csteubs

VMI has a number of cannonballs embedded in the turrets on the backside of Old Barracks as well. They're more placeholders now than anything, but were left in situ after General Hunter shelled and burned the then-arsenal during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. One of my favorite points of intrigue as a cadet tour guide long ago.

Just a head's up, I'm getting a 404 on the link to the relay docs (https://www.iroh.computer/docs/layers/connections) when attempting to click through.

Very cool. I was surprised to see the 40W-60W equivalent value; that's much better than I would have guessed, but makes sense based on the Philippine's equatorial location. Kind of like a modern-day deck prism.

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

Not OP, but I use solar and H8-size AGM batteries as primary with a backup diesel generator that I've converted to run on wood gas (and occasionally coal gas). Added a triple stage water filter to the gasifier last year to keep the tar and creosote down. The generator is an old clunker but it's easy to disassemble, which made it an ideal candidate for tinkering and the eventual retrofit.

Completely rational. It makes sense that an area with a highest concentration of defense/government contractors would see a ton of ads geared towards the procurement folks. I grew up in the beltway and interned with some bigger defense contractors in college, just pointing out that it's a phenomenon unique to the DMV area (with some more memorable examples).

Extremely accurate. L3Harris pumped so much ad money into the walkways at Dulles I'm surprised they don't have naming rights to a terminal. There was a time not too long ago where you couldn't listen to WTOP without hearing Mitre and ManTech ads with the term "Digital Twin".

I grew up in northern Virginia and very fondly remember going to Dulles with my dad as a kid to watch the Concorde take off for the last time. That this is the engine off the same plane I saw 20 years ago is really cool. Our old house was directly under the approach path; the windows would shake at 2:30PM almost every day.

I install replacements for friends and their referrals who've had them stolen; it's a serious and unfortunately common problem in LA. Roughly 80% are off of Priuses (Prii?) and most local Toyota dealerships are backordered for months. The OEM replacement part itself is one of the most expensive at around $2300 due to the higher level of precious metals in the catalyst matrix. The replacements I install aren't CARB compliant (which is why they're $125 or so on eBay), but it resolves the exhaust leak/fuel smell and noise at the expense of passing emissions.

I'm not sure what aspect of this conversation is "low intelligence", but automotive technician salary data doesn't often match reality where techs can (and often do) make close to double their "official" salary in side jobs. I'm a full-time engineering manager at a startup in LA, and I do repair gigs in my garage during the evenings and on weekends--all word-of-mouth referrals from former and returning customers. I've made a shade over $30k after expenses this year doing 2-3 jobs a week. Most are catalytic converter replacements that I charge a flat $500 for on $145 in parts; takes me an hour per. I've done everything from rear main seals to fuel pump replacements to in-and-out oil/filter changes.

What your comment and sentiment misses, I think, is that a significant percentage of mechanics do shade-tree jobs that won't ever be accounted for in official reports. Dealers and shops have become extremely hit-and-miss, part quality fell dramatically during the pandemic (ask me how I know), and thrifty consumers are more inclined to spend money on independent mechanics that work out of a small shop; there's a ton of money not being accounted for in the process. Maybe not "cool" or "attractive" to you, but I'd love to never have to touch a keyboard again and spend my time working on cars, boats, and fabrication.

I hope their Trust & Security team has a roadmap that prioritizes topic and thread-jacking. The advent of GPT and their recent changes to creator compensation has created a massive drive for engagement by any means; the results are fairly predictable. Clicking on any trending topic usually surfaces completely unrelated videos with that topic's hashtags (and all of the other trending topic hashtags) appended to the tweet.

Then you have the "content creators" who use GPT to summarize or add details to a post from a larger content aggregator in hopes of bandwagoning engagement. I see a lot of this type of behavior from popular History-focused accounts and the mega-accounts that post engagement bait content (think canned, "desert island"-type questions and polls). It's less malicious but certainly reinforces cynicism towards the state of Twitter/X and the broader social web.

This guy was undoubtedly the kid who reminded the teacher to assign homework.

New cylinders can get a little pricey but used bottles can be found dime-a-dozen on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/etc. Just need to know how to properly inspect a tank. Gas supply stores can get really particular about BYOBottle because of the safety/liability component, but they'll typically treat a no-fill tank as the deposit for a new tank in much the same way consumer propane tank exchange works.

Boost is likely the way to go for OP. I first saw them in Walmart in 2012 as a freshman at a military college. They made the surprise cadre workouts and X mile rucks suck so much less that I'd buy them all up when we were on liberty to sell out of my supply box. Really clever bit of kit, and the mint scent was a nice touch.

Having to handle lead for a practically unretrievable amount of gold would (I hope) be enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of "citizen scrappers". Worst case, I think a Pb/Au scrap grey-market would look something like the current catalytic converter market, where raw materials are purchased at set rate by an intermediary and then sold for further processing. Most people know there's gold in their computer parts, but still opt for the recycling bin/ziploc bag in a junk drawer.

I used Grav for my CS capstone back in 2016. One of the requirements was to create and host a web page with project details, abstract, etc. I completely forgot about that portion until 2 days before the deadline, and I stumbled on Grav while looking for templates. I had the cleanest, most modern looking site of all our groups up in about 5 hours of tinkering and adjusting and turned what would have been a C into a B+.

Haven't used it since, but I'm glad it still exists.

Not OP but I rent and have to use my deck for solar. I only have 2 x 100W panels that sit on the ground, and that feeds a 135Ah AGM battery in a box. The box has a 500W inverter on top connected to the battery and powers a mini fridge, deck lighting, and a few other things out there. I would love to put them on the roof and my landlord would probably be cool with it, but I take it camping all the time so it's nice being able to pack them up quick.

Panels and batteries are relatively cheap (and getting cheaper) to the point that it can makes sense to have purpose-built setups.

Pictures for those interested: https://imgur.com/a/VNnPxkB

The orange creek bed stands out vividly against the background and reflects light extremely well compared to the shale. It doesn't glow per se, but it gives that impression. I uploaded a few pictures if you're interested:

https://imgur.com/a/VNnPxkB

Centralia has long been a bit of personal obsession of mine, so I had to double take seeing it on HN. I travel between northern Virginia and the Poconos fairly often and always hop off 81 to drive through Centralia whenever I have the chance--my most recent visit was actually earlier this week on Monday afternoon.

It's an eerily beautiful place. There's hardly any infrastructure to explore, but walking through the overgrown streets and sidewalks and seeing the concrete steps and wrought iron railings is quite sobering. The town has three fairly large cemeteries, all of which are kept in excellent condition. The Odd Fellows cemetery is adjacent to the dump where the fire started in the 60's and really paints a picture of how far back many of the families that lived there go. There are a number of Civil and Revolutionary War graves in Odd Fellows as well, easily identified by the small American flags planted at their base.

If you walk down the dirt road (2nd St), you'll encounter a number of 10 foot poles surrounded by iron cages intended to keep people away from what used to be extremely hot exhaust gases. Locals used to toss trash into the cages to watch it melt, but it's difficult to encounter an exposed hot spot anymore. There's some debate about whether the fire is actually still burning in the coal seams as the terrestrial evidence (steam rising from the rocks, barren patches of land that melts snow, etc) has become less visible in the past couple decades, but there are certainly still "warm" areas. I brought an infrared thermometer with me on a trip last year and found a spot in a rocky outcropping that topped out near 150*F. If you go looking, the most active areas are now located just off Big Mine Run Rd just before it turns up the hill towards town.

I'd encourage anyone who's interested to stop through if you're traveling along the I-81 corridor. The surrounding towns of Shenandoah, Ashland, and Mt. Carmel are hauntingly beautiful in a way that can only be found in Pennsylvania Coal Country. Most of the original inhabitants of Centralia relocated to these neighboring towns and many will gladly share their tales, often from first-hand experience. There's an incredible amount of history in the region that dates back hundreds of years. Some of it has been overshadowed by the fire, including the crash of United Flight 624 back in 1948[1]. The Disaster Area podcast has an excellent episode that covers the birth and eventual decline of Centralia, and the host is herself a resident of Carbondale where a smaller but active fire has been burning for about as long.

I'd be happy to share some recent photos if anyone's interested. Some of the more captivating images I've taken are of Big Mine Run, a small mine-fed creek that is bright orange, visible even at night, from all the iron oxide in the water.

_____

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Air_Lines_Flight_624

This. Better to pull the parachute than wait for the federal retrorockets.

Weird indeed. Blank buttons in base model vehicles are at least user-accessible as opposed to a camera module behind glass. Any time I add an accessory, the button fascia gets popped out and a rocker switch put in. Perhaps the dummy camera is the same form factor of a component that Tesla knows it will include in future releases and is just carving out room for a possible upgrade years from now?

Absolutely this. I stood up a negative test suite for continuous DB queries late in 2020 and it's caught many potential show stopper integration issues since; about 45% more YoY than pre-suite.

Took about a week of duplicating happy path tests, investigating gaps, and switching inputs/assertion types to get everything passing, but less than a week later we had our first verifiable test failure.

The new Defenders are awesome. I got to borrow one for the day from a buddy in Colorado and it was the ideal vehicle for the terrain. My only qualm was that the turbo lag felt pretty significant but it scoots once it's all spooled up. Very luxurious and very capable vehicles.

I'm working through similar gamification of map update questions right now, specifically with aerial imaging. We're trying to crowdsource aerial imagery using (for now) passengers in window seats, so the most obvious solution was to provide them free in-flight wifi so that we could upload the images as they're captured as well. They don't record the entire flight, just at certain points based on altitude and tasked coordinates along their filed flight path. Most have appreciated the gesture, but a good amount would prefer airline miles, free in-flight goods, etc. We've looked into chain-based royalties where an image accessed by our customers is paid out to the original photographer, but that's a ways out. Gamification is tricky.

Liner.ai and Lobe.ai are both solid GUI-based platforms that run well on desktops. Your hardware will of course play a role in training speed, but it still runs well (albeit a bit slow) on an 2014-era HP tower I use for Windows. Heads up that Lobe is a Microsoft project and doesn't support the newer M-series Apple chips.

Surprisingly well, actually. The traction material I removed from my 24-year-old ski was some sort of neoprene-like foam rubber and worked fine despite being original equipment. Each individual astroturf blade has less grip compared to the rubber, but exponentially more surface area; your feet and toes almost sink into the grass instead of resting on top of a rubber mat that's typically covered in water. The benefits are particularly noticeable when leaning into the curves at higher speeds or just hooning it in general.

Because the turf is a highly-textured surface, there's far less tendency for your feet to slip in any direction when the mat is waterlogged and/or during high lateral-g maneuvering, while still retaining the "self-cleaning" characteristics of the foam rubber. The backing surface of the turf is very similar to the original rubber, just arranged in a square cell pattern. Slap some contact cement in the footwells and you've got a replacement that (IMO) exceeds the traction of the OEM mats and looks 100x cooler. I've been running them on my ski for two years now and have yet to see a blade come off after a ride, no matter how hard I push it.

Another commenter mentioned Topaz AI upscaling, and Pixelmator has the "ML Super Resolution" feature; both work remarkably well IMO. There are a number of drop-in and system default resolution enhancement processes that work in a pinch, but the quality is lacking compared to the commercial solutions. There are still some areas where DALL-E 2 is lacking in realism, but anyone handy with photo editing tools could amend those shortcomings fairly quickly.

On-demand stock photo generation probably is the next step, particularly when combined with other free media services (Unsplash immediately comes to mind). Simply choose a "look" or base image, add contextual details, and out pops a 1 of 1 stock photo at a fraction of the cost of standard licensing. It'll be very exciting seeing what new products/services will make use of the DALL-E API, how and where they integrate with other APIs, use cases, value adds like upscaling and formatting, etc.

My first prototype was for my own ('98 Kawasaki STX900) so I just asked if anyone was interested buying a set in a Kawasaki forum I frequented heavily. When custom orders started coming in I just asked for a picture of their current footwell/tread mat and cross-referenced measurements online. I erred on the side of leaving some models larger so the customer could trim it on their end, but the majority follow a really general form.

I sold about 70 through the forums, 300 from word of mouth, and another 250 on eBay. They make 90's-era skis really lean into that Dixie-cup aesthetic and they work surprisingly well, so a customer's buddy or dock neighbor would ask and I'd catch a referral that way. I think I priced them just right too.

I started making jet ski tread mats out of astro turf in my garage last year. Dead simple to cut, margin is super high ($60 for a standard set of three on ~$8 worth of material), and time spent per unit from roll to package is something like 15-20 minutes. It was fun and made about $30k over the summer months but I stopped when I moved back to the west coast.

I could have handled the whole operation in a spare bedroom if I didn't have a garage, and there are plenty of areas where I could have dropped the time required or the cost. I never bought the turf in bulk and I used household scissors to cut from a template so buying a roll and cutting with something more effective may have netted me more. Niche leisure products in spend-y verticals typically do well.