FrojoS

Can highly recommend this course https://underactuated.csail.mit.edu/ Russ Tedrake is an amazing lecturer (and researcher)

> What's true is that most stocks, including IPOs, don't do well in the long run. The half-life of a publicly traded company is something like 10 years.

I was very surprised to read this and from a quick Google search, what you imply ("don't do well in the long run") is not supported by that "half-life" statistic.

"We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. [...] While liquidation is often responsible for firm deaths, a much more common cause of death relates to the disappearance of companies through mergers and acquisitions. Thus, in our definition, firms may ‘die’ through a variety of processes: they may split, merge or liquidate as economic and technological conditions change."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4424689/

What about pirated models?

25 years roof lifetime might be right for cheap asphalt shingles that are popular in the US. Concrete and clay tiles, which are common in e.g. Germany, will last 50y and 100y respectively.

https://pitchroofing.com/roofing/the-best-time-to-get-a-roof...

From the article: “ Cider was a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. All the magic happened on a backend that indexes the entire codebase, so that all the data was ready whenever someone opened the webpage. ”

Sounds like all other editors were slow compared to Cider.

> there's no reason to believe the progress of LLMs [...] will stop anytime soon

Wrong. Every advancement has followed a s curve. Where we are on that curve is anyones guess. Or maybe "this time its different".

"Goodwill Industries was established in 1902 and is widely known across the country as the place where we all donate clothing and household goods to help others."

That's the first sentence from your link. Clearly people don't treat this org, literally called "good will", the same as they treat freakin eBay.

Very cool! Thanks for the detailed tech blog explainer.

Some, hopefully constructive, feedback:

- You mention "other games" several times. It would be so much more interesting to read, if you named them. Your readers may know that game but have no knowledge about those under the hood details. Like the user wordpad, I immediately thought about Planetary Annihilation when I saw rollback and multiplayer.

- Your landing page needs an easy to grasp "About" / "What is this" section. I'm more or less familiar with several popular game engines (Unity, HL, Source, Unreal, Godot, Spring etc) and never heard of yours before. Even after clicking around a bit on your website, I still had almost no idea what your engine (or is it a language?? [1]) can, and more importantly, can not do. I mostly went by the screenshots of the game examples shown and concluded that it is a 2D engine with simple graphics. Wikipedia [2] and web search were not that helpful either, so I had to resort to an LLM [3].

[1] https://easel.games/docs/learn/key-concepts "Easel is a unique programming language with some unusual features." [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easel [3] https://search.brave.com/ask says "No, Easel is not a 3D game engine. It is a web-based game engine specifically designed for creating 2D multiplayer games without the developer needing to code the networking or server infrastructure"

It’s not bs. France is lobbying for “Eurobonds”, debt they can take at German interest rates and with Germans etc holding the bag, for about two decades now.

https://youtu.be/tMd7EfFsPIc (Video claims France is against them, but if they ever were they are not anymore)

Maybe, but there is a trend towards more and longer education. More college graduates, more PhD grads, etc.

Given how many of these problems are self-inflicted, maybe we should focus more on trips to the moon and beyond, not less.

Sorry, I should have quoted properly in my reply. My first sentence ("Yes.") was in general agreement with you, the second sentence was specifically about

> Mathematica has been able to do many integrals for decades and yet we still make students learn all the tricks to integrate by hand

But maybe, integrating by hand is still as big as ever in other parts of academia. Or were you thinking about high school? I'm fairly sure, that symbolic solving of integrals is treated as less important in education these days, than it was before digital computers, but I could be wrong. Mathematica's symbolic solve sure is very useful, but numeric solutions are what really makes the art of finding integrals much less relevant.

> There is no history of any sort of long planning

Sure there is. Its the formal education system that produced the college grad.

That would be cheating. If the exam is 'gate keeping', I will say that it is a gate worth keeping.

To be clear, I am not against alternative forms of education. Degrees are optional. But if you want a degree, there have to be exams and cheating has to be prevented.

Yes. But to be fair to your specific point, symbolic solving of integrals used to be a huge skill in the engineering education. Nowadays, it is not a focus anymore, because numerical solutions are either sufficiently accurate or, more importantly, the only feasible approach anyway.

Every PhD program I'm aware of has a final hurdle known as the defence. You have to present your thesis while standing in front of a committee, and often the local community and public. They will asks questions and too many "I don't know" or false answers would make you fail. So, there is already a system in place that should stop Bob from graduating if he indeed learned much less than Alice. A similar argument can be made for conference publications. If Bob publishes his first year project at a conference but doesn't actually understand "his own work" it will show.

The difficulty of passing the defence vary's wildly between Universities, departments and committees. Some are very serious affairs with a decent chance of failure while others are more of a show event for friends and family. Mine was more of the latter, but I doubt I would have passed that day if I had spend the previous years prompting instead of doing the grunt work.

Awesome! Small feedback: The test should maybe auto run. I solved the first level and was confused why I didn't proceed. The out was -1 (but goal was z) and it took me a while to see the 'run test' button.

Guys, this is a well known and under utilized effect of human psycho physiology. Visually focusing on a single point, small object, or just small visual field (aka tunnel vision) increases mental focus.

AFAIK it’s also one of the reasons we all get “glued” to smartphone screens.

In this paper, more than 20 deg visual field for a screen and subject performance went down: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01678...

Ok. Maybe you are right. I don't know.

The good old "The Bomber always gets through" debate from 1932.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...

> I think the propulsion system will be the easy part.

Really? I think rocket science is still not easy. Just look at how much nation states are spending on maintaining their liquid and/or solid fuel rocket programs. If they even have one, let alone both.

This book might give some insights into the why https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Quote: "All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be It has recently been shown that an argon fluoride, probably ArF2, does exist, but it is unstable except at cryogenic temperatures.

[...] kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."

Granted this is about a fuel that is AFAIK not used for MANPADs, but the joke about the running shoes could be made about most aspects of rocket propulsion.