petsfed

The main problem with space blankets is that they eventually heat up. So they only work for a little while, and then have to re-equilibrate back to ambient, then you put them back on, then take off to re-equilibrate...

So this new tech appears to overcome that shortcoming, for static objects.

In terms of effective income, there are loads of places. Like, yes, I took a paycut moving from SF to the Seattle Metro, but I was able to buy the kind of house I'd need to live in Tracy to afford, within the same (time) commute that I had from Oakland to the South City. I have a peculiar affinity for Seattle that I don't have for, say, Portland, so it was an easy choice. I actually really appreciated SF as a city, but I also moved there just before the COVID lockdowns hit, and the Bay Area is a profoundly unpleasant place when lockdowns force it into endless-suburbia mode.

Denver is very much the same as Seattle (although I'd argue its got less going on culturally than Seattle).

There are a number of cities where yes, you'll make less objectively, but the cost of living is low enough that that's a wash. You'll have less prestige and maybe work on less important projects. But if that's important to you, why are you pinning your cards to someone else's mast instead of striking out on your own?

I think the most likely case for sedimentary deposition over ice would be something like volcanic eruption or an impact event redepositing material onto pre-existing ice.

I could go either way on hand-soldering a single assembly. But doing this more than once would be torturous.

I can only go so many days carefully monitoring diet and minimizing stimulant intake to minimize associated tremors. And I don't have rework microscope, so my eyes would definitely suffer.

Because I desperately want to make my own (and maybe modify it a bit to fit my own hardware biases), I found the repo for the hardware:

https://github.com/jagnat/fib_quintant_minimizer

It would be really neat if the author could put the relevant licensing stuff on there.

(but mainly, I want to hear about how they accomplished 5-fold symmetry!)

I'll bet there's some creative board layout so that the relevant controller IC and supporting passives can be soldered onto the back of one of the 5, then have solder jumpers or some such to actually connect it into the circuit. That way, you're not adding miles of unused trace to an active bus.

Of course, having a 5x PCB fab, but 4x+1 assembly would probably double the cost for a single turn of the device.

I would love to hear more about the process of making 5-fold symmetry work for board layout. That sounds maddening to get right.

>It's much more difficult to buy the ESP32 as an MCU than it is to buy it as a SBC, with ports for power and I/O already on a PCB (often with through pins, to land on another PCB, like the arduino hats). And I don't mean "it's difficult because you have to solder" - I mean "it's difficult to find many places that sell it".

1. Go to mouser.com

2. Type ESP32 into the search bar

3. There's your part.

Its difficult to buy a very specific nut or bolt from Amazon (their nut/bolt search interface doing precisely nothing it appears to be intended to do). That doesn't mean McMaster-Carr doesn't exist. You're just going to the wrong store.

If you're in particular referring to how hard it is to find a PDIP package (that is, a through-hole package) for an ATMEGA MCU, that's because they don't make them anymore. Insofar as I'm aware, Espressif has never made a through-hole ESP32 module, but maybe they made one with castellated edges?

But an ESP32 module is as easy to come by as a surface-mount ATMEGA328P. Which is to say, very easy.

I'm not claiming that people instinctively prefer anything. I'm saying that they've been socialized to believe that "traditional" architecture is some indicator of societal excellence. I don't think its weird that people report a bias they've been taught to have.

The article even seems aware of this possibility when it mentions that architecture students prefer modernism (with the semi-covert implication that their education is poisoning their aesthetic sensibilities). I claim its at most partially because they've been taught to prefer modern designs, but mainly because they've been taught to think about visual languages consciously, so they are able to recognize what a given architect is trying to do, in a way that a layperson might not. That's certainly why Thomas Kinkade gets as much hate as he does (that and the dodgy business practices...).

I'm also not claiming that people have been starved of traditional architecture entirely, just that nobody is building things in the traditional style now. They're not tearing them down either, the White House East Wing not withstanding. This is a novelty bias, nothing more. If you only ever see neoclassical architecture in buildings that are designated as "fancy" or "special" or "august", and all these modern, ordinary buildings do not, you're going to assume that the style itself, and not simply the age and intent at construction are what contributes to that.

I mean, 39 out of 50 US state capitol buildings have domes, as does the nation's capitol building. I think anybody in the US can be forgiven for thinking that dome = legitimate seat of authority. Certainly, that was the hypothesis behind the design decision.

Speaking only for myself, I found Washington DC, which is all neo-classical all the time, just really boring. All the buildings look the same, and I couldn't escape the sense that I was in museum that hadn't been updated in a long time. Chicago's Fields Museum has the same quality.

Next thing you're gonna tell me that English speakers overwhelmingly prefer novels written in English.

Cultures have visual languages just the same as they have written and spoken (and signed) languages. The crucifix symbol has an understood meaning in most European cultures, because of how foundational Christianity is to their cultures. Is it really so surprising that people prefer buildings in a visual language they already understand?

There's also this paragraph at the very end:

>If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.

In a world where we've seen nothing but modernist designs for 70 years, is it really that surprising that people might prefer novel designs? Especially novel designs in a style they are repeatedly told is better, or references a more refined time?

Put another way, while their positions are one set of 3 points, their momenta are another set of 3 points, and there is no requirement that 6 points will always lay on the same plane.

I wonder what phantom forces would appear when the reference frame changes in some complicated fashion. We get centrifugal "force" when we reconstruct F=dP/dt in a rotating reference frame, what would the 3-body "force" look like?

I used to work with several Apple MEs, and one EE, when they moved to the startup I was at.

They were all very skilled and pragmatic engineers. While there is some tribal knowledge benefits to getting really fluent with a given CAD suite, foundationally they are just tools, so when our startup migrated from one CAD suite to another, there was pretty minimal churn. You only have to go through one project management software changeover to realize that good operators, engineers or PMs or whatever, aren't permanently affected by the particular choice of software (but they are affected by constant change in that choice). The fundamentals don't change, even if the selector switch moves from one side to the other.

At the same startup, in the early days, I had a System76 laptop running their flavor of Ubuntu, and I used KiCad (but that was prior to their big UX overhaul so it was pretty painful) so I could design the few PCBs we needed. When we adopted Altium, I dual-booted the laptop. Later, I used a MacBook Pro and I ran Altium in a VM, and I've never had a more mind-bending computing experience than when I had Windows (running Altium) on one screen, OSX (with all of my firmware dev tools) on the other screen, and my keyboard shortcuts (down to cmd vs ctrl as the modifier) would change based on which screen my mouse cursor was on.

I've no idea if they still do it, or if this was an option open to the general public or if it was a special thing for our group, but once upon a time, in my early teens, I got to tour NIST's test reactor in Boulder, Colorado.

At one point in the tour, they turned on the reactor, while we stood along the edges of the pool it was immersed in. Literally all that separated us from the magic of fission was about 5-6 meters of water. I still remember the electric blue glow of the Cherenkov radiation. Even with decades of life and experience and education between now and then, its hard to describe the psychic impact of observing with my own eyes something that I had heretofore understood to be impossible. Something akin to seeing Narnia through the wardrobe for the first time.

I was already into physics at that time (I had shadowed a sibling for a day at the University of Washington, and got to attend a lecture about nuclear fission a few years before in the physics-for-liberal-arts-majors course she was taking at that time), but this was quite something else. All of that to say, I already understood that dragons exist, in a manner of speech, but there's a difference between understanding it and feeling one's breath on your face.

Are you thinking that mushroom foraging is just like going to the store, and there are no experiential benefits from actually going out to look?

Would you characterize beekeeping as nuts? Too many bee stings in a short(ish, weeks or months typically) period of time render one deathly allergic to further bee stings. Ooh, what about the risk of growing tomatoes, potatoes, or other members of the belladonna family? I mean, their greens are all toxic. Likewise for home grown rhubarb!

There are plenty of things people engage in for fun, on a regular basis, that are incredibly punishing of mistakes. Car and home repair come to mind. Downhill skiing, bicycling, motorcycling are all in there.

But the thing of it is, for every single one that I've mentioned, there are reasonable steps to be taken to mitigate a lot of those risks. Like, every mushroom foraging guide I've consumed goes to some lengths to point out how to correctly differentiate between dangerous and not dangerous mushrooms.

Your take on why people free solo is also misinformed. To be honest, I've never experienced an adrenaline rush from it, and if I did, I'd expect that to be in the 2-3 seconds before I met a violent and bloody end. It's not an "I survived that!" sort of experience, so much as it is a "I only had to focus on the climbing, not faffing with ropes and things" experience. A core goal of my climbing is already not to fall, and I can already get seriously hurt or killed, even whilst using the gear correctly. Neither the risk nor the sense of defying it are factors in why I do it.

Are you this actively shitty towards all hobbies you don't also enjoy?

People have been foraging for mushrooms for literally thousands of years, but mushroom cultivation is pretty recent, and the overwhelming majority of edible species have not yet been reliably cultivated.

Are you ignorant of where those interesting flavors come from (indeed, are discovered)?

This has strong "why should we care about farms? People get everything they need from the store" vibes.

Depends on how many times you get rape and/or death threats from unhinged audience members who went to surprising and horrifying lengths to figure out your identity.

Obviously, we cannot wholly bar these jack wagons from going out and finding the exact edge of “harassment worth pursuing legal action over”. But we can lower the cost of pursuing legal action, and raise the cost of defending against such action. That’s all I’m proposing.

More than one art installation has been a simple depiction of the clothes worn by victims during their rapes. You should look it up.

My daughters have dealt with sexual harassment. Should I tell them to dress less sluttily? I mean, they wear what I buy for them, and I don’t think I buy anything wildly inviting of anything. But what do I know?! I’m just the father of a 7 and 6 year old.

>Women just need to deal with it. Assume that whenever you're in a public place, ALL your actions are PUBLIC. A women (and men) should dress and talk in a way conducive to the public arena.

People have been the subject of stalking, harassment, rape irrespective of how they dress for ages. If you consider "being polite to a customer at a coffee shop" as an invitation to any of the above, then I guess you can claim that its solely the victim's responsibility to prevent this sort of thing. But I ask, what is the victim's recourse if they legit do not want to be filmed and broadcast? Just stay home? Are we seriously going to give third-tier facebook-live streamers that much power?

I feel like "if asked, don't monetize content containing others, if the content only occurred because of the recorder's actions". Like, yes, if you're in public, you can be filmed, sure. But if I ask you not to film me, and then you make money off a recording of just me saying "don't film me", that feels less like free speech, and more like monetizing actionable harassment.

I mean, if you'd asked law makers in 1850 if we needed speed limits on the roads between towns, you'd be laughed out of the room. Does that mean we shouldn't have speed limits? Or does that mean that nobody in power dreamed that it would be a serious or wide-spread enough problem that just suing each individual for damages was insufficient? Sometimes, we even have to invent new ways to express the damages so that suit can even be brought.

As I recall, the main issue with that was that because it used facial recognition, the labor burden of enforcing that was significantly lower. If its just human beings looking at every visitor and trying to decide if they match a description, the venue has to decide "has this person done anything so egregious that all this extra effort is worth it?" which makes the tactic self-limiting.

With facial recognition, enforcing a trespass order becomes nearly zero cost, so it can be applied for basically any reason. I can sort of get to understanding the tactic for "this lawyer is actively suing us", but if its "this person said something mean about us online, and we can get a facial recognition match from their profile picture", it seems like a wild abuse.

Which is why that whole Radio City Music Hall situation was such a good illustration of the actual harm of facial recognition systems. If a potentially bad action is only kept "good" because the high cost (in labor or lucre) causes discernment in its application, then removing the cost will necessarily remove the discernment, almost guaranteeing bad actions.

Business owners should have the right to bar someone from the premises, and legal recourses to enforce that right. But enforcing that right should be sufficiently cost prohibitive that enforcing that right does not grant the business outsized power to limit the public's rights to e.g. express negative opinions of that business.

Almost as if there's a limit to how many demands strangers can reasonably place on a person before we as a society agree that the person should put up boundaries (like, say, putting on headphones and outright ignoring the demands) and even go out of our way to encourage strangers to respect those boundaries.

I'm not calling you out, IncandescentGas, you're right and you're doing a good thing. I'm just saying its ironic that you jump to the defense of somebody who has made it clear that they don't believe others deserve the same courtesy you are providing them.

Well, no.

First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.

Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.

Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.

I had a similar experience playing, of all things Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. You play as a variety of US Marines helping Russia defend some island from a Chinese invasion so as to control some recently discovered oil deposits.

And at one point while playing this already somewhat implausible situation, I thought "that random PLA soldier I just mowed down would not have, in reality, signed up to be the invading force in a petro-conflict". It kind of killed first-person shooters for me for a while, because I accidentally humanized a poorly-programmed bot in a ridiculous, made-up scenario into making me feel bad for them.

Questions like "how would you search for a substring?" are so incredibly dependent on what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, and what you're doing with the data once you've split it. Just because .split(...) is in all the tutorials doesn't mean the codebase you've worked on for the last 5 years actually uses that specific call with any regularity, and it may well be the case that your codebase does use regexs more often (maybe for query-portability purposes).

I write bare metal firmware, primarily in C, and I've had to make it a point to explain, in most every interview I do, that I've only ever used malloc(...) in tutorials. "In my world, malloc is a 4-letter word". So while I know what it does, and how it works, I actually have to google its usage, and I'm not as keyed into its pitfalls, because every system I've ever worked on could not afford the risks associated with dynamic memory allocation.

All of this to say, bad interviewers go looking for a specific answer, good interviewers go looking for good process. All of the jobs I've held are ones that accepted that I was rusty on this or that specific call, but could think about the system holistically.

My point is that American suburbs are so aggressively designed for cars that even considerable cost and inconvenience (driving 30-40 minutes) is acceptable in the face of much MUCH lower prices (even if the prices are so low because the quality is commensurately lower as in e.g. Levi jeans since they started selling in Walmart). If we hadn't let our communities be planned around driving to begin with, then building a big box would be less effective.

People are so habituated to driving, and the walking/biking experience outside of inner cities so unpleasant, that the corner stores simply cannot compete. Of course a big box store is going to have better prices, they win on economies of scale. But we've allowed our cities to be designed around the total separation of residence and commerce, so that you have to drive an interminable distance on unpleasant, congested roads just to get to an ersatz corner store. May as well drive to Walmart.

The funny thing about the big box stores is that they can apply so much pressure to their suppliers (and their landlords) that the price difference outstrips differences in quality and convenience.

Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon residents who are too cool for such a mainstream store. Despite the higher costs, I vastly preferred shopping at Market of Choice because I could easily walk there and the food was generally higher quality. Generically, I would consistently shop at stores I could bike or walk to, outside of that shopping center, and frequent restaurants I could get to.

Meanwhile, where I live now, there's a Haggen (an Albertson's branded Whole Foods competitor) across the street from a Safeway (which is the brand Albertson's uses in this particular market for their standard store). They carry identical store-brand items, but the premium store charges 5-10%, because they know that people will pay more just for a better shopping experience.

Obviously I don't speak for everybody, but I think a lot more people would accept paying a little bit more in exchange for not driving so much, but part of the problem is that, thanks to market effects and economies of scale and so on and so forth, they have to pay a lot more, for the same products.

I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.

You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.

Just to buttress and embroider around your point that a fab is not a small business:

If there was a realistic way even to go from bare wafers to non-trivial custom chips in a small-batch fashion, you can bet there would be a cottage industry around it. I would love to live in a world where I could manufacture custom silicon as easily as I can manufacture a custom PCB or custom mechanical part.

But as it stands, quick-turn, rapid-proto "micro" fabs are obscenely expensive, to the extent that if you aren't absolutely certain you need the performance gains from custom silicon, justified by years of R&D that confirms the inadequacy of a multi-chip solution, then the idea is killed before any layout engineer is contacted.

Microfabs are either operated by research institutes, or they're booked solid for years, and basically printing money.

... which sort of assumes that the global downturn and the local downturn are completely unrelated.

Like, if a rent hike pushes out the tenant who has been there the longest, who has the most consistent revenue stream, in other words is the surest bet, then that, all by its lonesome, should be a pretty clear risk indicator to the bank.

Which has led to police officers using "the punishment I received is far in excess of the last time an officer of this department was punished for habitually arresting and raping minors!" as a defense, and it works.