japanuspus

Yes - for the high profile journals (Science, Nature): Once it's public, you can forget everything about getting it accepted there.

This is what I miss from (the early) Stack Overflow: often the process of writing up a well-framed question ended up solving the problem.

I sometimes put out the question anyway and added an answer. Never quite figured out if this was considered bad style.

Just to nitpick, in the section after "On the other side, these following guards are more of a “you really shouldn’t do this” variety – much closer to a disabled state in graphical user interfaces:"

The second and third examples are safety lockouts [0] working as intended: Some system is locked in the off state to ensure safe access for technicians.

Especially the padlock lockout is simple and effective: As long as you have the key in your pocket, you can be sure than no one is going to turn on the meat grinder you are cleaning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockout%E2%80%93tagout

Just don't try this on Ryan Air. A good friend got stuck at the airport on a Sunday night after being denied boarding because he waited out the standing line sitting on a bench right by the gate. As soon as the last person standing walked through the checkpoint the gate crew closed the gate -- and completely ignored my friend when he showed up 10 seconds later.

It should be trivial to combine ephemeral options with file name options, which seems like it would be the best of both world.

With some agreement on mapping (maybe just `%HH` for anything outside `A-Z a-z 0-9 . _ -`), this could be completely standardized and made part of standard library argument parsers.

I could see a bunch of my utility scripts replaced with a python script and a `uv` shebang if this was in argparse.

"Gnonom" by Nick Harkaway describes a society that takes this all the way to invasive mind-reading. A very special read.

I completely agree in the game of chicken. Usually I spend the time up to T-3s wondering how the crazy beepers on microwave ovens is still a thing, generations after the novelty has worn of.

I can sort of understand why beepers where a cool sales gimmick back when the microwave was the only appliance with a micro controller, but really -- it doesn't make sense: Firstly, immediate attention is not critical when the time is up: unlike a stove or an oven, energy transfer stop the moment the magnetron is de-energized. Secondly, the microwave (at least my microwave) is not exactly silent: if you are not deaf, chances are you can easily tell when it is done.

Maybe I should apply the Joe-treatment from my old lab: whenever there was a new shipment of frequency meters for the lab (we always needed more), Joe would meticulously unbox them and stick a pointed screw-driver through all the piezo buzzers to make sure the would never make a sound.

[Edit] microtron (sic) -> magnetron

Or just a long pipe where the inertia of the water resists change in motion. This is what causes the "water hammer" effect which is a problem for plumbers, but a great thing for all kinds of fun experiments, e.g. creating predictable cavitation [0].

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321225042_A_novel_w...

And Norway. Mjøstårnet [0] claims to be the worlds tallest wooden building at 85.4m.

[0] https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/

Identity -- This is a difficult problem.

My hope is that in 5 years, I will not have anything in my feeds that have not been signed in a way that I can assign a trust level.

Here in the Nordics, we are already seeing messaging apps such as [hudd] that require government issued ID to sign in. I want this to spread to everything from podcasts and old-school journalism to the soccer-club newsletter, so that I can always connect a piece of information back to a responsible source.

[hudd]: (https://about.hudd.dk/))

If the Bayer pattern makes you angry, I imagine it would really piss you off to realize that the whole concept encoding an experienced color by a finite number of component colors is fundamentally species-specific and tied to the details of our specific color sensors.

To truly record an appearance without reference to the sensory system of our species, you would need to encode the full electromagnetic spectrum from each point. Even then, you would still need to decide on a cutoff for the spectrum.

...and hope that nobody ever told you about coherence phenomena.

Just as important here: The higher the temperature of the storage medium, the higher the fundamental limit to how much electric energy you can recover.

Put differently: If you used the same amount of energy to heat one bucket of sand by 200C (A) or two bucket of sands by 100C (B), you would be able to recover more electric energy from case A because of the fundamental Carnot Limit. This is why sand is a good storage medium (as opposed to e.g. water), and why some solar power systems work with molten salts. Also why steam-based power plants need to operate at high pressure to be able to obtain high-temperature steam.

Please go have a look -- this is really well done with a clear message, good documentation and the call to action implemented very nicely (which is the background for TFA).

I think a lot of it is covered under "New Public Management" [0], which was maybe a result of the financialization happening in the 80's [1].

And I completely GP, having been in or in contact with academic research since the late 90's, there has been a very strong shift from a culture where the faculty had means for independent research, and were trusted to find their own direction, to the system we have today where a research project has much tighter overlook and reporting than most corporate projects.

A professor with a 4-5 person group will typically need two staggered pipelines of 4-5year funding projects to run risk free. In the EU it is virtually impossible to get funding for projects that do not involve multiple countries, so you need to set up and nurture partnerships for each project. Coordination the application process for these consortia is a major hassle and often outsourced at a rate of 50kEUR + win bonus. And you of course need to run multiple applications to make sure to get anything. When I talked to mentors about joining academia around 2010, the most common response was "don't".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_public_management [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

PSA: the "No Tax On Tips" provision expires...

My understanding is that this is true for all the Trump handouts: otherwise the ten-year economic outlooks would have cratered. The Economist had a couple of nice analyses on this.

Of course this means that the next administration will need to start with tax increases just to get to neutral, but maybe that is a feature?

Did you read the article? The author specifically addresses accessibility in multiple places, including taking extra steps to work around browser bugs [0].

[0] https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/#fn:10

Seems an overly pessimistic take. TFA specifically mentions per-cell temperature monitoring, and I would assume there is also per-cell voltage monitors.

As long as the controller is made sufficiently conservative, there is no fundamental problem: you limit the current according to the cell that heats the fastest and shut down once one cell is near depletion.

Maybe they have even gone a more aggressive route and build a balancing circuit that can route significant current around a low-capacity cell. Or maybe just charging logic to keep as many cells as possible in the 20-80 regime if they will be limited by low-capacity members anyway. There are so many options here.

This is such a great use. Excalidraw does this too [0], and uses a two-level extension, `.excalidraw.png`.

[0] https://excalidraw.com/

Well right now I am very skeptical, but I think we have somewhat given quantum computing plenty of time (we have given it decades) unless someone can convince me that it is not a scam.

Shor's paper on polynomial time factoring is from 1997, first real demonstration of quantum hardware (Monroe et al.) is from 1995: Yes, quantum has had decades -- but only barely, and is has certainly only now started to have generations.

To look at the kind of progress this means, take a look of some of the recent phd spinouts of leading research groups (Oxford Ionics etc.): There are a lot of organisations with nothing but engineering to go before they reach fault tolerance.

When I came back to quantum three years ago, fault tolerance was still to be based on the surface code ideas that floated when I did my phd ('04). Today, after everyone has started looking harder, it turns out that a bit of long-range connectivity can cut the error correction overhead by orders of magnitude (see recent public posts by IBM Quantum): The goalposts for fault tolerance are moving in the right direction.

And this is the key thing about quantum computing: you need error correction, and you need to do it with the same error-prone hardware that you correct for. There is a threshold hardware quality that will let you do this at a reasonable overhead, and before you reach this threshold all you have is a fancy random number generator.

But yes, feel free to be a pessimist -- just remember to own it when quantum happens in a few years.

Borrowing and taxation are completely different concepts. Unless I am the only idiot who hasn't asked for their tax back with interest. Possible.

I get the impression that maybe you are not aware of what is implied by the 'buy, borrow, die' tax strategy that parent is referring to: in effect it completely eliminates taxes on capital gains (in the US). [0] and [1] below are first two Google hits.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26... [1]: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-ric...

This is exactly it. Especially for the UK offshore projects where sites were auctioned off: All bidders knew that a competitive bid had to aim for an ROI only slightly above market rates, given that risk was very low. This means that 1 percent on production will easily turn into 10 or 20 percent on profit.

Source: worked on CAPEX and yield estimates for major player operating in this sector for a decade.

Thank you for making this!

My initial take was to share this with my son who used to built all kinds of things in Scratch, but I know that the lack of simple install instructions will be a deal-breaker for him.

Given that (part of) your audience will be persons like my son graduating out of graphical programming in Scratch, it might be worth spending a little time on non-dev install instructions. Even more so as you can leverage the rust toolchain and just suggest something along `cargo install --git ...` [0], without even publishing as a crate.

Apologies if this comes across as entitled: I just want to communicate that a single README-sentence on top of the work you already put into this would make it significantly more accessible.

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-install.html

I use a mix of bakers yeast and a wet (1:3) starter/sourdough. Just 2g yeast/kg flour makes a huge difference, even with 150 g starter.

My wet sourdough is 1 part flour to 3 parts water. As noted in a sibling comment, this favors the sour parts (lactic acid?), but compared to a dry starter, there are significant advantages the the starter/yeast combo:

1) Feeding the wet starter takes 10s: pour flour and water onto leftovers and stir quickly with a spoon. No sticky stuff to deal with.

2) The starter seems exceptionally stable, maybe because of the water layer: I only wash my starter jar every two or three months, and the 10g or so that I put back in the fridge after starting a dough, will last for weeks and consistently restart overnight when fed

3) Being able to independently adjust yeast-levels in a predictable way, means that I can easily play with sourness levels and adjust leaving times when I have to match the timings with other activities.

There is the downside, of course, that I need to keep bakers yeast in the house as well...

The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.

Agreed: this is the key question. One effort I follow in this direction is Terraform Industries[0] who are building exactly this type of system.

Their approach is PV + DCC (Direct Carbon Capture) and then simple carbohydrate synthesis, with the goal of establishing standalone autonomous systems that can generate valuable resources on their own in remote areas with ample sunlight.

They have a great blog where they go through their motivation for the approach from first principles [1].

[0] https://terraformindustries.com/ [1]: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/

A friendly person on the internet already put up the typst-to-mathml part of this [0]. I have been considering the ultimate yak-shave of building a static site generator around this...

[0] https://github.com/wcshds/typst-math-to-mathml-converter

Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.

I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.

[0] https://www.houches-school-physics.com/ecole-de-physique-des...

If you want to dive into the details, you can copy the "fonted" output to a unicode analyzer. [0] is an online unicode analyzer that seems to work well.

[0] https://devina.io/unicode-analyser

The problem conda solved that nothing had solved before was installing binary dependencies on MS Windows.

Before conda, getting a usable scipy install up and running on MS Windows was a harrowing experience. And having two independent installations was basically impossible. The real hard work that went into conda was reverse engineering all the nooks and crannies of the DLL loading heuristics, to allow it to ensure that you loaded what you intended.

If you are working on macOS and deploying to some *nix in the cloud, you are unlikely to find any value in this. But in ten years as lead on a large tool that was deployed to personal (Windows) laptops in a corporate environment, I did not find anything that beat conda.

You don't even need a plugin: I have been using a setup with parametrized tests and `runpy` for a while [0]. Works especially well if you use jupytext[1] for just storing the input part of the notebook as a python script -- which is good for version control sanity in any case.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/56813896/212538 [1]: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/