martinpw

This hits hard.

He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.

A sad loss.

When I first switched from IRIX to Linux I missed the SGI desktop, and was running a clone. I think it was this one - looks like it is still around:

http://5dwm.org/sgi-schemes.html

The problem with any theory of modified gravity is that there is just no physical justification for it. It's only motivation seems to be to explain away dark matter by adding and tweaking free parameters until you fit the data, which you can always do given enough variables.

van Neumann's quote comes to mind - "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

I was thinking exactly this. Example - a 3d app I worked on. There is a tool that does a set of complex modeling operations on geometry. The operation description seems simple, the attributes that control the tool are easy to understand. But underneath it there is 50k lines of code - 1k for the common case and 49k to handle all the (literal) edge cases you can have with complex real world data, which came in from dozens of customers over the course of decades, mostly highly proprietary one off models.

I think agents can absolutely write the default path correctly and it will work most of the time and seem to be feature complete. But I don't see how they will quickly handle all those dozens of edge cases.

Over time it can happen - each time a case fails, send it to an agent and have it implement the conditional case. But that will take a long time. There is a reason most solid CAD kernels are decades old - they have been battle hardened and just handle all those edge cases better than other kernels.

> fire drills exist for a reason

I remember doing a fire drill once at work - we all headed down the emergency staircase and every single one of us missed the big sign on the door saying EXIT and ended up down in the basement - even those of us who were the floor marshalls.

A great wakeup call for what can go wrong even if all the right signage is in place, and how easy it is to just trust the person in front of you assuming they know what they are doing. As the parent says, fire drills exist for a reason.

> I remember many sleepless nights where the power went out

Genuine question - how did people sleep there pre-AC?

> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.

I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.

Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.

> dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce

The 4 Ds of self storage: Death, divorce, dislocation, downsizing

This post inspired me to go through my box of cables and I actually found a full HTC Vive headset with controllers in there buried several layers deep that I had completely forgotten about. I think it ended up there because it came with about a dozen cables so the cable box seemed like the natural place to dump it all.

Now I need to go through that box in detail to see what else might be lurking.

I had thought this administration had killed energy star, but it seems like it actually survived. A rare piece of good news:

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/nx-s1-5684126/energy-star-tru...

Looks like it is available here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3wrbsb

Are you sure that will be enjoyable? Lots of articles out there about people opening coffee shops with idyllic dreams of what it will be like, only to find the reality is a daily grind (hehe) of dealing with delayed suppliers, broken machines, absent staff. All that not-fun stuff falls on you while the customers sip their cappucinos.

Yeah, it's funny, for experiments like this you spend 90% of your time modeling and subtracting noise, and 10% analyzing the signal that results. Had the same experience in X-ray astronomy. 3 years building a detailed model of all the sources of noise, then subtracting it out and finally starting on the science.

It was an incredible time to live through as a young kid. There was a Cambrian explosion of computer designs - new systems coming out every month, each outdoing the previous ones. I remember rushing to the store each month to buy and devour the latest computer magazines. Felt like a time of endless possibilities. Only downside was I couldn't afford any of it except for a ZX81 (which was great in its own way).

> Even tracked by checked luggage.

Which would be great if it was actually accurate. Took a United flight two days ago. Checked two bags. App only reported one bag loaded onto plane. Spent the flight anxiously wondering if the other bag had been lost. Both bags arrived fine.

I'd rather have no information than unreliable information.

Pretty easy to look this stuff up rather than depend on decade old memory. Temperature in Europe is rising much faster than the worldwide average. Here it says +2.3C by 2022 - that is significant.

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

Was in an Uber in Korea recently traveling from the airport and the car literally beeped every 30 seconds for the entirety of the one hour drive with what presumably was a speed limit warning - a beep AND a verbal message. Seemed to be only marginally over the limit. Drove me insane. I don't know how the driver dealt with it - he must experience it all day every day.

I guess you just filter it out after a while but it definitely makes me think I need to do some research before getting a new car any time soon.

> When I talked to the dealers, they said that the speedometers only have to be accurate +/- 10% according to the SAE specifications.

I believe the requirement is only one way - they can read high by a certain % but they cannot read low. Which makes sense. But that means in reality they will usually read a little high.

> Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up.

Very true. I've heard stories of how technicians struggle with friends/family perceptions here. Since a lot of these datacenters are in rural communities, they are perceived as being technical wizards to be working there. But in reality they are doing as you say - just following a preprogrammed script with very little scope for any sort of creative problem solving.

> it's a force majeur

I assume you meant something like 'force multiplier"? Force Majeure is an uncontrollable event that prevents a party from fulfilling a contract. Which some may argue is what AI will also deliver. :)

I've always felt bad about not understanding git better and wanted to dedicate time to learn it properly but never got to it. Finally this is a use case where AI is really good. It has always been able to get me out of trouble when I mess up, and often rescued files I thought I had lost for good. And is always able to rebase for me, normally a place where I flail pathetically. And it's easy to human verify the result before pushing.

Honestly this is one area I really like AI - so I can focus on the things I really need to focus on and not spend a bunch of time becoming an expert in things I don't want to be an expert in.

It will still be application dependent.

Code to compute fillets and blends gets incredibly complex when multiple surfaces are involved. And when surfaces are barely intersecting, or almost coincident, all bets are off what the command will do - very much depends on the geometry kernel and the tolerances it uses whether it decides the surfaces even intersect. And if it decides they don't intersect, all downstream commands will fail. Handling tolerances is one of the hardest aspects of CAD. (It's no coincidence that most open source CAD applications always demo with the same relatively basic types of models - they just can't do truly complex CAD.)

So a simple set of operations - cube, sphere, intersect - sure that will work anywhere and will be portable across applications and makes a nice simple demo. But once you start doing any serious CAD modeling the result is kernel dependent. That's why portable CAD formats like STEP do not preserve the commands used to generate the results. And why native CAD application formats do preserve the command history but are not portable across applications.

> The goal of art isn't merely beauty. It's primarily communication.

"Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us" - Picasso

> Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

And open offices with the associated foot traffic. Constant distraction quite apart from the noise factor.

How does this work in combination with age related hearing loss? At some point you will lose high frequency sensitivity in that 11-15Khz range. Would be nice to get some benefit from that, but I assume the tinnitus itself will not go away even if it hangs out at that frequency?

It also means the above experiment will not work since you lose the signal before you reach your tinnitus frequency.