manvillej

I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there. especially since rocket launches tend to be extremely static.

More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.

I think this is a step forward, but I think it is better to think of access in terms of what responsibilities a person or group has.

When new access is to be given, it should be framed in the context of what new responsibilities are required.

I think this framing provides not just justification, but can provide inherent expectations of a users behavior that is easier to inspect and interrogate if needed.

I found this little pocket mathematics notation book when I first studying undergrad in this used book store in Boston. it literally carried me through Calc, Linalg, stats, dynamic programming, stochastic processes, game theory, economics, etc.

I ended up copying it by hand along with every exam and test notes over my entire degree into one little moleskine notebook. its a god send any time I have to remember how to do something or learn something new.

RIP Academia as a whole

reddit had a nice list of the pros and cons: https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/17k0wcc/natri...

I understand the risks around sodium, but the "passive natural circulation cooling" I don't understand. Is it more feasible with this design and why?

" Pros:

    high temperature means we can use process-heat which is a much more efficient use of heat.

    fast spectrum neutrons means we can burn importantly troublesome parts of nuclear waste.

    fast spectrum is also better for breeding new fuel, significantly increasing how much energy we can extract from uranium/thorium.

    passive natural circulation cooling is much more feasible.

    fast spectrum is a little more complicated to control.

    fast reactors require high enrichment.

    inspection of the plant is very difficult with liquid metal.

    high temperature liquid metal doesn't play nicely with metal pipes.

    sodium burns in air and is explosive with water.

    we simply do not have nearly as much experience with sodium as we do water and that really cannot be understated.
"

probably anecdotal, but I live in a new apartment building <2 years old. near CONSTANT elevator issues. 1-2 of the 3 elevators are out at a time. its been this way for a year.

can't wait for my lease to end.

this isn't even a software things. Its any production process. The greater amount of work in progress items, the longer the work in progress items, the greater risk, the greater amount of work. Shrink the batch, shorten the release window window.

It infuriates me that software engineering has had to rediscover these facts when the Toyota production system was developed between 1948-1975 and knew all these things 50 years ago.

This is a standard technology company strategy. Isolate your customers, remove their options, markup the price.

Governments pay to keep food at the cheapest point possible to ensure stability. a fed population doesn't kill their governments. Agriculture is not a regular industry; its a national security issue

Farming is not a profitable endeavor. There would be a lot less financial advisors in the world otherwise. A carbon tax will either drive up prices or reduce suppliers, increasing prices. Reducing farmland will require more efficient methods which will also drive up prices

The result will be the public pays more for food, not the agriculture industry makes any more or less money. It will require more imports which will come from countries with less regulation and more exploitable resources.

We've seen the story of disruptions to the food supply play out before. The reality is this is a more dangerous gamble than most people realize.

a combined tax and subsidy to try to drive farmers into more sustainable practices in a fiscally neutral way isn't a bad idea, but I think it is just a very risky and necessary roll of the dice.

I think inevitably, there will be price increases. The questions is just how bad and how many farms survive the transition.

I am very conflicted on a carbon tax for the agriculture industry. It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins. The transition from regenerative agriculture is expensive & rising food costs has a destabilizing effect.

There need to be changes, but I am not convinced that this will have the desired effects. Its quite possible this leads to a net conversion of farmland to residential or commercial property rather than nature.

package.json does not capture all the technologies in a repository. just the JS ones. This seems to capture full stack technologies. This would be very helpful when evaluating existing projects either as a consultant, new team member, open source, or evaluating a vendor's codebase or project.

I would perfect my video gaming art. Teenagers in their basement would fear me after school.

it seems to be Easy Task + increasing audience = doesn't really do much.

and Difficult Task + increasing audience = improved performance

which makes sense to me. 1 person is a distraction. a group of people is an audience.

per day though. I think others are right that it has applications in space. going with the butter example, 5 people on a year long mission is almost 11kg you don't have to bring up to space.

on an environmental perspective, if applied to everyone, its almost half a quadrillion kJ removed a year, plus supply chain logistics, waste, packaging,

I still think its probably a ridiculous pipedream, but even pipedreams are meant to be dreamt.

I have this little book that I cannot find right now that is pretty explicitly that. just a little math symbol dictionary. its small enough to fit in a pocket and was invaluable all through college.

hey this might be a stupid detail in implementation, but if the poisson simulation of arrival and completion are started cold, then random assignment of events could assign a completion before an arrival, or there could be more completions than arrivals? Arrivals should always be greater or equal to completions?

Edit: I remembered by stats class. merging poisson distributions requires Independent processes. since start and completion are dependent, its not mathematically valid.

but I am an engineer and it works, so whatever

you go to school for it. Stats, applied mathematics, operations research, industrial engineering.

I went for industrial engineering. we learned the math as pure math, then the math as free language problems, then how to identify and collect data to identify their attributes, then simulate and verify those processes, then test for variations in the underlying assumptions of those processes.

They never really did teach me to code well in a language that was useful, I had to pick that one up myself.

I feel like any solution that replaces excel must solve a larger problem outside the scope of the spreadsheet.

Data intake, preprocessing, solving performance limitations, executing automated decisions.

If it’s just a “better excel” it’s not better enough.

I have a colleague in tech over there on the product side. They do a ton of very interesting work: https://open.nytimes.com/

They have a much higher bar for quality and boutique solutions than almost any organizations.

Research.

my family has been getting into this very seriously in the last few years. There are several very serious challenges to the adoption of regenerative farming.

1. most farmers are stubborn and OLD

2. most of the industrial equipment is not meant for regenerative practices meaning many farmers simply can't afford to switch technologies

3. regenerative farming takes time & there simply isn't enough expertise out there

4. agricultural land shrinks every year. EVERY year. new farms are harder and harder to start & we really cannot afford to dip our food supply

5. Economically, the government has a very strong interest in keeping food cheap. Hungry people have a tendency to overthrow governments. farming has extremely thin margins.

6. There is a lot of funding in the form of grants and programs to encourage growth, but it means most farmers need to become grant writers. Large scale farms now have professional grant writers, smaller farms where the regenerative practices might have the most impact are having a difficult time accessing these programs.

7. Carharts are fashionable and really expensive. My dad found my first carhart on the side of the road with treadmarks across it and I got made fun of for it. Give me back my carharts.

Here are some of the things that are really helping with these problems though:

1. most farmers are really stubborn and will push through problems because its just work

2. Agritourism is bringing in a lot of renewed interested in farming & money.

3. Food chain issues (looking at you boarshead & mcdonalds) is bring a renewed interest in buying local.

4. Regenerative farming simply makes better food. Seriously, I cannot eat grocery store pork or chicken. The meat looks and tastes different.

5. Ignoring no-till techniques, there are techniques that can be started at a low cost for small scale farms. Chicken tractors, rotational grazing, soil health programs, etc. My family has been doing chicken tractors for chickens and turkey for personal consumption. Its been pretty easy for 1-2 person to raise 1500+lbs of meat with only about an hour of work a day. The only labor intensive day is harvesting and we've really gotten it streamlined. Its also eliminated the need for fertilizing or aerating the area they are run in.

6. I've noticed its really bonding family farms together and bringing in younger farmers in with a sense of ownership and purpose

Nitrogen pollution compounds with heat stress, it makes the coral more susceptible to heat stress: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915395117

the simple basic reality of statistics, a binomial distribution.

5 independent systems with 90% chance of success is mathematically as reliable as one that is 99.999%.

100x 90% systems would get you to 100 "9s" of reliability aka 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999%

what a tragedy, this person never learned how to read.

If you're big enough you will have unique requirements that nobody else has.

the problem is when EVERY process is that way.

yes, each business has unique aspect to their processes, but when every process is heavily customized by people who have no business designing processes & applications, organizations start to hamstring their flexibility and scalability.

Its like hand-making a Ferrari with completely custom parts when what you need is a Toyota Camry. If you aren't gonna race with it, its a waste of money.

I have been working in the ERP space for over a decade. and almost ALL customers have no criteria for when to customize or keep a customization. They don't do any cost benefit analysis or any strategic planning beyond building a customized tool for the thing immediately in front of their nose.

no. That is relative to 2023. There isn't going to be an absolute decrease because the chart started at 0 and we can't go below 0.

only absolute increases (increases that go over historical highs), relative increases (increases that do not go over historical highs), and relative decreases.

Bingo, easier access to life saving medication.

just 2 days after they release their Q4 results. there will be a grace period and then they'll start firing.

They're expecting subpar Q4 results.

anyone feel like this and Boeing sound remarkably similar?

Its almost like there is a lesson for executives here. hmmmm