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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • One of my first big jobs at NASA was as a lead engineer on a multi-experiment platform to fly on the space shuttle. I checked all the work and compiled all the data and trotted my 27 year old self down to Johnson to present my case to the Safety Board. When I stood up to present, the head of the panel asked if I knew why I was there. I confidently told him that I was there to walk them through my evaluation of each of the payload components and show that the payload was safe to fly. He smiled. He then said “You’re here because if something goes wrong on this mission, there had to be one ass to kick. Proceed.”

    Everyone needs an ass to kick, and AI doesn’t offer that function.


  • The output looks good to people who are poorly versed in the segment for which AI is being asked to perform, but often inefficient or fails in ways that an expert in the field would never miss.

    —ignore this part, I’m just rambling from here on Depending on the context, you’ll almost certainly get something that looks correct on first glance, especially if you’re not an expert. If you’re an expert, you wouldn’t need to ask for such a task and, if you did to save time, you’d probably end up adjusting, correcting, or fixing several things to produce a production-ready output. I use it regularly for code because the last language I had any training in proper syntax was Fortran 77. And eventually the simple tasks I ask it to code for me work. I’ve asked it to do some excel calculations (I’m not an excel expert, I do a lot of mathematic manipulation in custom sheets) and some of them work, but most are either wildly convoluted or relay on obscure calls/functions rather than simply using standard logic and mathematic operations which are easy to edit and change. I’ve also asked it to do some graphical illustration (because I’m not a graphic artist) and it has produced nice looking illustrations with zero basis in reality - i.e. “draw me an outline of Scotland in the style you’d see on a tourist map and label, with a star, these four cities”. It produced what I would expect an average American would estimate the outline of Scotland looked like and was equally as accurate with the location of the four cities (i.e. utterly incorrect).





  • stealing * information* Nobody was harmed; nobody was deprived of life, limb, security, or physical property or currency. Knowledge was transferred without authorization, meaning that only the potential reduction of future profits for a corporation is at stake. It’s a breach of contract - about the least impactful thing that a human can do to non-human. This kind of crime should never result in prison, or else it should be applied to every knowledge worker, ceo, or vc who remembers any part of any business they’ve every been involved with in the past (which it never is).





  • You know what’s funny - before I clicked through to see the context, I thought you were replying to a comment I made about the Houthis attacking it ships in the Middle East. We get attacked by terrorists all the time. Lots of people around the world hate Americans because, like most of the colonial powers, we’ve been reading assholes to lot of people. They also hate us because the rules of life that were made up in the name of our imaginary deity conflicts with the version of rules that they made up in the name of their imaginary deity. And we hate them back.

    People are kidnapped and/or killed on a regular basis by “terrorists”. That’s a tragedy to everyone who hold them close. The lack of perspective is thinking that one particular tragedy is somehow larger because of the news coverage afforded.



  • Americans have no sense of perspective. I have friends who were affected by the tower collapse in NY. We sent more service members to die looking for Bin Laden than were killed that day. And more than 10 times a many people die from gun violence in the US every God damned year than died in all four plane strikes. And every one of those other tragedies destroys families and communities.

    It’s so overblown it’s practically a meme to everyone but the boomers and Christian “patriots” who need a way to make people angry about foreigners so they can ignore our home grown violent tendencies.



  • You’ve touched on a great point. The power provided is so low that solar can effectively provide equivalent power in nearly every application except one where the continuous operating environment is pitch black. 15x15mm for 0.0001w is small. For comparison, that’s about 1/6 of the power that falls on a 15x15mm patch in an indoor office (300lux environment with led lighting), out about the same as could be harvested by an efficient solar panel off the same size. You could collect a full days power from this battery (and store it in a 2mm thick li cell behind the panel) in roughly three minutes of sunshine or ten to fifteen minutes on an overcast day.

    There certainly are applications where it would be useful, but most could just as easily be served by a small solar patch and lithium cell or super capacitor.



  • I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.

    I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.

    My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.