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zikzak

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Yes, I think when you work in implementation, it's obvious that you made a bad decision (to yourself before others see it) and you are quick to say "I made a mistake, let's fix it before the mess gets worse". Your skillset in this hypothetical I'm creating is "implementation". You decided on the implementation but that's only part of the entire thing you are responsible for (plan, build, maintain).

For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.

When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).

That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.

Ice forms on the roof and they need to get up there manually and clear it off and I don't think they do. :)

I was driving the Gaspe coastal road once after an ice storm and we were on the road with a bunch of semis early in the morning. The switchbacks had massive sheets of ice coming off them over the sides. It was wild.

It wasn't so thick that driving over the shattered pieces was an issue but it was a sight to behold and turned a white knuckle drive into a real jaw clencher.

Was there for a family issue and had to be somewhere otherwise I wouldn't have been on the road that day at all, let alone first thing.

I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.

Um, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing.

But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.

There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?

No, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded.

He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.

If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.

I was sitting with my dog in my yard one night and a green meteor lit up the evening sky like the day. It also made a sizzling noise (or maybe crackling).

I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.

What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.

This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.

I am tired of people mocking me for my interest in this topic so I won't bother to back this up too much, but this article doesn't really do what you say. It is itself disinfo designed to provide a simple, easily digested explanation for people that don't wish to think too deeply on this topic.

Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.

However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.

My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.

RSS is awesome 11 months ago

Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.

No Cheese Please 12 months ago

When I was in cooking school, it was assumed we would not have the time or equipment to constantly be monitoring temps with a thermometer so we had techniques for determining fairly precisely the temp of things.

Poaching liquid was evaluated based on the quantity and rate of bubbles rising from the bottom of the pan.

Milk was scalded (e.g. for bechemel) when the milk foamed but was shut off before it boiled over.

A knife inserted in a steak, chop, or roast could be tested for temp against your lower lip or wrist (yes, yes, hygiene and so forth).

The techniques you are talking about all came about because of all understanding of food that led to science asking "why does cheese happen the way it does". The precise techniques leading to a sharp, hard cheese or a soft, fresh cheese were well understood long before instant read thermometers.

I tend to agree here. I haven't been allowed to code for a few years now but I spend a lot of my time talking through code with developers. I find many of the people on my teams lack a perspective I can provide to frame a problem or evaluate an approach.

I also help them get to the heart of problems quickly simply because I'm not stuck in the code all day. For example, if I see a developer taking too long to identify the source of a bug, I'll get on a call and get them to take me through that code and get them prove any assumption ("ok, show me the code that checks that value is greater than zero").

By doing this I'm using my coding experience directly without actually coding. I'd consider coding a huge waste of time for me, but spending 30 minutes to unstick a developer when I am sure they should have found the problem by now seems like a really good use of my time.

It also lets people know they can't just spend three days on something that should take a couple hours without someone checking in, which I don't live having to do but it's a reality for some teams I work with.

I spent a very frustrating 20 minutes with someone this week (a nice person I like, which is why I spent this time) explaining that the Python code chatgpt had provided them would just copy files from one folder to another and was no different from using Windows drag and drop copy.

It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on.

ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.

I recently deleted my Reddit account after a million years because every other post was obviously AI generated "am I the jerk" posts (use your imagination for variations on "jerk").

I used to participate in some subreddits where support is offered for a couple of chronic illnesses I have but even those are "doctor says it's X, am I cooked".

Just over it.

All industrial generators undergo regular shutdowns for maintenance and recalibration. This is costly and time consuming when they are on land.

Also, I am thinking about all the ocean factors beyond salt corrosion. There's tons of crap in the water beyond salt and minerals. Like fine grit suspended in it. Plus the tidal forces etc.

If you ignore the black piece that should be captured, it's a legit Go game. A configuration that would probably never occur in real life but noone would ever place a Go board on their leg like that.

I'd file this under the same category as fast food burger advertising images and move on?

Kernighan's Law - Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

My father was born in 1930 and shared a bed with two siblings around ages 5-8. The bedroom was a small room at the top of the house and was on the wall where the electrical supply attached to the house from the street.

During a bad storm one night, they heard a buzzing sound at the window by their bed and saw an intense light outside. The ball lightning then entered their room at the window (I have no idea how that would work) and followed the wall out to the hallway. The whole time, they could hear a sizzling noise and the light was blinding.

Where it had entered the room, there was a fire outside where the electrical supply connected the house that entered the room. They took off out the door and down the the stairs. The fire damaged their house but did not spread (they think the rain put it out).

I have also heard that there was a family that had ball lightning enter their house down the wood stove chimney and emerge into their kitchen, followed the wall around the room, and the fizzled out.

Both incidents were a very long time ago. Other than that, I don't know anyone who has seen this phenomenon personally (my father passed away a couple of years ago).

I was in a "101" undergrad compsci class the first year the program used Java (1997, I think?) and so this asst prof was showing a simple example of some Java syntax.

I had been programming in C for a while, learning from K&R, to build ray tracing input files and that sort of thing so I was kind of disappointed but whatever, I was a mature student who had rediscovered computers a couple of years before (had a C64 in the 80s) and was just happy to be there.

Anyway, this guy in the back yells out "I could do that in 2 lines of Q-BASIC" or something to that effect (Q-BASIC was definitely part of his pithy one-liner). Little did I know he was representing so many of the people I would encounter over the next decades.

Not an AI expert but this sounds a lot like code review.

Most people are using systems to facilitate code review these days (we aren't sitting around boardrooms with printouts these days) so I wonder if there is a way to use the code review data streams combined with diffs to train AI to "do code reviews"?

Agreed. The things I look for most when hiring programmers (assuming they have a resume showing they have the skills) are attention to detail, empathy, and ability to communicate without feeling like I'm arguing all the time or pulling teeth.

Empathy tends to win here: you need to understand why people are using the software and how they are using it to make good decisions.

Communication tends to be better with people that have empathy.

I had tried using Kagi just for home use since the bulk of my searches are work related (Kagi is not something I can claim as an expense, before you ask) but still found little added value beyond "I think I like this more".

I did also try a bunch of side by side searches "for work" (so mostly leading to stack overflow) and they were the same results, more or less, for my searches between Kagi and Startpage.

One thing I found myself doing as I became conscious of my search quota limitations is going directly to sites and searching there using the local search. This doesn't seem like a bad thing but it's one more step in an already friction filled process. :)

I tried Kagi and even signed up for the basic plan but ultimately cancelled. If the basic plan included twice as many searches per month, I'd be all in. However, I find Startpage results are "just as good" and free. I didn't use a lot of the other Kagi tools.

So make it cost less or offer more and I'm in Kagi!

I did find it interesting that the dod approved their release retroactively: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/216571...

Because that's what happens when you release classified info without authorization, right?

I do wonder, though, if Fravor, Graves, Deitrich, etc are in on this (psyop), were themselves duped by a classified program they were unwittingly helping to test, or something actually strange and as yet unexplained went on.

I am definitely not saying any of those interpretations of the event are correct (I'm a skeptic) but I do find it interesting that some people do seem to have a period of increased focus and productivity afterwards.

Contact with mysterious phenomenon that seems to communicate with the witness is not unheard of and many people seem to undergo an intelligence boost afterwards, even if short lived. This is often considered a religious experience while more secular minded people might attribute it to something like a ufo experience.

Probably referring to Bigelow Aerospace

https://www.bigelowaerospace.com/pages/news/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bigelow

Does the report claim all sightings can be definitely explained? The very small percentage that cannot is where efforts should be focused.

Anomalies like to that could lead to really interesting discoveries. Maybe there's a lot we don't know about how plasma forms and behaves, for example.

I find this area really interesting as a pop culture phenomenon. Even Carl Jung weighed in on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosocial_UFO_hypothesis