derstander

> As i look through, my binder has so many backs of mailer's i've received and scribbled on. cant figure why.

Is your mailbox a short walk from where you normally work? Walks have been credited for the assist in idea generation from Aristotle to Nietzsche (and beyond).

I personally just keep a little pocket notebook and a couple pens on my person at all times. That replaces the need for the distributed folders of your system. Every week I go through and add them to either my paper notebook or my digital notes.

I don’t really trash the “bad” ideas either since my notebook is bound. I try to be neither precious with the good ideas nor embarrassed of the bad. I treat them all as just a record of thoughts.

> Cool does mean detached, offhand, poised, aloof, unperturbed.

Cool is from “Old English col "not warm" (but usually not as severe as cold)”. If you’re using it to mean detached you’ve already accepted that words can change meanings (add, remove, or modify) over time. ;)

The article is from February.

*32MB of RAM (plus 4MB of video RAM and a little sound and IOP memory).

Only a dabbler in Love2d here but I’d expect that update to be a bit down the line. If I’m not mistaken the current Love2d version 11.5 is (mostly) tied to Lua 5.1 because of LuaJIT, though I understand some later Lua features are backported. And the changelog for the in-dev 12.0 release talks about compiling Love2d for Lua 5.4 as if it’s an optional thing.

I don’t really follow LuaJIT too closely so I’m not sure if they’re even targeting Lua 5.4 let alone 5.5. I remember reading some GitHub issue that suggested some of the design decisions in Lua 5.4 wouldn’t really support LuaJIT goals re: performance.

With that said I’ve been enjoying Love2d even with Lua 5.1 features — as a hobbyist it works just fine for me.

Would certainly appreciate any corrections by those more in-the-know though!

Picotron (also by Lexaloffle) might be an even better match for those wanting a retro workstation as opposed to a retro game console.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

Wait until you hear about September through December not being the 7th through 10th months of the year.

They don’t even give you a sense for _when_ they are. Or, more accurately, they give you the _wrong_ sense for when they are by name alone.

Should this be David Gingery instead?

This is probably a reference to a quote attributed to Stalin: “The Pope. How many divisions does he have?”

Stalin disregarding soft power in favor of military might for international diplomacy.

I didn't say nor mean to imply it did. I assumed your initial question about a congressional mandate was about Artemis rather than the layoffs specifically as that's what sparked this comment chain (the wonderment at NASA spending money on Artemis and the Lunar Gateway).

Here is a link [0] to the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. And here's a relevant snippet:

"The Administrator shall ensure that NASA carries out a balanced set of programs that shall include, at a minimum, programs in— ... (A) human space flight, in accordance with subsection (b); ... The Administrator shall establish a pro- gram to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Administrator is further authorized to develop and conduct appropriate international collaborations in pursuit of these goals."

Artemis grew out of these efforts and enjoyed fairly bipartisan support over the years (including by President Trump in his first term, see [1]).

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-109publ155/pdf/PLAW...

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-space-policy-directive...

This is a particularly bizarre part of the article to me. Certainly Eric Berger, the article's author who's written more than one book on space at this point knows this.

The President appoints NASA's administrator (subject to Senate approval, of course) and Congress controls NASA's budget. How anyone is puzzled by NASA's focus is beyond me. If I'm being pessimistic, I would assume such people are woefully ignorant of how NASA (and maybe the government as a whole) works. I try to be pessimistic instead of cynical because if I were cynical then I would assume a bunch of negative ulterior motives.

> Laying off what is presumably the bottom 10% of the NASA workforce is probably a healthy decision in an environment where Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams still have not returned home.

Per the article, the 10% includes both people that have taken the deferred resignation offer and probationary employees. The former are probably generally older staff that are already considering retirement. The latter are, according to what I could find on the definition of federal probationary employees, either new hires or existing employees that were promoted or otherwise moved into a new position.

I don't see how you square that with "the bottom 10% of the NASA workforce". On the back end you're losing institutional knowledge. On front end you're losing your future contributors (see the old adage about "eating your seed corn").

> But with SAR you're not beam forming. You're illuminating everything - the whole ground below you. And you get a return from everywhere all at once. Two equidistant reflectors will return signals simulatenously. If your flight path is between these two points, and the distance is always equal, how can you differentiate them?

There are a couple conceptual ways to think about SAR. One is, in fact, as beamforming. Each position of the radar along the synthetic aperture is one element in an enormous array that's the length of the synthetic aperture itself: that's your receive array.

Regarding your question about scatterers that are equidistant along the entire synthetic aperture length: typically, SAR systems don't use isotropic antennas. And they're generally side-looking. So you would see the scatterer to one side of the radar, but not the equidistant scatterer on the other side.

If you had an isotropic antenna that saw to each side of the synthetic aperture, then the resulting image would be a coherent combination of both sides. Relevant search terms would be iso-range and iso-Doppler lines. Scatterers along the same iso-range and iso-Doppler lines over the length of the synthetic aperture are not distinguishable.

As to your question earlier in the chain, my preferred SAR book is Carrara et al. Spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar: Signal Processing Algorithms. Given the title, it is of course geared toward spotlight (where you steer the beam to a particular point) rather than strip map or swath (where your beam is pointed at a fixed angle and dragged as you move along). It has decent coverage of the more computationally efficient Fourier-based image formation algorithms but does not really treat algorithms like the back projection that Henrik uses (I also think back projection is easier to grasp conceptually, particularly for those without a lot of background in Fourier transforms). But my book preference might just be because that's what I first learned with.

It's not clear to me that administering an entity with as many people and as much land as the United States could be done in a simple enough way that would satisfy these objections (not necessarily yours specifically, but this broad class). Though I certainly don't object to the notion that there's fat to trim and ways to make things less complicated.

I would be interested in an existence proof of this: an entity of similar population and size with a budget that's simple in comparison.

My naive expectations are that more authoritarian countries will hide a lot of budgetary items and countries with coalition-style governments will have even messier budgets than the US. Looking into that would be interesting but it's not going to make it onto my Sunday morning short-list.

My opinion about this remains that if the governed are really interested, they need to put in the ground work to understand the material that's available. Some things just are complicated and require studying to understand.

> Spread the entire budget out, all expenses line by line for all to see, and may they survive or be culled based solely upon their merits in the eyes of the American people.

What do you envision this looks like? To my mind this is already done. For example, here's the appendix to the FY2018 budget: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2018-APP/pdf/BUDG...

Note that the appendix is described thusly:

"Contains detailed information on the various appropriations and funds that constitute the budget and is designed primarily for the use of the Appropriations Committees. The Appendix contains more detailed financial information on individual programs and appropriation accounts than any of the other budget documents. It includes for each agency: the proposed text of appropriations language; budget schedules for each account; legislative proposals; explanations of the work to be performed and the funds needed; and proposed general provisions applicable to the appropriations of entire agencies or group of agencies. Information is also provided on certain activities whose transactions are not part of the budget totals."

I feel like a lot of people clamor for this and it's right there for everyone to read. Not that I expect citizens to read >1,000 pages of budget information alone every year: I certainly don't. But let's not pretend the information isn't there for people who want it.

If you have cast iron and you’re having a lot of food sticking issues then you may need to reseason it. As a person that uses mostly cast iron, I prefer it, but I think it does require a bit more care.

> It's weird af that Geerling ignores nVidia.

“With the PCI Express slot ready to go, you need to choose a card to go into it. After a few years of testing various cards, our little group has settled on Polaris generation AMD graphics cards.

Why? Because they're new enough to use the open source amdgpu driver in the Linux kernel, and old enough the drivers and card details are pretty well known.

We had some success with older cards using the radeon driver, but that driver is older and the hardware is a bit outdated for any practical use with a Pi.

Nvidia hardware is right out, since outside of community nouveau drivers, Nvidia provides little in the way of open source code for the parts of their drivers we need to fix any quirks with the card on the Pi's PCI Express bus.”

Reference = https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-r...

I’m not in a position to evaluate his statement vs yours, but he’s clearly thought about it.

> Having things and photos are actually good for your soul. You go to a trip for one month, take photos, sometimes rewatching them helps them bring you back the good memories.

Is this categorically true? Asking honestly. I’ve thought about it a bit and haven’t come to a firm conclusion. Part of me thinks that human beings are supposed to forget a bit over time. Maybe forgetting is part of helping with mourning and grief, for example.

Oh yeah — I definitely understand that some people need ADHD meds to function normally: my partner is one of them, too. We joke during acute shortages that it must be exam season at the local colleges. But of course I know there are chronic shortage issues as well that aren’t simply explained by students wanting a quick boost. I’m mostly poking at people that don’t need it using it to augment their focus.

One thing that I wasn’t aware of until I happened upon a blurb somewhere is that Adderall is harder to get in many other countries than in the US (and seemingly impossible/illegal in a few).

> Hospitals are chalk-full of surgeons, doctors, and nurses that are all overworked, burned out, and half-awake.

A friend, who switched from electrical engineering to medicine, told me that the medical residency program in the US was essentially molded by a doctor who was a cocaine addict; seemingly a lot of his students were, too. Maybe it’s a lot easier to work ridiculously long hours when you’re hopped up on coke.

The (admittedly limited) looking I did into the topic suggests that there’s at least a kernel of truth to that story — if not more.

You can look for yourself: the doctor’s name was William Stewart Halsted.

Tongue-in-cheek, but maybe the ADHD medications that doctors and academics often abuse today aren’t as efficacious as good old fashioned cocaine in keeping people working for 80+ hours a week.

To be fair, I don’t think cocaine was illegal during Halsted’s time, though he was in and out of treatment for that and, later, morphine addiction.

This is all true. My naïveté is showing; I assumed if they were developing a phone they’d just say so outright. I guess I don’t understand what benefits being vague about the kind of device gets them.

I don’t particularly see the connection between Ive, OpenAI, and a new phone but are you maybe just looking for something like a PinePhone?

I don’t use one but I have followed the company for some time due to their low cost laptops that run Linux (PineBook, PineBook Pro).

https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/

Edit: oh, I see. I automatically assumed the device referenced in the article would be something like those smart home speakers that one can talk to.

> If we are attributing these results to the the mass homeschooling experiment that was remote learning, what does that say about regular homeschooling that is still practiced?

Probably not much? It seems pretty reasonable to expect that people that self-select to homeschool their children are going to diverge from the general population (I.e., people en masse that had no desire nor means to do it).

The story’s probably much the same for people working from home. People that sought it out and had established routines before the pandemic probably handled it a heck of a lot better than the general population that was forced into it with little to no prep time and a lack of equipment and support.

> Nvidia got the bid for Switch when they were basically dumping those unwanted Tegra to Nintendo for an incredibly low price.

This seems pretty well aligned with Gunpei Yokoi’s strategy of “Lateral Thinking [with] Withered Technology”. It worked out pretty well for Nintendo in the past (e.g., Gameboy) and seems to be working out with the Switch. Even though he has passed, his Wikipedia page alleges that this philosophy has been passed on to others at Nintendo.

Consoles (especially under the hood the last couple of generations) look a lot more like general purpose computers than phones do.

I hadn't heard of this before, but here are some sources. Note this quote from [2], U.S. Customs and Border Protection:

"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."

I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/golden-valleys-new-k-...

[1] https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/meet-currency-detecto...

[2] https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/canine-...

> The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.

To be fair, that's kind of the case. Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world. A level 1 spellcaster may be able to do two of the following things a day using their two spell slots (depending on what kind of spellcaster they are):

- feed up to 10 people for a day (and heal them, to boot) with goodberry

- create 10 gallons of potable water with create or destroy water

- double walking speed for 10 minutes without exhaustion (expeditious retreat)

- move a third again as fast as normal for an hour without exhaustion (long strider)

- load up and move 500 pounds at those speeds without having to carry anything themselves for an hour (Tenser's floating disk)

That's just food and transportation. A level 1 cleric totally trounces period-accurate medical care and compares pretty favorably to a whole modern hospital filled with specialists and equipment (and with a few more levels under their belt they do much better than modern medicine as they can bring the recently deceased back to life).

But that's starting to miss the forest for the trees. I definitely respect people, like the author of the article, that focus this deeply on hobbies -- I can barely do that for paying work. But it misses the point of D&D for me.

Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.

I, for one, would expect social and political structures to deviate from history once you've added magic in the mix.

In my eyes, the article's argument is akin to people a thousand years from now role-playing in 2020s America but adding in Star Trek-style replicators and wondering why the rules don't model Homeowners Associations (HOAs). Sure, lots of current Americans are subject to them but what percentage of players would find that enjoyable? And are you sure they'd still exist in such a world?

Also really enjoyed What Dreams May Come despite its lack of success at the box office.

People are probably already aware of the fact, but it is based on a novel of the same name by Richard Matheson — who also wrote I Am Legend (which has had its own fair share of film adaptations).

Just going by the title, I thought this was going to be related to William Zinsser's book of the same name. It's not, though of course many of the topics are shared between the two.

It's been a few years since I've returned to it, but the material in Zinsser's book has been useful to me as an engineer that has to occasionally write for both fellow engineers and non-technical folks. I would recommend Zinsser's book if you like the content in the article and wouldn't mind a bit more.