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darkmarmot

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As someone in the Venn diagram intersection of "software engineer" and "studied climate/astrophysics/planetary science" in school, reading comments here is painfully disheartening. Virtually everyone highly engaged in this field is anticipating multiple, systemic apocalyptic scenarios that will end modern life as we know it. I'd assume that most of the people reading have enough of a calculus background to understand some of the underlying math. I implore you to find a good book or course on it.

I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. They had a mini golf game with a 3d golf club I embedded that I spent more time playing than working on :)

Alas no. I worked on their Power Play downloadable system to embed games in a local player and also did stuff like add Mojo Jojo and new levels to games like Power Puff Girls Fast and the Flurrious. Fun times :)

Doh, I did some work on some CN games back in the day -- but don't see any of those here. Hopefully they keeping adding to it!

I work in distributed systems programming and have been horrified by the crap the AIs produce. I've found them to be quite helpful at summarizing papers and doing research, providing jumping off points. But none of the code I write can be scraped from a blog post.

I think that's a good point. Our largest pain point with Elixir is definitely the size of the community and the associated dearth of niche libraries. The technology behind it, though, is solid enough that once those libraries exist, things really take off. My team wrote several open source medical libraries for Elixir and we've seen it really expand into the healthcare market.

We use something like this at scale, similar to Riak's design. We use it to store things like the active state of millions of hospital patients in RAM for high availability (zero downtime when DCs or nodes fail). One copy per data center with a writer at one of the DCs. Our current cluster has 32 nodes (8 per DC -- we should have 5 DCs across the US but only have 4 at the moment). You can learn more about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ0CvjAJXz4.

I used to do this kind of work as a contractor (for logistics and manufacturing), and I've it seen go both perfectly well and tragically wrong. The most common points of failure I've seen are underestimating the amount of business/domain knowledge needed and picking the wrong team.

Sometimes it's worth bringing someone in to build a temporary prototype to test the waters (I once wrote a wireless hand scanner pick system for a startup warehouse in a weekend -- they planned to throw my code away but just needed something functional right then.)

I would only pursue it if:

- your business is truly niche/unique and there's a significant cost due to process friction

- the total amount of work needed to have a functional product could be completed by one or two good developers in a matter of weeks/months.

If you do pursue it, I would try to take advantage of the Python Paradox (https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html) and hire someone, counterintuitively, working in a niche technology. You could probably find someone pretty good willing to build it in Elixir without much trouble.

Global CO2 Levels 3 years ago

It's a tiny fraction of what we already emit -- above the tropopause and, you know, weather? The primary concern is related to ozone damage.

Global CO2 Levels 3 years ago

As someone who went to school for this, no. Mammals evolved to survive colder conditions. Going hotter and with higher CO2 is not going to be awesome for our biology.