alhirzel

There needs to be better tooling for inspecting PDF documents. Right now, my needs are met by using `qpdf` to export QDF [1], but it is just begging for a GUI to wrap around it...

[1] https://qpdf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/qdf.html

If you are talking about having the copyrighted source code not be used to train an AI, you could look at the discussions surrounding a recent license change in the Reticulum project [1].

I had previously been curious about this, and made a post on HN that got limited attention [2], but if you are wanting your software to not be used to create training data for third-party models, it could be a little relevant.

[1]: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum?tab=License-1-ov-file...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384196

This reminds me of the following, a story from my personal life. My wife and I both ski, and early in our relationship one of us told the other about the coolest poster ever about snowflakes. We each described it. We were sure we were talking about the same one - the one that graphed how snow changes over temperature and helped explain why it can feel so different. One of us pulled it up, and we realized, well...

[1]: https://vermontsnowflakes.com/cdn/shop/products/Snowflake_Th...

[2]: https://physics.montana.edu/demonstrations/video/1_mechanics...

She was talking about #1 (the work of Bentley made into a collage), and I was talking about #2. It turned out to be a pretty good way of thinking about how imperfect communication is, and how hard it is to get on the same page about things that are even more important when all we have is words.

Such a great resource!

Years ago, this very subject was an interview question at a national lab (at an undergrad level). The question was roughly:

> the ends of windmill blades look a lot like a jet on radar. If you were assigned to this project, what would your approach be to avoiding false positives?

This was in 2011/2012. I find it difficult to believe the problem is not solved.

+1 for CADQuery - it lets you easily specify surfaces as the basis for manipulation, and results in much less fragile designs than OpenSCAD.

> Apple acquires OpenAI, Sam becomes CEO of combined company; iPhone revenue used to build out data centers; Jony rehired as design chief for AI device.

Wonder what to call this brand of fanfic?

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

Crazy that it's pretty much a 3D printed assembly internally, and the manufacturer didn't know how it worked. No way that would pass any kind of vibration test.

> I wonder what some outage analogs to the pre-internet ages would be.

Lots of things have the sky in common. Maybe comet-induced ice ages...

> I worry this is the big botnet flexing.

Even worse - the small botnet that controls everything.

s/Aplication/Application/g

Automatic generation would be really tough because of all the levels of abstraction traversed in this diagram in particular... But tools like Mermaid / PlantUML can get you in the ballpark, and PGF/TikZ could be a reasonable target if you want to attack that mission by generating text instead of images.

I have had some really good results with Alpine.js and back-end templating for simpler apps (especially served from non-traditional embedded web servers). This base plus the combo of what kids these days call "vanilla JS" and whatever other libraries make sense has worked for me for small-to-medium complexity sites. It would easily grow to larger efforts as long as the team did. I think if my sites grew to need larger teams, there would be some value in using frameworks other people have used; this basically means "match the big guys" to make brainpower a little more fungible, even if the tools aren't perfect for the job.

Only if they care...

Has anyone tried the `--trim` option? I wonder how well it works in "real life".

Good name!

There have been other graphite mines in the US.

> would be quite the burden to carry

only if you care

Snow load is not mentioned when using horizontal panels. In higher latitudes, solar is relatively uncommon because of the sunlight deficit in winter. Panels that are deployed are usually placed at an incline equal to the latitude (or even vertically) to capitalize on free snow shedding and to regularize/maximize year-round minimum output (i.e. bring up winter by bringing down summer). Mounting solar panels flat is sensible from the standpoint of this technology (no solar output needed in the winter, that's what the storage is for!) but may be breaking a lot of ground (and panels) with horizontal panels in snow country.

This cycle starts with an integration for model developers. I wonder if anyone is working on a generic ARIA hookup, as well as whatever standards are necessary for desktop/smartphone integration?

What are the economics of this?

Reminds me of Electric Sheep

https://electricsheep.org/

Especially the part where improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety: regulatory dysfunction at its finest. Interestingly, in other regulated areas (such as toxic emissions into the environmental), there are clear echelons regarding what is required such as BPT vs BAT (best practicable vs achievable technology). For the coal mining case, if BAT had been the requirement (and the regulating body had enough teeth to enforce it), Chris's work might have been easier to fund.

That article touched on so many facets of a person's career: the pursuit of meaning, grit, familial context... It should be required reading for all young engineers.

GOOG currently pays ~0.47% APY. The GOOG stock price could reflect some certainty of these dividend payments, but there is not much stock price independent risk basis to choose GOOG over e.g. US treasury bonds at ~4.32% or Swiss bonds at ~0.77% APY.

As well, micro-fluctuations in APY driven by stock price values create inconsistent hopes: a dividend investor that will "never" sell should hope that stock prices do not exceed inflation so that APY is stable or goes up, while most people hope that stock prices inflate with the economy or go up so that appreciation can be realized at sale.

Then there are the people who bought at IPO, at which the closest thing to a true valuation exists: it is at the IPO cost basis that a true value is established. IPO is also where the company performance becomes coupled to the stock price as the general public invests money into the company in the sale, and employees with stock options become incentivized to exercise any available control over the stock price, including increasing company performance.

I think there is a continuum between dividend investors and stock price speculators, and there is also some kind of monotonically devolving continuum from a rational value basis into chaotic market forces. In one corner of this N-dimensional continuum, I can definitely agree with you.

It's all a tower of cards based on what people think the cards are worth. Unless stocks pay dividend, valuation is afloat on the expectations of shareholders.

Designing for space is definitely an art full of pitfalls. Guides like [1] exist that cover basics, but experience is king.

One of my favorite pitfalls in aero is connector mating lifetimes. Any time there is a connector (like a good old-fashioned DB-9), there are metals in the contacts that will have a pressure-based interface (pin inserting into hole). High-ductility metals (copper, gold, etc. that are typically used for connectors) like to become brittle after getting bent around a bit. Unfortunately, when the individual conductors become more brittle, their stiffness goes down, and this results in the connector performing poorly on vibes. This is because the resonant properties of the individual pins within a connector are tuned to not have micro-disconnects during the vibration of launch - they are sufficiently stiff to withstand the forces. This tuning is a function of the number of times it has been connected and disconnected because of the embrittlement, so each connector has a "mating lifetime" on the order of 10 mates/demates before you have to scrap it. This means your flight electrical connectors are really, really important. I remember being a young naive engineer and being shocked and appalled by the waste.

[1]: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19900004959/downloads/19...

I use vimwiki[1] just for this "diary" functionality, with different days in different files. Can browse the directory in netrw to find a day's notes, and I have scripts that let me archive old stuff. I tend to put an "x" in front of completed lines (and move uncompleted lines forward to new days) so it is easy to detect and archive unactionable or "completed" files.

[1]: https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

Surprised to not see Pandoc.

The diversity measures used in this study are a fascinating window into some unusually measurable communities. The count of contributors and volume of their contributions are proxies to many things, including project popularity, ease of contribution, number of approachable fixes (tantamount to how many simple/low-hanging bugs there are), and diversity of use cases exposing the product to new situations (i.e. potential growth of project scope). These things need to align for diversity of contributors' motivations to arise and contributors to approach the project initially, but different things need to arise to sustain involvement: introduction of new bugs, need for completely new features (i.e. a growing project scope), continuing need for refinement of otherwise battle-tested code (i.e. performance gains remaining on the table), and continued relevance as other alternative packages and paradigms rise and fall. I can't wait to read their future work, and I hope it includes measures of project maturity (in the senses of feature-completeness/code quality as well as whether functional scope is growing or not). Surely there are projects that lack contributors for the simple reason that the projects are "done", and surely there are projects where engagement looks like disproportionately many shallow contributions due to immaturity of the product, and surely there are projects that have wider or shallower pools of scope to draw from (as well as management ethoses that readily take on new scope or are avoidant of the same).

Some opposing examples are the Linux kernel (eternally growing scope, with huge motivation by many user communities) and libpng (which is relatively fixed in scope, with desirements like security increasing the bar for contributions to an already mature and popular product).