jschwartzi

Same but with my Sennheiser HD280s. I can still buy brand new earpads and a band pad online.

I think it's very rational to see people being harmed and to want to do something about that. It's how many of the best policies in America have been formed. What's irrational is making it about politics, like it's somehow a leftist thing to empathize with the plight of others.

Rationality isn't about suppressing your emotions and your connection to other people. It's about integrating those emotions with your values, knowledge, and capabilities and deciding how to act based on that synthesis.

The fact is that we Americans are at our best when we're looking out for each other. And many of us are very concerned about COVID.

What does it matter? Should we care less about someone because they're not living in an "iconic tower" in "the flagship city of the country?"

And not just the lives of people who get COVID in the future, but also the lives of people who contract other illnesses. Every COVID bed is a bed that can't be used to treat someone who would have otherwise gotten sick or injured, and that person will have to go somewhere. Early on in Washington when the Army was setting up temporary field hospitals, it wasn't to handle COVID patients, it was to handle the normal patients who would have otherwise gone to the regular hospital.

What's messed up about this whole "crisis" is it's being framed as an individual choice to wear a mask. People make it sound like wearing a mask protects you somehow. And that's simply not true. I think in all this "individual freedom" sabre rattling someone is forgetting that you do not have the freedom to harm someone else. And your choice to not wear a mask is a choice to harm the people around you.

So really choosing not to wear a mask is more like choosing to drive drunk, and you won't ever know how many people you kill.

Yeah pretty frequently. It's not dangerous at all. Maybe if I was climbing alone it would be.

If I'm the only developer on a project and I really need to get to market I might do just that. I sometimes do day hikes on weeknights so this is actually a likely scenario for me.

NWS is an amazing resource for pre-trip planning for a variety of different people. I frequently consult it for weather forecasts prior to hiking. I'm not sure a company like Accuweather could provide me with access to such great forecasts or sensor data as NWS does given how reliant they are on NWS data themselves.

The other problem here is that Accuweather charges huge fees for access to their forecasts and I'm not sure that I, as a private citizen, could afford that. So my choices go from pay a little bit of tax to get access to high-quality, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, to being totally unable to get access to this information without paying exorbitant fee. Or alternatively just not knowing these things and having to pay higher insurance costs for my ignorance.

This is a really good example of how making government smaller makes a lot of peoples' lives much crappier.

I would add a marine survival/immersion suit to the list as well.

I've not worked specifically with contaminant sensors, but I know oxygen sensors require very specific and very consistent flow rates across the element. The type I've worked with used a ceramic element which absorbs oxygen and changes resistance as a result. So increased or decreased oxygen results in increased or decreased resistance.

Using a sensor like this to measure percent of oxygen in a gas requires you to eliminate a lot of confounding effects like pressure waves, flow changes, etc.. Basically you can cause the sensor to absorb more oxygen than is present in the gas by temporarily increasing flow.

So if you're building an air quality sensor you have to pay very close attention to how the air moves through the sensor. That requires not just a calibration but also characterization of the flow through the system under environmental conditions.

One other effect I could see is a contaminant sensor becoming fouled. Oxygen sensors can become fouled and report inaccurate values, which is why it's very important to control the inputs.

This is one of the reasons an antifreeze leak in an engine block can cause your engine performance to go to crap. The oxygen sensor is part of how a stoichiometric ratio of fuel and air is maintained, by monitoring the combustion products for excess oxygen. So when it gets fouled either the ceramic element is damaged or the sensor stops receiving consistent flow and the resistance relationship ceases to be valid.

In short I don't see how you could build a useful long-lasting sensor by just buying parts off Amazon or Digikey and throwing them together. You would have to treat it like a scientific instrument, meaning that you have to validate your assumptions about how the sensor performs and I doubt that most of the products on Amazon do that.

I think the argument is that so much of safety and risk is about whether a risk is acceptable or not. If you work in a foundry you may run a very real risk of being burned by hot metal. But the question is whether a pedestrian simply walking past the foundry should bear the same risk should there be an incident. What makes a risk "acceptable," in other words? And it strikes me that much of that depends on the individual experiencing the hazard, the nature of the hazard itself, as well as the risk of an incident involving the hazard.

The “good attitude” line is a form of toxic positivity, actually. Getting evicted sucks and it’s perfectly rational to be upset about it. What matters is how you move on from it, and you did and it sounds like your life is much better now.

> To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't give a damn, I saying why couldn't they i.e. why should they be forced if they choose not to.

In a lot of these cases it's probably true that there's no direct, measurable, benefit. One has to look past the direct benefit to the indirect benefit to understand why we would be forced to do something that has no direct benefit to ourselves.

For example, a property tax increase to pay for improved schools doesn't have any apparent benefit if you're a single adult with no children in school. In fact the whole education system has no measurable benefit to you if you're an adult. It seems like a waste of money. So we can say it has no first-order benefit.

But suppose that the increased funding would help pay for things like civics education. There's a second-order or third-order benefit to paying those taxes. By ensuring other peoples' children are educated in how our Democratic institutions work, they are better able to navigate those institutions, and they will make more informed decisions about their elected officials because of this. If you care about maintaining and improving those institutions then that tax increase is very worthwhile even if you have no kids. But it has no measurable economic benefit.

I think our Capitalist system has gone insane because it no longer acknowledges those benefits that have no tangible monetary value. It also encourages us to think in terms of money above all else. We've gone so far into the weeds with Scientific Management that if we can't measure the direct monetary benefit it doesn't exist. And that's not true.

Being unable to measure something simply means we can't quantify the benefit. It doesn't mean it has no benefit. And that's at the heart of a lot of economic arguments against tax increases. They're arguing that being unable to quantify the benefit implies the benefit doesn't exist. And that's patently untrue in a lot of cases.

Only if you conflate "The Dow" or "The S&P 500" as the "economy." People who only watch the number go up think things are going well, while people who look at how real people fare in this crisis think things are going poorly.

I was a warehouse clerk which meant I was responsible for picking stowing, receiving, shipping and organizing the warehouse.

It was mine. An opening appeared in the service department and I applied for it.

I got PIP'ed and actually fixed the problem I had and resolved the PIP. The problem was that I would mis-ship items sometimes in a warehouse. I figured out that I couldn't reliably read some of the product labels, so I went to go get an eye exam. Apparently I had 20/100 vision in one eye due to astigmatism. Getting glasses meant that I quit fucking up, so they dropped the PIP and moved me into another part of the company.

I guess I'm the poster child for having vision insurance as a company benefit.

Yeah RPi is a great toy but you should treat it like a chemistry set. Use it as a tool for learning but don’t build a product with it. The difference between a $24 board and a $200 board is often the level of support you get. The boards I’ve used in the past all have manuals down to the chip and I won’t touch anything that doesn’t.

Do you want things that children do to follow them for the rest of their lives?

Even then, the Google results are usually terrible. I haven't used Google as a fallback in about a year because every time I tried it they couldn't find what I was looking for either. Or they did something atrocious like changing my search terms for me.

Last time I looked at Azure IoT Hub for anything I was baffled by the way their system used MQTT but didn't provide general-purpose MQTT access. Frankly they're not a great example of a company understanding how these devices are supposed to work.

If your unit tests are breaking all the time, try testing less at the unit level and more at the integration level. There are a lot of dogmatists out there who preach that unit tests should have "X % coverage" no matter what, but that's a ridiculous claim. Different projects will require different mixes of testing strategy, and part of the engineering process is arriving at your verification and validation methods, codifying them, ensuring that they provide valid output, and making sure you're using your time efficiently. If most of your time is spent fixing tests, re-evaluate whether those tests are worth doing that way. Your time might be better spent testing at a higher level or even manually.

Polynomial fitting can be used to generate curves which fit any dataset perfectly given enough degrees. Like if you give me a data set with 150 points in it that are apparently randomly distributed throughout the sample space, I can give you a nice high-order polynomial that perfectly passes through all 150 data points.

Making any claims based on that kind of curve fitting is a huge red flag, especially if you don't discuss that.

One of the reasons we would prefer lower-order fits to higher-order fits is that there is a very real risk of overfitting in the interior of a data set but then providing completely inaccurate results anywhere but at the data points. Seeing that kind of overfitting in a scientific paper without any justification suggests that the author of the paper is making statements without any basis in science.

Good luck running serverless code in a lightbulb.

The problem is that it's also not free money. The students who get their degree but can't use it have to pay the money back just the same as students who got the degree and get the high-paying entry level job.

So getting a degree is a gamble, because you either come out ahead or you get hobbled by it for the rest of your life. Whereas if you did indeed get free money to get a degree it would eliminate the hobble and produce a class of well-educated people who could afford to work for PD wages.

It's also a tool to pacify people with empty promises of a better future. The way that it's being used as a distant future utopia is like the way promises of Heaven are used in Abrahamic religions to convince people to suffer in the here and now.

A lot of people would choose to suffer some now in order to go to some peaceful space colony where they don't have to live with any of the consequences for our biosphere. They'll just get to go live in a different one. The reality is that if we continue to ignore the very real problems on our planet we won't ever see the day that we're living on other planets.

It doesn't matter that there are real, quantifiable benefits to space exploration. Most people who believe it's important don't know anything about those benefits, and they don't think it's important because of that. It's all about the promise of a "heaven" in the sky in which they won't have to struggle anymore.

We had the same experience with GH once(and never again as we canceled). The food arrived and was completely inedible. The restaurant sent out a vindaloo that was the most unnatural red color, like they had dumped a bin full of chili flake in it.

Grubhub pointed the finger at the local restaurant, and the local restaurant pointed the finger at GH for not specifying the level of spiciness. In the end the only way to resolve the problem was to do a chargeback because neither merchant would take responsibility. We didn't have the business relationship with the restaurant. So I'll never use GH for anything because when something goes wrong they absolve themselves of responsibility.

And I'm skeptical of any other company that acts as a base middleman like they do.

Teams is pretty crappy software but it works really well as an integrated chat system and it fits nicely in our organization.

The Windows client is really really slow. Nearly every time I click on it and start typing I get about 10 characters in before it pauses and does something for about 15 to 60 seconds, and then I can finish my message when it's done.

They have, in the past, reached for LISP and various other languages. What matters for life-critical systems isn't the presence or absence of a formal specification. It's more important to foster a culture of design verification and validation of tooling. You can use Brainfuck in a medical device provided you can create the right organizational architecture to ensure the quality of your Brainfuck code. It's more about creating a rational engineering organization and having a process of searching for problems and solving them proactively rather than waiting for your customers to test your code.

Of course most rational engineering organizations wouldn't choose Brainfuck because it's harder to write code that other people can evaluate. But it's not automatically out of the question if you have a good reason for its use.

Methodologically it makes sense to exclude work done in the mmap call. After all you would do that once to initialize the memory but you never need to call it to do the work. The point of the test wasn't to check performance of the mmap syscall versus the read syscall, but simply to check the performance of read() versus memory-mapped files.