are doing in their position - they are BEST IGNORED. Which can mean you won't get hired by them but often that is actually for the best - if you care about an idea, you should be the boss or be working with like-minded people who know what they are doing instead. That corporate job might just be 100% pure trash and a waste of time.

This last reality is why I do NOT value the idea of working for FAANG companies - there's nothing good about what they do or how they do it. They are generally evil in that sense. So why would anyone work for them? Mostly to make some money and because you don't know any better.

It would be nice. The problem is the same as self-driving cars: they work but ONLY in certain very constrained and limited application scenarios that limit their adoption.

Self-driving cars will never do well in snow country during a blizzard.

Airships will never do well in thunderstorms or other similar severe weather.

Failing to recognize the limitations of an idea or technology is the #1 way innovators, inventors and startups fail - they lack the critical thinking rigor and fail to nip bad ideas in the bud because they are too emotionally attached (by ego or by lack of brain cells) to KILL their bad ideas. You attack your own ideas as aggressively as any competitor would to get good ideas.

I look forward to finding ways of sabotaging this technology!

Maybe they shouldn't use a technology that is fundamentally ambiguous about identity - you know go back to paper and US mail.

There's a reason why it didn't work before during the 1960s. And why dirigibles died in the 1930s. Nothing in technology or the laws of physics have changed enough to alter its viability!

MOST people, in my experience, who push, fund or jump onto the bandwagen for such things have ZERO STEM knowledge, zero economics/finance knowledge and zero market knowledge. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation made before they "jumped" with both feet would have nipped the stupid in the bud and saved a lot of wasted money.

But it's human nature to be willfully stupid.

Yet another reason why I drive 20 yo cars and have zero interest in buying anything new.

I live in a place that barely have 3G and mostly not even that. The best strategy is to simply adjust to not having or using cellular.

When I need to make a cellular call, I simply have to get in my car and drive the 8 miles into the nearby village. There's a certain part of the village where you can get both cellular and data. The rest of the area only gives audio phone.

I live about 30 miles from our state capital and you only need to be about 2 miles outside of the city limits and there's zero cellular.

For personal security, that's why we own guns. For personal health, that's why we make friends with neighbors. This is simply how it is. The best strategy is to get used to it and stop whining about what cellular providers will NEVER provide.

Who decides what is uninteresting?

No.

Only up to a point. Not everyone can be "supremely good leaders" but most can become better than average. The difference is personality and especially empathy and charisma. Without those, it's hard to reach the heights.

Peltiers simply can not scale. But compressor refrigeration easy can.

With the recently court decision against social media company censorship, this may become a major legal problem for Facebook.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/fifth-circuit-deals-huge-lega...

We can only hope!!

Leave California.

Pretty much ANYWHERE ELSE has a lower cost of living and if it's a Red State, far more jobs.

I left despite being born and raised in California. Never coming back.

Ethereum's PoS is so dangerously weak and risky that strict PoW in Bitcoin is very much a better hedge.

The cost to "collect" space junk is astronomical. The issue is relative velocities of their orbits combined with the fact that even LEO has a lot of separation between objects.

It's very similar to the issue of extracting CO2 from the air - once it's in the air, you first have to add the energy of entropy to un-diffuse it and then you need collect it. That entropic energy is ENORMOUS. And you can easily generate more CO2 to create the energy to overcome it than you are extracting because most energy generation is still fossil-fuel sourced.

There's a very similar entropy problem with space junk. The energy requires is far higher.

Absolutely NOT.

Or you need to stop calling biology, geology and other majors forms of science or STEM if you eliminate calculus.

The US DOE designed the most efficient wood stoves during Jimmy Carter's presidency (he was an engineer by training). Those are the same ones we use today. This isn't a recent thing. This includes cat converter wood stoves.

Strictly wood is NOT a carbon footprint because it's part of a short-term carbon cycle (in <100 years it's already back into trees).

Until recently I lived in the boonies and ONLY used wood for heating.

The biggest problem with wood: you have to constantly manage/regulate the fueling and heating - even the best stoves need to be refilled in 4-6 hours when the temperature is below 10C. Further, you only get this if you've aged (dried) the wood for 2 years first. Newly cut wood is 20-30% water and the heat of vaporization to steam radically reduces the heating value of the burned wood.

Of course it is absurd.

The most logical, green and efficient solution is to burn Russian natural gas. But when you have politicians irrationally ignoring the needs of the people they are supposed to represent, this is what will necessarily happen!

"The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, buying Russian gas in rubles."

You are absolutely correct.

Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all.

For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon).

Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals.

The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil.

You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M

The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green.

Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.

Complete BS.

Green Energy has radically lower thermodynamic efficiency and energy density than ANY other currently used energy source (especially fossil and nuclear). These two qualities of an energy source have a direct relationship to economic efficiency and utility. Economics and Energy are 1:1 causal - economic growth ONLY occurs with energy growth. Lowering the quality of energy means lowering economic productivity, efficiency and activity.

When they say it will result in "trillions of net savings", this is PRECISELY the same as saying that you can increase profits by driving all costs to zero. It's either fraud or ignorance to claim such a thing.

Clock rate limits are directly due to physical heating limits on-chip with silicon. That's what it stopped being an automate gimmme of scaling and it likely never will come back again as a systematic thing because the laws of physics can't be changed.

Cores were the direct answer to this limit. But then Amdahl's Law limits what cores can do.

What this story means is someone decided to trade off thermal effects for clock rate. The primary effect of heat is reliability - that is, how many years of operation can you expect with the final product. Heat kills the life span of transistors, metal and oxide.

Honestly there's nothing special about hitting 6 GHz - it's not some magical thing. Magical thinking people!!

There's a mathematical model for this. It doesn't require 50% leaving to destroy a company.

First you have Price's Law - half the people actually doing work rises with the square root of the total employee count. It's a variant of Pareto law. So as you grown bigger, the critical path of viable operation depends on fewer and fewer people per capita.

That group is also the group who first to see problems and least likely to put up with BS so they are the first to leave when things go downhill. The bigger the organization, the fewer people who need to leave to destroy it.

This is one of several dynamics that assure a role of startups and entrepreneurs because large companies can never be safe or stable or eternal.

Related to this: most startups last no more than 5 years but large corporations seldom live beyond 20-25 years. The handful of corporations that do are super rare and mostly living on borrowed time. Usually the only thing keeping larger companies around beyond 20-25 is one or a few very charismatic leaders/executives - as soon as they go, it comes crashing down. Hewlett-Packard is a classic example of this.

Seriously look at other payment processors.

You are overthinking this - if you have to use game theory and uncertainty to plan your relationship with a vendor (instead of picking up a phone or sending an e-mail to ask or solve your issues), you need to find a new vendor.

Cold Turkey is one of the most effective ways. Close the old account and open an entirely new one if that's still on the table. Honestly all the problems that accrue with social media are net negative and are best avoided 100%. No point to reinflating the bubble again - because it WILL.

I went cold turkey on both Reddit and Quora and have zero plans to ever return to either. I proceeded to delete all posts I'd made in the last 10-20 years. Best decision ever! I could trivially recreate the content on different platforms if I ever really wanted to and it would be better the 2nd time.

I saw how these platforms treated me as akin to being bullied, having the bully demand I apologize for being beat up and then making money on my good will and contributions on top of that.

The obvious answer is to delete it all to deny them any benefit from the content and to stop the beatings and bullying. Life is too short for anything else.

I call BS on this. It would require negating entropy.

This is the central flaw of social media itself.

As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media:

1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds

2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe.

This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)

Yes. It's 100% BOTH.

Twitter is going to have some major, major legal problems with the current Missouri lawsuit - acting as a direct agent of the US Government puts Twitter 100% under the jurisdiction and requirements of the 1st Amendment. "The government shall not infringe" now includes Twitter censorship!

Social media as also enabled mentally ill and fringe lunatics to have a voice that is nominally equal to people who are rational and law-and-order based. In so far as individuals should show "reasonable restraint" in anything they do or say (to avoid 1st Amendment, discrimination, slander, libel or other ILLEGAL speech acts), that is partially and centrally an individual's fault as well.

Both feed on each other. Both are evil in any sense of what civilization and civil society are. The pendulum will swing back and in many ways already is.

When a group of people act like terrorists, it's absolutely wrong or illegal. It's not polite but politeness is not the measure. The definition of terrorism lately is (per the FBI):

Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.

Committing slander or libel or violating the 1st Amendment (if government OR GOVERNMENT AGENT) is precisely terrorism by the above legal definition given by the government itself.

Very cool.

If you do machining, carpentry, construction, etc. you find this kind of stuff is surprisingly central to everyday work - you'll use either geometry constructions or the concepts behind them CONSTANTLY. Very useful to peak your skills at doing drills like this.

Bravo!

Definitely agree.

The one I co-own is an old-school .com domain. Probably still the best. If costs are your critical issue, maybe you should re-think your plans for having any of it online. We are not talking about a lot of money in any case.

The two elements I see:

1. CO2 is ONLY useful if the CO2's next use is profitably useful - the fossil fuel industry is the only economically viable user of CO2 that can "make it disappear because they inject it into wells. Any others will always re-release it (e.g. make sodas, triple-point extraction, etc).

2. CO2 extraction is probably marginal economically because you are already starting from the disadvantage of having to extract it from the air - where you first must "pay" in energy for the entropy which is always going to be costly and unavoidable.