frankus

I assume the device these were used with was something like this?

https://www.amazon.com/Proxxon-27106-PROXXON-Engraving-Devic...

I'm curious what the challenges are around using mRNA to synthesize antibodies in a person's own cells. A little googling turned up this company: https://acuitastx.com/technology/mrna-therapeutics/ but I'm curious if there are any obvious showstoppers for that kind of thing.

Right, but it said "You will travel across North America, and onto the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, you will hit another country."

So I was thinking the next country you would hit after hitting the Atlantic Ocean if you moved along a line of latitude.

> So maybe half a point for “France” if that’s what went through your head.

I was thinking France, but I assumed the answer was non-obvious, so I guessed St. Pierre and Miquelon.

But you'd have to start somewhere just south of Tacoma and just miss the tip of Nova Scotia on your way to the northern tip of Miquelon.

It's kind of baffling that in 2024 there are appliances that exist for which I have to manually set the time, or at least have to go through some cumbersome IoT set-up process, that most likely is absolute garbage security-wise if it isn't actively acting against my interests (like those fridges that only work with first-party water filters).

Maybe I'm under-thinking this, but couldn't my Wi-Fi router just broadcast the current time (and time zone) every minute or so in an unencrypted fashion to all devices within range?

A subtext here might be to try sleep restriction when you have a period of funemployment or PTO and can deal with the consequences of being sleep-deprived and/or can distract yourself from nodding off e.g. by going for a walk, and while you don't need to operate machinery, e.g. a car.

Kind of a tangent but I'm worried that "Kodiak" is not going to pass the "a moron in a hurry" test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry) and could get them in trouble. I for one read it as "Kodak" the first few times. Hopefully they cleared it with the owner of the trademark.

I've noodled around with something like this for a climate-controlled micromobility vehicle. Something like the Nimbus but built with ebike components (https://nimbusev.com -- godspeed to them because I really want them to succeed, in part so I can buy one).

I'm pretty sure it would be ridiculous and impractical, but we could use a way to solve the "it's only five blocks away but the weather's miserable" in a way that doesn't involve huge parking lots and otherwise terrible land use.

I know that there must be clothing that solves this, but donning a whole suit for what might be a 90-second trip is a lot of friction, especially when the alternative is feeling a little bit guilty about driving for a trip that could easily be biked/walked/etc.

A bit of a tangent, but those "distinctive" interior mockups made me instantly cringe. I'm fine with designers having a bit fun with every part of the car other than the top of the dashboard, which should be flat, dull, and dark (ideally covered in something like Vantablack), because any bit of visual clutter there gets superimposed over the road in front of you thanks to the reflection of the windshield in sunny weather.

No idea if it helps with this sort of thing but one hack that patio11 recommends is to own a de minimus amount of stock in the company to have shareholder relations available as a channel for contacting someone who can fix things.

As a regular customer of the onboard dining on BC Ferries, I was always a bit mystified about how the cashier (maybe 20 m from the counter where you order) seemed to have some kind of clairvoyance regarding which type burger(s) to charge for, as they all use the same kind of wrapper.

It turns out the wrapper (that's printed with patches of stripes and crosshatches in different colo(u)rs), can be wrapped in a way that exposes a particular pattern on the outside of the finished package that indicates what's inside.

I'm sure this sort of system is used elsewhere but I've never noticed it anywhere else.

One of the draws of the DTC model (and IKEA) is the apparently heavily commission-based pay structure of the sales staff of most brick-and-mortar furniture stores.

Standard time keeps noon relatively close to the middle of the day, and midnight pretty close to the middle of the night (which, as the article suggests, is the entire point of having timezones).

Summer "daylight time" tweaks that by an hour (or two?) in order to make customary "waking-up time" closer to the summer sunrise.

Permanent daylight time just shifts everything over one timezone to the east, which to me seems kind of silly (along the lines of the "these go to 11" bit in Spinal Tap) but does have the benefit of not having to rename things like "the 11 o'clock news".

Agree strongly on 4000 weeks, and I'm planning to check out the second one.

Although I haven't personally engaged with it, David Chapman's Meaningness writings (https://meaningness.com) try to address this stuff from an analytical perspective.

By all accounts the built-in speakers are amazing, but tbf not usable if you need privacy or to not annoy people sitting next to you.

It has a built-in spaced-repetition system with predefined, extremely silly (but effective) mnemonics to help memorize the various kanji (and their various readings) and vocabulary.

The first three levels are free, with the prerequisite of learning a bit of hiragana and how to type them on their website (I don't know how well this translates to an actual Japanese keyboard). The emphasis is on reading, and they suggest you don't put a lot of effort into understanding actual Japanese in the wild (or media) until level 10, when you have enough vocabulary to not be completely lost.

I'm only on level 5, just trying to be somewhat less functionally illiterate for an upcoming Japan trip than I was when visiting Taiwan 20 years ago. Although I can't read many kanji, I'm often able to recognize a few as well as enough of the radicals of the ones I don't know to sometimes make sense of them.

It’s worth pointing out that there are lots of ways to get people into and out of a city that don’t involve driving a private car.

Can a FZ assist in enrolling a new key in the ECU immobilizer’s list of approved keys, or does it just facilitate a relatively quiet way of unlocking the doors?

Because honestly there are lots of ways of gaining access to the inside of a vehicle, and if it can’t enroll a new key it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for stealing a vehicle.

The article regularly refers to Automakers (e.g. in the headline), but the actual suit is from NADA and its Texas equivalent, who represent auto dealers.

IIUC it’s the minimal bioavailability of it in pill form that’s the problem, but it works ok when injected.

Also if the chemo wipes out your immune system apparently you can start fresh (Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation).

I like to say that the best thing you can grow in your backyard from an environmental and financial perspective is an ADU ("granny flat"). At least assuming you live closer than average to a job center.

The second best thing would be herbs (since they cost a fortune at the store and are only available in quantities that will spoil before they're used up).

The third best thing, as the article says, are things that are costly to produce on a farm but grow like well with little maintenance in small spaces (my favorite here in the Salish Seaboard is raspberries).

The fact is that "people miles" are astronomically more costly than "food miles" or almost any other kind of miles. People are impatient, fragile, don't like to be stacked, prefer a relatively limited range of temperatures, and their loved ones usually consider them irreplaceable. Just about any other type of cargo is easier to deal with.

I do see a niche for growing stuff in places where the light, water/humidity, and heating/cooling needed to grow plants is already being produced for humans sharing the space. Basically an amenity that happens to produce food, which in a lot of cases would include the gardens discussed in the article.

I think your comment is a little bit off-target but adjacent to something interesting:

Putting a lot of time and effort into learning something difficult, but that isn't directly useful for survival, is a form of status signaling. Hence the stereotype of successful artists and musicians and athletes having countless fawning admirers while considerably fewer people are thought to be throwing themselves at accountants and teachers and farmers.

Unicycling is interesting because you could just be going about your day getting from point A to point B, while a hostile audience sees both conspicuous consumption ("I have so much free time that I can learn to unicycle") and conspicuous outrage ("I'm so secure in my status that I can do something nonconformist that maybe also looks kind of silly"), and feels like they have to take you down a notch.

Now that there’s no longer a giant pool of unemployed workers in North America who could otherwise be employed to courier food orders from a restaurant’s table to its kitchen, there’s a real tradeoff between a human doing a job that only a human can do and a human doing a job that a robot (or a website) could easily do with current tech.

"haha, only serious" question: Can we use something like CFCs to break down the ozone?

I've never worked in a supremely functional scrum org, but as others have stated it may only really work if the whole org is on board. In places that I've worked there has always been a fundamental tension between how developers/makers work best ("leave me alone! It'll be done when it's done!") and how the rest of the world expects things to happen ("I need to know if it's going to be next week or next year"). I imagine organizations that can take the "it'll be done when it's done" approach are very much the exception.

So in the usual case that means that developers have to "waste" a not insubstantial amount of time making plans (that may largely be thrown away) and estimates (that might be off by an order of magnitude), and then course-correct over time (trading off time, scope, and quality) as they learn things while doing the project.

The other thing I've found over the course of the last ~25 years is that any kind of system (waterfall, scrum, GTD) is an abstraction that inevitably leaks. It's not somehow provably correct that if you follow a system perfectly that nothing will fall through the cracks. You can either admit that any model of the world is necessarily simplified, or you can keep retroactively adjusting your definitions of things in the model and at some point end up like a game developer treating a subway train as a piece of clothing, or arguing about whether a particular body of water is a "pond" or a "lake".

Do you have first-hand experience with being overweight and/or losing a significant amount of weight?

I think you're vastly overestimating how much of this (particularly "calories out") is under voluntary control. We're discussing an article that showed that extra active calories burned tend to lead to a compensatory reduction in resting metabolism.

And there are some very strong psychological/physiological drives that influence "calories in" (read up on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment for examples).

Space heating/cooling, along with water heating, are the overwhelming majority of household energy use. In fact, in a heating-dominated climate there isn't much of win from having efficient lights and appliances, because the space-heating system has to make up for the energy not wasted by the lights/appliances.

So it's unusual ("unique" is a high bar) in that it's one of the largest privately-owned energy-consuming devices where existing technology can result in substantial energy savings and emission reductions.

Ground-source real-world cost effectiveness for residential use isn't that great (see here, although unfortunately paywalled: https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/geothermal-heat...).

The gotchas are the energy used to run the circulator for the ground loop, and the fact that over the course of a heating or cooling season the ground temperature lowers or raises, respectively, by enough that the COP isn't even much greater than an air-source system (but this would definitely vary by climate).

Coupled with the much higher installation cost, it's a bit hard to make a system pencil out for a building the size of a single-family house.

You can do radiant cooling with an air-to-water heat pump just as you can with an air-to-air or water-to-water heat pump.

The main issue is managing humidity so that the dewpoint stays below the emitter temperature.