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ok_computer

Small scale natural gas turbine plants are bad for local human air due to NOx emissions.
Re:Stop sending me huge PRs; a rant on Friday August 14, 2026 @08:20PM (#49306217)
That message could also be generated by a PR line count rule and string replacement without the ai overhead.

Edit - apologies I misunderstood which side the ai agent should be on.

Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.

The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.

I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.

My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.

For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.

I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.

I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works on Thursday April 30, 2026 @10:59PM (#47970893)
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.

I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.

There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).

Re:How an Oil Refinery Works on Thursday April 30, 2026 @10:51PM (#47970825)
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.

There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.

Re:Is my blue your blue? on Monday April 27, 2026 @07:34PM (#47928703)
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.

Re:Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @02:46PM (#47852778)
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.

I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.

Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.

Re:LLMs Predict My Coffee on Monday March 23, 2026 @11:06AM (#47490541)
Latitude may affect the eddy currents and resulting convective shear on the film surface imparted by angular momentum from the earth’s spin.

This is what humors me about analytical minded computation focused people vs dumb simple engineer and physics (practical) people. That is imagining all the infinities of what may change a physical result vs knowing by experience or education.

ANOVA: analysis of variance from linear fit parameters will show you in experimental data or simulation the contributing factors. Or you can read a chapter in an undergraduate heat transfer book.

Decay rate of (T(t) - T_inf)/(T(0) - T_inf) is probably dominated by the wind speed in your room. For an 8-12oz cup a sphere or cylinder will get you pretty close.

Re:Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @09:02PM (#46521604)
I’m having a really hard time reading with the background particles.
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))

Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.

How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?
Re:The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership on Tuesday October 28, 2025 @10:50AM (#45733619)
I think this says more about how much of our tasks and demonstrations of ability as developers revolve around boilerplate and design patterns than it does about the Cognitive abilities of modern LLMs.

I say this fully aware that a kitted out tech company will be using LLMs to write code more conformant to style and higher volume with greater test coverage than I am able to individually.

I’ve used respirators through prior lab work and be warned the ammonia grade and organic solvent grades are distinct filter packing.
Re:What if we treated Postgres like SQLite? on Monday September 22, 2025 @02:38PM (#45337648)
Noted, that confirms my suspicion. Thanks.
Re:What if we treated Postgres like SQLite? on Monday September 22, 2025 @01:52PM (#45337029)
I’ve always worked in a datacenter (non cloud) with separate db servers to the app servers. Besides network latency, what is the advantage of collocating the http server and database server on one machine?

It’s always given me a separation of concerns good feeling by seeing a dedicated db and app server and doesn’t seem like much overhead, given they are nearby machines in datacenter.

Also, our main reason was sharing a database license to have a well resourced multi-tenant/app db sever serving peripheral web app servers.

Re:Seattle Ultrasonics: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife on Saturday September 20, 2025 @03:52PM (#45316754)
This is a QVC product with the name of a US tech city slapped on it.

Signed, a guy living nearby the home of QVC in a decidedly non-tech area of the US.

Ps. don’t buy future e-waste kitchen ware unless you have accessibility reasons. You can get a good-enough victoronix 8” chef knife for $65 (I paid $36 a long time ago) and a world class chef knife for less than $250.

Re:IQ Tests Results for AI on Sunday August 17, 2025 @11:57AM (#44932515)
I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from.

I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0].

Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The%20Lake%20Wobe...

It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted.

Re:PuTTY has a new website on Sunday August 17, 2025 @11:16AM (#44932222)
Independent projects but not unrelated since there was a historical dependency from OpenSSH to OpenSSL.

https://serverfault.com/questions/780476/generating-ssh-keys...

My knowledge was a bit outdated by about a decade.

Re:IQ Tests Results for AI on Sunday August 17, 2025 @10:54AM (#44932033)
Lower and median IQ people still benefit from literacy, numeracy, and art to function in society. The point of education systems isn’t to boost individuals’ dimensionally reduced 1D metrics but rather enrich their lives and contributions to society. There will always be distributions of abilities and means but that doesn’t justify neglecting the bulk of tax paying people.
Re:PuTTY has a new website on Saturday August 16, 2025 @10:47AM (#44923933)
If you hadn’t discovered this already with you mac CLI commands, OpenSSH from OpenSSL ‘ssh-keygen’ command is a good way to create SSH keys in ClI and ships in many OSes or is a lightweight download. The OpenSSL website name is unambiguous, which is a benefit.

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

Re:Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework on Saturday August 02, 2025 @11:10AM (#44768253)
I cannot stand the latency using a local app. Same with rendering views of local file systems. Frontend reactivity as the expense of responsive performance is the problem with modern user interfaces in my opinion.

Like I’m searching for an installed app. I don’t need news articles about that and never expected a file system ui to be a web portal.

Re:You might not need a Python class on Thursday July 24, 2025 @08:27PM (#44678013)
As an aside, my preference for a class container is dataclass(slots=True) for typing. I’d normally used dataclasses as np array containers vs serialized tuple row objects.
Radon fan drawing from two basement surfaces (concrete slab crawlspace addition and original stone foundation with cement floor): $1,200.00 usd in 2020 with warrantied fan and included confirmation test kit. US mid Atlantic. The prior homeowner thought radon was a scam too. It doesn’t make sense as a scam for a one-time capital and labor purchase.
We use coconut oil for kids’ diapers and as skin moisturizer. The melting point (above room temperature in winter) and skin absorption makes it less greasy to me. And it seems ok and maybe preferable to get the refined organic expeller pressed stuff because it has lower aromatic smell and scratchy particles as the virgin cold pressed stuff at a 3-4$ jar discount.
Cool, thank you for the response and details.
Cool visualization for your personal logbook. How is the raw or display data stored?

The globe map reminds me of this hexagonal grid article from my bookmarks I’d found on here or reddit.

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

As an airline pilot, I am curious, have you watched the season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s Rehearsal on HBO, that comically addresses the topic of pilot-copilot communication?

If so what are your thoughts on his portrayal of the existence of copilot communication friction. And without intending to dig into your personal business, do you think there is a tendency and survivor (retention) bias for the profession to remain high functioning ______, without recognizing a need for help. Or is this portrayal of stunted coworker dialog an edge case that is amplified from his perspective.

Re:Container: Apple's Linux-Container Runtime on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:59PM (#44231012)
I am going to show my ineptitude by admitting this, for the life of me I couldn’t get around to implement the Mac Os native way to run linux VMs and used vm-ware fusion instead. [0]

I’m glad this more accessible package is available vs docker desktop on mac os or the aforementioned, likely to be abandoned vmware non enterprise license.

[0] [apple virtualization docs](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/cre...)

Re:Decibels Are Ridiculous on Thursday May 22, 2025 @02:42PM (#44065297)
I think college undergrad physics and engineering is an important time to gain exposure to a variety of concepts and measures. Then you learn the people who discovered or invented these concepts were writing by candlelight and not washing their hands and didn’t have modern mathematics or computers and didn’t want to piss off the church. Oftentimes working at the pleasure of a rich sponsor family or king.

Like you have to describe relative intensity of waves in some way and these were experimental scientists, not commerce merchants looking for absolute interchangeability like weights and measures.

Computer blog people like standards and languageisms but science isn’t determined by big tech sponsored committee. It’s the best tool put forward so far and db is a physics concept and with a reference denominator you can calculate the absolute value. It’s fine. If you dabble with physics and expect the universe to make intuitive sense then you need an education.

Read books not blogs.

You may want to try something similar to Python Polars scan_csv for lazy evaluation of same schema csv directories. It also supports a SQL context where you can use a subset of Ansi Sql instead of learning the functional api to start.

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