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even a swarm of satellites has risk factors. we treat space as if it were empty (it's in the name) but there's debris left over from previous missions. this stuff orbits at a very high velocity, so if an object greater than 10cm is projected to get within a couple kilometers of the ISS, they move the ISS out of the way. they did this in April and it happens about once a year.

the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.


yeah, it's a good post overall, but the humblebrag factor undermines it

sorry but you’re underestimating the number of people who come here, and the range of backgrounds (and interests) they have

yeah, that’s what works for me also. LLMs are a nightmare for debugging but a breeze for this.

another good use case: have it read a ton of code and summarize it. if you’re dealing with a new (to you) area in a legacy application, and trying to fix a problem in how it interacts with a complex open-source library, have the LLM read them both and summarize how they work. (while fact-checking it along the way.)


The problem with Lisp (or at least Clojure) is that abstracting away the boilerplate requires you to correctly identify the boilerplate.

It’s nontrivial to structure your entire AST so that the parts you abstract away are the parts you’re not going to need direct access to three months later. And I never really figured out, or saw anyone else figure out, how to do that in a way which establishes a clear pattern for the rest of your team to follow.

Especially when it comes to that last part, I’ve found pragmatic OOP with functional elements, like Ruby, or task-specific FP, like Elm, to be more useful than Clojure at work or various Lisps for hobby projects. Because patterns for identifying boilerplate are built in. Personal opinion, of course.


Since I had to Google it, 3Com was the company behind Ethernet, a wired networking standard that revolutionized offices in the days before remote work. Like with GUIs, the work started at Xerox PARC.

Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC and was inspired by ALOHAnet. Metcalfe was however a co-founder at 3Com.

Since I had to google it, Metcalfe was one of the inventors of Ethernet.

Fun fact, he predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse entirely within the following year, and said he would eat his words if it didn't. In 1997, at a web conference, he put a printed copy of the words into a blender and drank a smoothie made with that paper.


The EPA is currently reviewing its ban on asbestos.

this is correct, because "enemy" starts with a vowel, but it's a fairly gratuitous translation either way, since "know your enemy" comes from Sun Tzu

Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible has several errors where it uses "thy" before a vowel sound. This might vary by edition, but I've verified some in a scan of the 1611 "he" bible. Unfortunately it's blackletter which I can't read quickly, and I really don't trust the OCR.

Semi-manual verse counts from a random digital copy I have convenient, before 'e' only:

  (2 thy, 2 thine) elder
  (2 thy, 0 thine) elect
  (19 thy, 3 thine) estimation (most in the same chapter!)
  ("thy ewe" is correct due to pronunciation)
  (1 thy, 0 thine) exceeding
  (1 thy, 1 thine) excellency
  (1 thy, 1 thine) expectation
  (2 thy, 110 thine) eye
2 John, being short, is the only book that exclusively does it wrong. The other errors are in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Job, Proverbs, and Ezekiel, all of which also use the correct form.

(it also has errors before other vowels and 'h', though the 'u' one is debatable)

For "enemy" it is always the correct "thine".


It's all correct in the original Hebrew. For example in "Ezekiel" 16:61

https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.16.61?lang=bi


Unfortunately I have an even harder time reading Hebrew fonts than I do reading English blackletter.


I found the Wii U joystick too springy to win OOT or even play much of Twilight Princess. I was able to compensate for the springiness until the penultimate fight with Ganondorf at the top of the castle in OOT, at which point it got too annoying and I just gave up, but with Twilight Princess, I hit that threshold in the fire temple's boss fight. Possibly even just a miniboss.

It's possible I just had a Wii U with an unusually tight joystick or something.


> One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment.

the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.


In case anyone else has the same memory fuzziness I had that led me to thinking "I could've sworn it was ARPA, not DARPA, that the internet came out of"... it was ARPA, but they aren't separate organisations as I for some reason thought they were. To quote Wikipedia:

> "The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996"


Hence the name arpanet


Also, NCSA was started with NSF funds and the put out the first web browse. And now the guy behind that is supporting Trump. Really pulling up the ladder.


Larry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/

It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.

The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.


[flagged]


He means Andreesen, obviously.


Or he could mean Marc Andreesen.

In my defense, I haven't been taking that guy seriously for a long time now. Some of his friends, yes. But an embarrassing omission all the same.


I would guess he means Marc Andreesen.


Marc Andreesen


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