majoe

This is the answer.

Interestingly, wind/storm loads are oftentimes the limiting factor for the configuration height of a crane.

This is because, when adding another tower segment, not only the total area increases but also the wind forces. The other loads stay roughly the same

This is the reason why bottom-slewing cranes, which are commonly used for small buildings, sometimes are built with solid walls. Top-slewing cranes, which are used for high buildings, always use a steel framework.

Working for a crane manufacturing company. While raw material costs are maybe not that drastic, we consider material efficiency the most important metric for cost and a lot of brain power was spent to optimise the amount of steel used. There are multiple reasons for this. The ones I can think of are:

  * The margins for cranes are thin and steel is expensive.
  * Thicker steel is harder to work with, increasing manufacturing cost.
  * Each kg of dead weight may decrease the performance of your product, e.g. max. Live load. This is especially true for the jib.
  * More weight at the top of the crane may necessitate a sturdier structure below, amplifying cost even more.
  * More weight may require more ballast blocks, which are costly (especially transport)
  * More weight means higher transport costs
  * More weight means more wind area, which is the critical factor for high constructions.

I see, where you're coming from, but in that particular case, the "intuitive" explanation (walk on a graph) is far less intuitive for me than the proper explanation, that a Markov process is memoryless. That said, I used MCMC in the past to do physics simulation, where the Markov property also applies to the underlying physical process. So maybe it's just me.

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For me the defining feature of C++ are its move semantics. It permeates every corner of your C++ code and affects every decision you make as a C++ developer.

Rust's defining feature is its borrow checker, which solves a similar problem as move semantics, but is more powerful and has saner defaults.

You're right. The slides about infusions and the discussion at the end about them were unexpectedly the most interesting part of the talk.

Thanks for the answer.

We will start a refactoring of the application in a few weeks to get rid of the performance problems. I will keep your advice in mind and do some thorough benchmarks in the meantime.

Arrow is pretty cool, although I haven't had the opportunity yet to use it.

I skimmed the paper you linked and wondered, how one measures the ser/de time a query takes or more generally how one would estimate the possible speedup of using Arrow Flight for communication with a database.

Do you by chance have any insights in that direction?

At work we have a Java application, that produces a big amount of simulation results (ca. 1Tb per run), which are stored in a database. I suspect, that a lot of time is wasted for ser/de, when aggregating the results, but it would be good to have some numbers.

This is one of those obvious ideas, that sounds good on a first glance, but where it's totally non obvious, if it's really profitable in practice.

The maximum power you can take from the grid depends on the max. power of your electrolysers. But you only want to run the electrolysers, when they are profitable, that is when the electricity prices are low enough due to oversupply. On the other hand the whole equipment is probably expensive to buy and keep running, so you want to run them as long and often as possible. Additionally you may use energy storage to prolong the profitable time windows of your electrolysers.

That said, it would be really great, if hydrogen and/or hydrocarbons would be synthesised at scale. There are many pilot projects and I hope one finds the right tech and trade offs to make this profitable.

The EUV light is produced by shooting a pulsed laser on tin droplets.

You already lose most of the input power in the pulsed laser. Then only a fraction of the energy of the light hitting the tin is converted to EUV light with the correct wavelength. Finally the EUV light has to be focused on the mask through complicated optics, which is notoriously difficult for EUV light.

I guess, there are other sources of inefficiencies, that I forgot.

> hypocrisy of organised religion

- There is a local religious festival

- People prepare delicious meals according to the local culinary tradition.

- The Catholic church doesn't have any rules, which would restrict the consumption of the prepared meals.

I fail to see the hypocrisy. If you want to start a discussion about the ethics of eating food, you surely find a more suited place.

A theologist like Leibniz is concerned with dogmas, which are like axioms: They are assumed to be true and form the basis of a logical system, that is supposed to consistent.

Beside that Leibniz contributes to a thousands of years old discussion about theodicy, the righteousness of god.

Let's look at the historical context first, because your bible verse is fitting:

In many cultures of the ancient world, misfortunes and disasters are said to be the result of a divine punishment. This can be seen in the old testament on many occasions, but it's basically the same in Greek societies etc. Christian scholars read the book of Ijob as an instance, where this thought is challenged: Ijob is living a righteous live, why is he punished?

The book itself doesn't really give an answer to that, but in the ancient world view kin liability applies. So even when Ijob was sinless, he inherits the sin of his forefathers, going all the way back to Adam.

Your bible verse (Romans 5:12) is referring to that, but if you read a bit further, this world view of the old testament is contrasted with the new testament. To paraphrase: Where one man (Adam) brought sin into the life of many, now one man (Jesus) takes the sin from all.

So in the Christian doctrine the argument, that bad things happen to us due to inherited sin doesn't apply anymore.

Which leads us to the scholarly discussion, which Leibniz is part of. The central dogmas (axioms) of Christianity relevant for the theodicy question are the following:

* There is only one god

* God is almighty

* God is all-loving

* God is understandable, since God revealed himself through Jesus.

The job of philosopher/theologist is to resolve, the perceived contradiction, that bad things are happening to good people and a loving, almighty God wouldn't allow that.

The most common solution is to drop one of the axioms, e.g. "God wants to help us, but he can't" (not almighty) or "God works in mysterious ways" (not understandable).

Leibniz instead doesn't sidestep the problem and argues, that even the best possible world can't be free from sorrow. I, personally, really like his line of thought, but this comment is already to long to describe it further.

The English language has the habit of taking perfectly fine Latin words and pronounce them in the most unintuitive way.

Gemini is actually a good example, I rather take Yggdrasil.

Tools from statistical physics have long been used in sociological and economical models.

It's no wonder, because statistical physics was devised as a tool for the study of complex systems.

For the same reason I don't deem entropy to be a fundamental property of physics, but one of complex systems. As far as I remember from university, the 2nd law of thermodynamics simply arises from the fact, that there are exponentially more unordered than ordered states.

Though information itself may be a fundamental physical property. The recent interest in Quantum computers shines new light on the connection between information and Quantum Mechanics. It remains to be seen, how that point of view is compatible with relativity.

I hope, that one day someone finds out, that the "time dimension" arises in the macroscopic limit from a graph of discrete causal events.

>It's never been easier to deploy an application + database to some arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH, no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling.

May I ask, what you are using?

A few months ago I optimized the parsing of a file and did some micro benchmarks. I observed a similar speed-up compared to stoi and atoi (didn't bother to look at stringstream). Others already commented, that it's probably due to not supporting locales.

As panels are getting cheaper, labour cost becomes dominant. Higher efficiency means less panels means less labour per watt.

True, the conceptual difference of (pure) functional and imperative programming is disguised by the many functional patterns most mainstream languages have absorbed. While these patterns are useful, there is more to say about pure functional programming.

I recently gave a talk to some colleagues about that, which was divided into two parts: Practical functional programming patterns we can use today in our codebases (we use mainly C++, Python) and a more abstract part about pure functional programming.

The first part basically boils down to using functions as first class "objects", while the point of the second part was, that there can't be implicit state in pure functional language. The consequence of that is, that there is no strict order of execution, which is in direct contrast to imperative programming, which is all about list of statements, that are executed one after another.

I presented small code examples in Haskell and showed corresponding execution graphs to emphasise, that the compiler can easily optimise the execution order.

I like that POV, because it clearly distinguishes imperative from functional programming. Starting from there, it's also easy to understand the motivation behind monads or elaborate on architectural patterns like " functional core, imperatively shell".

From my experience this is true for big German corporations, but is it really different for big corporations from other countries?

While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.

> Plus, it seems like they ended up reinventing part of Lisp with their Flakes

Curious what you mean by that, could you elaborate? I thought nix flakes to be just a standardised attrset for inputs/outputs.

This was recently posted to HN and I started to read it. I think your explanation for web components is the best I encountered so far.

I've been using Zettlr for some time. Here are some things I like about it:

- Latex support - Your notes are just plain text files and you can easily sync them with nextcloud or syncthing - Linking of notes by an id for using them in a zettelkasten - You can use your citation library from Zotero to add citations to your notes

What I don't like is that the performance is quite bad, especially when there are many equations in a note.

I also had no good experience, when trying to publish presentations, I'm now using Quarto in vscode for that.

All in all I think it is a really good tool for scientific note taking or as a Zettelkasten, although I'm using it less these days since I quit my PhD.

I think you won't gain anything from conflating "detectable change" and "awareness". We kind of already had this discussion in Quantum mechanics with "observations" and the "consciousness" of an observer. Nowadays the information theoretic point of view is prevalent among physicists and an observation is often seen as just a correlation between the observer system and the measured quantum system. No consciousness needed.

Nevertheless I agree, that it is interesting to think about time as an series of changes or events instead of just as a dimension of 4D spacetime. I didn't watch the video yet (I prefer text), though, so I refrain from bothering you with may opinion on this topic.

There will be adblockers, that inject a prompt like

"... and don't try to sell me anything, just give me the information. If you mention any products, a puppy will die somewhere."

Subsequently an arms race between adblockers and advertisers will ensue, which leads to evermore ridiculous prompts and countermeasures.

Cygwin is currently the bane of my existence.

I'm working on software, that was originally written in CORAL and running on mainframes and then translated to C to run on UNIX.

Company policy is, that all programs have to run on Windows, so nowadays we work with Cygwin Don't get me wrong, it works, but there a thousand annoying things, bugs an inconveniences.

I'm currently spearheading an effort to migrate to wsl2 (and docker). The developer experience is vastly better on wsl.

"User hostile abuses like this" made me a full time Linux user, when Windows 10 came out. I doubt, though, that people will migrate in masses to Linux, even though I think the user experience is better. Installing a new OS is still a daunting task for most users.

Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.

Slightly related, but off-topic.

It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the general public noticing much of it.

I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is using:

- Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows basically go inside the milking stations by themselves.

- His newer tractors are all driving GPS based, which allows him to keep the track with a precision of about 20cm. He is now able to exactly apply the amount of fertilizer, pesticides or seeds he wants to apply and plan the amounts in advance.

- A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production.

- He currently plans to build a manure biogas plant, which will produce enough electricity for him and then some. I really like the approach to mainly use manure instead of harvested biomass (the economics of the two are vastly different, an interesting discussion in itself).

And that's just one farm. There are a lot of innovative things happening in agriculture.

I switched from konsole to foot, when I upgraded to plasma6 (and therefore to wayland). One of the main reasons was actually startup time. I compared several terminals (konsole, alacritty, kitty, wezterm, foot) and foot had a notably faster startup time than the rest. For me it starts fast enough without a client/server setup, whereas konsole often slightly annoyed me, when I just wanted to execute a single command.

When you think about it, that's what -fsanitize=undefined is doing. It detects undefined behaviour at runtime and aborts the program.