tsmarsh

Yes, its very much a part of my work setup. It transformed working so that for the first time I have a good working setup everywhere.

Its also my preferred place to consume cinema. I have a short throw projector and sound system. I prefer the AVP. The image is so crisp and the 3D is so good, that its better than a decent home movie theater.

Its my preferred place to watch F1.

Environments genuinely soothe me.

Breathe works on this platform, it annoys me on the watch.

I would watch every sport and documentary in spatial if the was a thing. The tastes have me excited for the future.

I find the easiest way of explaining LLMs to laypeople is "Bulls*t Engine". If tuned well they're going to answer like a salesperson or internet troll: if they don't know they will BS before they don't answer. Its not hallucinating, or confabulation its BS.

That's not to say they're not useful. The ability to BS is well regarded among humans as long as you, as a consumer, have a decent BS detector. And like a good BS artist, if you stay within their area of expertise they can be really useful. Its when you ask them something that they should or almost know that they start to be full of s**.

I really enjoy the luxury of both. I have a MacBook Air that I use when I'm traveling or sick of being at the desk, but 80% of my computing is done at my desk with my Mac Studio. git, icloud, airplay and basically all corporate work happening in office360 means that I'm not really tethered to any one machine.

Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.

Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.

'over the wire' is less obvious than it used to be.

If you're in k8s pod, those calls are really kernel calls. Sure you're serializing and process switching where you could be just making a method call, but we had to do something.

I'm seeing less 'balls of mud' with microservices. Thats not zero balls of mud. But its not a given for almost every code base I wander into.

I bought Ben Eater's Motorola kit and was overwhelmed, I have a whole new respect for folks that can do this.

Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.

As a turbo for cars to enable focusing on super high wH/kg storage class batteries this is interesting.

But as power delivery for drones and rail guns these could be game changing.

Dyson fans substitute one large, slow fan, for a small fast fan and then hydraulically gear that down.

Its an interesting idea. You would definitely create an uplift if air was blown through the fan and that could drive a turbine, and that turbine would be experiencing a much higher air speed, so you might be able to avoid the mechanical gearing. You'd have less moving parts, but probably lower efficiency.

You could also combine the fans with ducting and use a single generator. Ducting also has significant losses when compared with wiring, but if the generator is your biggest expense maybe its worth it?

For me its worse when my introversion is acting up. Its like having a song stuck in your head. It really only goes away if you engage with the rest of the world.

I started modeling in OpenSCAD. It fit really well with my programmer mentality. The language is small, the concepts simple and you can do some really amazing things with it, far more than might be obvious from the primitives... except filleting and chamfering.

The limitations caught up really quickly after that.

I echo what the other folks are saying. Its great, but there is no "I knocked this out in 10 minutes in OpenSCAD" for any part that couldn't be done in less time in TinkerCAD.

Its difficult to imagine how you could fix this elegantly. "Pick a path that follows the intersection of these two solids" is difficult to express in code, and easy to express by clicking on the vectors that represent the path.

There isn't one way of doing this.

Quickly figuring out if the model is good, I'd start with a map. If I'm feeling fancy I'll add a schema, if I need to I'll convert to a Record. Because of the way the language works you can probably make those changes without significant logic changes. Its a remarkable language.

I work with people with multiple phds. They’re smart. Technology focused professionals and they still have problems. Computer skill must be a parretto distribution. The difference between the top 1% and top 0.5%is enormous.

Yeah. For example, I don't find Veggietales to be family friendly. Its a minority opinion, but I can't get it removed from my kids profiles. So now I have to talk to my children, ugh.

The Guardian has the motto: “Comment is free, facts are sacred”

During the rush to digital a section was launched “facts are sacred”

Hahhahahah

No it was “Comment is free”, that is what generated clicks and ad revenue

I work in Pharma, we're not worried yet. We've done a few trials of nano-fabs, essentially 3D printed labs where you inject the raw materials and drugs pop out the end.

They kind of work, but its still a lot of work and would mean consumers getting hands on a bunch of controlled substances.

Being able to produce meth in a 'lab' that fits in your hand is not crazy... except you can clearly see how crazy that is.

Democratising manufacturing.

CAD / CAM is still hard. CAM especially. You have to know a great deal about materials and tools, even order of operations to help the computer build efficient tool paths. There is a lot of scope for process improvement and there are commercial opportunities to sell to job shops who would like have their engineers working more on CAD and less on CAM.

There is also potential here to make it so easy and affordable that having a 5 axis machine on your property is as common place as having a laser printer. 3D printing offers the ability to create more plastic crap you don't want, or prototype things you want made on a CNC in the future. 5 Axis CNC in the home means that you could download a mocha pot, wait a day (instead of shipping) then screw it together. Drones, motors (winding is still hard), car parts could either be downloaded or you take a video on your phone and let AI figure out the CAD / CAM.

The difference between solving a problem, and solving a problem for someone else for money.

If I'm solving a problem for myself, if it breaks in 'prod' then "Ooops", I try and avoid that, if I'm expecting other people to use it I will document public interfaces and write unit tests, but my focus is on scratching my own itch, not getting paid.

If I'm writing code that 1000s of peoples lively hoods, or millions of users buying decisions are being made on the stakes are higher. I might decide to use a more rigid language like Java, because the chances that I'm going to be given the freedom to replace rather than repair classes is slim. Similarly, if I persuade a client that microservices are the way forward, I'm going to spend significant time making sure we have a monorepo so each service has the same time line, an automatic deployment pipeline and I'm going to want to be able to defend my technical choices with economically sound data... and thats where Hickey kicks in. Many of the economically sound data sets are actually vapour.

These books refocused my life's work towards drones and AI. I now know what I want to be when I grow up: an interstellar von Neumann Probe. I might even make my AI butler look like General Akbar as a nod to the series.

I quit for a year. Then figured I’d just use facebook for the bits that work for me: local sales, peloton and fitness groups. My deal is no friends, not even my wife. No posting about me, just the group, just helping/commenting where it feels healthy for both me and the group.

The most interesting thing about serverless for me isn't 'web scale' its 'scale to zero'. My apps tend to be bursty, with trickles of data in between. I mostly concerned in reducing their 'idle' costs, so not having to manage the OS, security etc is a massive cost saving for us.

We have been free. We were free for millennia.

But... if you look at the most free animals in nature: cats, after domesticating humans and getting guaranteed safety, shelter and food. They have independently decided to sleep and murder their lives away. Their contributions to the art world via social media (a task they’ve mostly trained their humans to do) is probably the nost significant and vacuous the world has every seen. Their obsession with small mammal terminating is probably better for the biosphere.

I used to be angry at ‘polluters’ now I’m frustrated at a market/society that encourages bad behavior.

Few set out to destroy the planet. If you buy fish from fishermen that drop their lines sea it doesn’t matter how many plastic straws, bottles and cutlery you didn’t use. But as a consumer we are so abstracted from the source we are powerless to affect behavior.

You can see this on a micro scale in Basel, CH. Buying bread in different countries, just a short walk / bike ride with unenforced boundaries and there are real price differences. For luxury goods it can be even more extreme with Sushi on the french side of the border being affordable, and on the Swiss side... less so.

You would think that the effect of the German and French markets would create a local dip in prices in Basel, but it doesn’t seem to be true.

On vacation in Copenhagen right now. OMG is it bike friendly.

I’ve spent a fair amount of the summer cycling around european cities and you can’t get even close to kind of work out you get on a peloton. What I’m realizing is that all of the years where I assumed that because I was cycling to work that I was at least doing something was completely false.

45 mins on the peloton is a completely different thing to even 45 minutes out in the country.

Kinda? Maybe?

I think its a mistake to think of a spin bike as a bike. There is peddling, and you can get most of the same experience out of a turbo, HR, PowerMeter, but then you are also putting the frame and peddles through really weird force profiles as you spend time bouncing between the front and back of the bike.

I mostly ride PowerZone, for which a turbo, hr and power meter would be perfect, but if you like the ‘dance’ classes you might want to look for a more ridged machine, you really have to be able to trust that its not going to break on you.

I have a similar thing. For me it is exacerbated by sinus pressure.

Sinus care, exercise, even losing weight all have positive effects on my perception of tinnitus. At its worse I could hear it over the sound of 2 stroke marine diesel engine (around 60dB ambient), its currently around 20dB.

I also have TMJ, I'll look into getting a specialist. Thanks for the tip!

I think this is how Florida wanted to go. Its its time.

Driving an arduino from a pi is still the way to go, which is a shame. I’d have liked to have seen more PWM too.