rekenaut

Especially if with the radiators you can just roll out as rolls of aluminum foil, which is very light and very cheap.

I don’t think this has been true for the vast majority of NASA’s existence. [This 1966 NYT article about Gemini](https://www.nytimes.com/1966/03/20/archives/gemini-8-mishap-...), [this 1986 article about Challenger](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/22/us/nasa-had-solution-to-k...), and [this 2010 article about Constellation](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/science/space/27nasa.html) all omit periods. Even if NYT did stylize it as “N.A.S.A.” in its earliest articles, this would not diverge from common agency practice early on. For instance, in [this official reel about the dedication of Marshall Space Flight Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fasslw4MvE), it is pronounced spelled-out as four letters.

Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).

Dozens of us use Julia. Dozens!!

Where does this idea that a programming language has to be Turing complete come from? As far as I can tell from cursory searches, the most broadly understood understanding of a programming language is a formal language for directing computations on a computer. HTML does this, CSS does this, and SQL does this. Frankly even configuration languages like YAML or the spare INI file do this in the proper context.

Can these languages do everything or even most computations you would be interested in doing in a computer? Of course not. But why should the definition be restricted to languages that can do everything?

If nobody else is claiming the land, you don’t even need one!

Traditionally, interns exist as a well-vetted and well-shaped supply of labor (which is very difficult to find through the traditional hiring process). The work they complete is secondary. Are companies going to stop needing good employees? Is nobody going to need to work in 40 years when all the current employees are phased out?

Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.

Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.

The difference is much greater than this. It’s $20/month for a machine that can provide instant answers to any prompt in any topic hundreds of times a month vs $200/assignment that may take days to received and you have to edit yourself if you want a change made.

I think it’s quite clear that most students who are using AI now to generate assignments would not have bought.

Is it possible that the methods of cheating in the past were a lot more ineffective, risky, or expensive? If a tool like ChatGPT makes cheating a lot easier and less risky, of course more students will use it.

Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.

This isn’t remotely true, the United States is the second largest manufacturing nation by value [1]. And manufacturing is still the dominant industry in many regions of the US. We might not be great at making consumer goods, but consumer goods is only a small subset of all manufacturing.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing

Perhaps it’s just nostalgia on my part, but I really don’t understand imposing the constraint of making every Mac app look like the rounded iPhone app buttons. To me, it makes it harder at a glance to distinguish one app from another compared to the older designs.

Is it feasible to get 100 million people to play this game even if it was free? I have to imagine that once you get to $400 million, every additional dollar has effectively no value add. When is it not better to just target a smaller user base and spend way less money? I’m unfamiliar with the ins an outs of this industry, so I am genuinely unsure.

Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.

In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?

Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.

They’re not important to (most) young people today for the same reasons health insurance plans aren’t important to young people today: they just haven’t reached the professional world yet. Once they get there, computers suddenly become very important.

Many people who are not tech enthusiasts will be interacting with a computer for at least 40 hours a week or more for nearly half of their lives. If you used any other tool that much, you’d want to get really good at using it. Why shouldn’t the same hold for computers today?

I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut). Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure it's not a comfortable wage in some places, but "basically minimum wage" just seems ignorant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

This is very cool! I love the idea of having a device dedicated to local transit as opposed to having another thing pulling me to my phone. I wish there was something similar for American cities.

I wonder if there is any connection between the models producing exaggerated outputs and the litany of exaggerated or overconfident claims that academic media offices or the press have produced from previous studies. Maybe the models trained on the studies and the reports on the studies naturally tend toward the style of attention seeking reports even when directly provided with the studies.

Not to mention the endless legal fights to get anything new built.

Students entering smaller colleges now have to ask themselves more than ever whether their university will be open in four years when they plan to graduate. With increasing closures of private and public colleges alike, I’m sure this will continue to fuel the flight from regional schools to state flagships.

This is great aspect of it, but that doesn’t diminish that it feels so tedious to work with compared to Julia and Matlab. Some of that is just from trying to shoehorn Python as a scientific computing language, but I think it’s time to revisit whether Python should have first party support for vectorization, arrays in memory, and broadcasting as Julia and Matlab have.

LabVIEW is really fantastic because it’s really easy to throw lab software together in a few hours or days and just get hardware test stands off the ground, especially when you don’t have a SWE in your department and you have an engineer who just wants to get it working and doesn’t want to get bogged down in code. It’s also pretty easy to make changes to even if you have limited software dev experience. Sure, there are many projects where you really want to have the flexibility of traditional programming languages and have actual SWEs work on it, and the proprietary license is annoying, but it makes a lot of sense when you see non-SWE engineers and techs working with it on the lab floor.

Edit: By the way I’m aware that there are LabVIEW specific SWEs as mentioned in the article who are able to do wizardry with it, but I wanted to highlight its usability beyond that.

I don't know that that's true. For subset of people, this correlation may be true. To be extremely anecdotal though, I have never had trouble maintaining my weight even though I don't exercise, have a mostly sedentary lifestyle, and don't pay attention to my diet. I just got lucky in that I feel hungry more rarely than others. I think it would be absurd to say this is a reflection of my self control, and I am sure there are others that this applies to too.

I often say "definitely possible" when I am not sure what the chance of something happening is but I ought to acknowledge that it is possible. It is definitely possible that I should choose better language to communicate this.

OnShape is great (we have been using it exclusively for a project over the past four months, the collaboration tools are phenomenal), but FreeCAD has made some fantastic progress over the past year. Some of the underlying technology problems have solved, and the UX has improved a lot with 1.0. The customization and scripting opportunities are also wonderful with FreeCAD. That said, if you’re coming over from Solidworks/NX/Inventor, as much as there are buggy parts of those, FreeCAD still has extremely frustrating workflows and buggy parts that you have to work around. It feels like it’s moving closer to Blender-like quality, but it still has a long road ahead of it.

I've discovered that the people I most enjoy being around are those that are authentically optimistic. Not those that are blind to everything negative, and not those who are faking it to ameliorate themselves, but those who are encouraged by the opportunity for a better tomorrow. Astonishingly, these are often people that have suffered overwhelming personal tragedy. I've also noticed that the more time I spend around these people, the more emotionally resilient I become myself to difficulties.

There seems to be common sentiment that being optimistic is somehow ignorant or otherwise insidious. Maybe this is true, but I am already too familiar with the acute pain that comes with a life entrenched in pessimism to allow myself to fall into that spiral.

This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.