dreamcompiler

This is both a bad and a good idea.

First the bad: Helium is very expensive to extract and store. You'd need a lot of venture capital. And you'd have a tough time competing with Qatar which produces between 1/4 and 1/3 of the world's supply. Qatar already is the DeBeers of helium.

The good: When the US/Iran war started helium prices shot up, so there might be an opportunity for a helium supplier not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helium-prices-soar-q...

This USB-C toothbrush is something I've been looking for so I don't need to bring a special charger.

What would be even better is an electric toothbrush that doesn't contain a battery that would work with USB-PD plugged in. Why? Because I like putting my electric toothbrush in my checked bag because it's not essential, and technically you're not supposed to put lithium batteries in checked bags.

Likewise usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser. Looking at you, Confluence.

And of course you often cannot paste a 6-digit number into these fields. You have to type all 6 digits by hand.

React was invented to make multiple DOM changes quicker and set up DOM event dependencies declaratively. Fine. Some websites benefit from this. Most do not.

Since React's invention, it has gotten more bloated, browsers have made living DOM changes a lot faster, and the vast majority of websites still only change one or two DOM objects in response to events. Those could easily be handled much faster with plain old AJAX. The latency overhead React adds to a website is quite noticeable and unnecessary. Airbnb.com for example would be a great deal more pleasant to use if they would ditch React.

The fact that React had to reinvent server-side rendering is all you need to know to see that React has jumped the shark.

I haven't bought a Sony product since 2005 when they put a rootkit on music CDs. Apparently their customer-hostile attitude hasn't changed much.

I think of C as more of a dark side language because it's basically a portable assembler. Lisp at least prevents you from doing the stupidest things like overrunning array bounds or writing to freed pointers*, which C is perfectly happy to let you do.

* Of course there are no user-visible pointers** in Lisp so the concept of free vs. not free doesn't come up because memory allocation and garbage collection are automatic.

**Under the hood most everything in Lisp is a pointer, but the user cannot see them or mess with them.

Oh of course. Mycelium is just the tip of the iceberg e.g. "Spock had a secret sister." Oh come on!

Yes some Trek scripts are better than others, as are some entire shows. But the creators of Disco seemed like they had never watched a single episode of "real" Trek or understood what made it work.

Yet another thing they didn't teach us in Texas history class.

I think regime change is likely to happen within two years. Just not in Iran.

And Anthony Rapp (the actor who plays him) went through some awful stuff that made him famous for another reason and he seems to have come out stronger. Good for him.

As for the whole mycelium plot in Discovery, I found it so ridiculous that I refuse to consider that show canon.

I grew up in Texas and took Texas history. I learned things like Texas being the only US state that was once an independent country and where the Six Flags came from (later the name of an amusement park empire that originated in Texas).

But they never taught us much about New Mexico.

TIL Bonnie Tyler was the female Meat Loaf.

There are a number of lesser-known chunks of American history like this.

One of my favorites is that Santa Fe has been the capital city of Nuevo Mexico since 1610. Acoma, another city in modern-day New Mexico, is about 500 years older still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoma_Pueblo

How long ago was this? In the last 5 years rent has increased dramatically in many of the historically LCOL cities.

Even better question: Compute the moving median.

Computing a moving average with samples being pumped through an n-element buffer is easy. Doing so for the median requires more thought. It's also very useful e.g. for removing single-sample noise from an audio track, so it's not a meaningless exercise.

I thought it was funny that almost every alien planet on Stargate SG-1 looked like British Columbia.

I was trying to keep it simple. Yes you can buy n-acetylcysteine but OTC versions can vary in purity and dosage and it's not the only treatment you might need. With an acetaminophen OD you really want to be in a hospital.

There is an antidote available for acetaminophen overdose, but it's only available in the hospital. So if you think you took too much, get to a hospital quickly before your liver suffers permanent damage.

Untreated acetaminophen overdose is an extremely unpleasant way to die.

Until the late 1960s, codeine was considered the definitive over-the-counter cough medicine. It worked well. Maybe a little too well, because it was easy to get addicted to it. So the FDA banned it from OTC sales and dextromethorphan was substituted. Which brings us to today.

Absolutely true. Phenylephrine liquid applied directly to nasal mucosa is a quick and effective decongestant. It doesn't last as long as oxymetazoline (the other big nasal spray ingredient), but it also doesn't cause you to become dependent on it as much as oxymetazoline does.

Don't mistake tenure for competence. Meta's stock structure is such that Zuck cannot be forced out by the board or the shareholders regardless of how many mistakes he makes.

As well as laws that make forced arbitration contracts unenforceable.

Fair point. The mathematical process of differentiation is always straightforward even if in some cases one ends up with e.g. /0 singularities.

With integration, there's often no closed-form process at all, as the author points out.

And it turns out that it’s quite straightforward to calculate a derivative, no matter what type of function it is.

I get the author's point but this is not completely true; there exist functions that are not differentiable at certain places (e.g. ideal square waves) and others that are not differentiable anywhere (e.g. Weierstrass functions).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function

The Tesla UI is pretty good. It's the only built-in car software I consider good enough to use for navigation. In any other car I use my phone.

But Tesla also understands that good software engineers need to be paid Silicon Valley wages. The other car companies hire B- and C-level software engineers and then wonder why their customers prefer to navigate with their phones.

I do do some things just to say I did them. Or to compete with myself so I can push farther. But for the most part those things have much lower risk of death than climbing Everest. And it's easy for my family to retrieve my body in the unlikely event that I die.

If I ever climbed Everest it would only be to recover some of the bodies or preferably bring down somebody still alive who needs medical attention. I would not consider it "fun" but that's just me.

As a firefighter/EMT I occasionally have to deal with death, and I will even put myself in somewhat dangerous situations (that I've been trained for, and for which I have appropriate PPE) if there's a chance I can save a life.

But putting myself in a situation where the likelihood of dying is quite high for no reason other than to say I did it? No thanks.

Nevertheless I'm glad the family of Mr. Morup is no longer wondering what happened to him.

Elon hires great engineers. Or at least he did before he blew out his brain with ketamine and went full-on fascist because he had a trans daughter.

He still hasn't built a fully self-driving car. His last electric vehicle (the only one he directly designed) was a massive flop. The successful Tesla vehicles are losing market share because they're old and because of the CEO's odious politics and because he seems to have lost interest in EVs unless they're robotaxis.

Just recently he scammed Wall Street with a horrific overvaluation for a company whose only profits come from Starlink and whose biggest rockets blow up before they reach orbit.

Now he's talking about orbital data centers which make no sense to any engineer who understands thermodynamics (and sadly, many don't) and which are unnecessary because within the next 5 years 90% of inference will be done on local machines in users' homes because the hardware and the algorithms will be good enough to enable it and every Joe and Jane are fed up with surveillance capitalism.

Thermodynamics.