rm445

I have been hired essentially on the strength of a covering letter... weirdly, I was later cc'ed on a whole email chain going back to my application, and saw the impact of certain things I had mentioned.

It was basically explaining my passion for a cross-industry move. But for most people for most jobs, most of the time, a job is just a somewhat match for their skillset and there isn't much else to say. Now I'm hiring I don't pay much credence to cover letters or objective statements, but they can still be meaningful for certain people's circumstances. I think cover letters have a bad rep because a generic one is meaningless.

I'm due to interview someone tomorrow who has had 20 jobs in 25 years... a few 6-month contract positions but mostly 12-18 months in 'permanent' roles. I'd estimate that most of the roles would have been on project-based work of >2yrs duration.

I'm keeping an open mind - this person isn't ruled out but it's difficult not to read something into the possibility that they've never seen through a project.

Yeah, I remember reading a long-form story about the 'Death Valley Germans' from this site, and it was so sad - a family with young kids, that just hadn't comprehended how far they could be from help when they got into trouble in the USA. That heading towards the local military base might not help when everything is so huge that all you'll see is miles of fence.

Because task runners come from the lineage of build systems, I (previously) would have thought that smart management of dependencies was a critical feature, especially skipping outputs whose inputs haven't changed, so that tasks can be run efficiently. Make and rake both do this.

But I guess, enough of the time, what people want is just a nice tidy way of organising tasks to run. Not drastically different to a set of shell scripts, but organised differently, with a few extra features and less boilerplate per task.

I think so. Even with a compiled library distributed with a header file but no source, the header file needs to forward declare something like 'typedef struct foo FOO;' So (unless there's some clever trick I've missed) you can always tell it's a struct but not necessarily see the definition.

There is a point, perhaps a little specious, that you put a module's data structures behind a typedef so the interface doesn't change if it changes from a simple data type to a struct. Probably doesn't happen too often.

The perfect C object-oriented-style interface is FILE* from stdio.h. A FILE is a structure full of operating-system-specific file information but you never have to see it or worry about what's in it, you just use the functions.

Yeah, that's what it's for. But the ideas generalise to general project-management and processing of 'stuff'. A lot of it makes sense in multi-person hardware development projects.

Transistor-free compute in memory? Am I hopelessly behind the times in thinking that memory is, like, flip-flops in CMOS?

I get that memory could be anything which holds an encoded state, for instance magnetically. But how is the compute part of it achieved?

The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed.

I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.

Got to respect Mr Watterson's stance, but I was a little bit gutted to learn he had turned down Pixar - surely a safe set of hands that could produce something incredible from his creation. Would he turn down Hayao Miyazaki as well?

Your friend sounds like a remarkable person, but it's not really clear from your account whether he has hacked career success in the career field of academia, or has found more efficient ways to do great science. If you accept there's a difference between those things, and that the latter is more important to the world at large, it's concerning.

Can I ask, did you lose a relative on the Sheffield? It's quite rare to see the Falklands conflict through the human lens rather than the almost irresistible chance to see just how effective cold-war technologies were:

- naval area denial: even if the threat of the Exocet missile was overstated, it caused the British aircraft carrier to hang back. Conversely, having a nuclear-powered attack submarine in the area was highly effective for the British.

- Aerial combat: the carrier-borne Harriers were outnumbered and outclassed, but the Sidewinder missile was devastating.

The twin of your human factors story is the infantry engagements in the Falklands: a small force of professionals with good night-vision equipment was effective against unmotivated conscripts.

It's a job title in HR with a certain level of seniority. It doesn't imply that the business is organised as a partnership.

It's a dumb title, but very common. I think the root cause is a lack of a general job title for a senior contributor in that field. With the debasement of the word engineer, I'm just glad they're not called senior HR engineer.

Dale Carnegie wrote 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. It's an enduring work, but did you perhaps mean the industrialist Andrew Carnegie?

Nice site, but it makes a meal out of the material. The technique of 'completing the square' is about as quick and easy as the quadratic formula (indeed, doing it with generic coefficients is what gives you the quadratic formula) and only calls on a good elementary understanding rather than dredging up a formula from the memory banks.

Just to nitpick, there were two Falcon Heavy missions in 2019 - Arabsat and a DoD one. That's after the successful demo launch, which was in 2018.

There are also some number scheduled for this year - I doubt we will actually see five Falcon Heavy launches, but there will be a few.

Falcon Heavy was a victim of Falcon 9's success, but it probably can't do the same thing in turn to Starship, it's just too expensive.

Quite a few, though it may have crept up slightly - one link I found said the Uk average new builds size 2002-2012 was more like 1030 sq ft.

UK new build houses (as a type - of course there's lots of variety) are a strange breed. Small and crammed into tiny lots though cleverly designed to make the most of a small space. Energy-efficient but shoddily constructed. The cheapest premium-looking materials (i.e. brick). Generally nice enough to live in but a bit depressing.

Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.

Quite a bit more than $20, but the option to pay more for Apple products and get a better experience has always been there. I don't want to come across as a shill or anything, of course Apple has made blunders and many people have always been locked into Windows. But it does seem relevant, that despite network effects and lock-in, they've been able to provide an alternative ecosystem all these years primarily by having slightly-less-worse products that people are willing to pay a premium for.

Just to note, the linked story is about David Mayman of Jetpack Aviation in California, while the other stories you mentioned are (British) Richard Browning of Gravity Industries - the one recognisable by its wrist-mounted supplementary engines. So there are at least a couple of competing inventions.

Sure, there isn't a killer app for jet packs at the moment, or perhaps ever. They were enabled by miniature-scale turbine engines being developed for other purposes. But you never know - some innovation in control systems, or them turning out to be just perfect for some obscure emergency/military task, they might find a niche beyond stunts and tethered tourist experiences.

Big congregation, arena-like seating? Check. Incredible 300-metre-plus gothic tower? No.

I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.

> Microsoft

> Ban FAANG

I know exactly what you mean, but is that what we're doing now? Including Microsoft in FAANG but not changing the acronym?

There's plenty of money in the hands of religious people. Where are the ultra-tall cathedrals? It would be absolutely staggering to see modern construction techniques used with traditional-style facades, to produce church towers competing with skyscrapers.

I find it weird that there are two kinds of snobbery for goods. (Harmless snobbery - de gustibus non disputandum est).

Coffee, wine and whisky lovers adore the rarest and most refined, and insist the everyday stuff is vile. But lovers of crime novels, science fiction and anime adore the widest range, and insist that the most obscure trash contains treasure. I've never met a wine lover who would rave about obscure objectively-bad wines, or a sci-fi fan who will only read the most perfect works. I don't know quite what the difference is - consumability? Physical flavour?

I'm all for letting people enjoy what they enjoy. Personally I wouldn't want my palate to become so refined it became a hassle.

We live in an absolutely wonderful biome, at the bottom of a deep, steep well. Sending materials down the well might or might not make sense, depending on the needs of the people at the bottom, who will be the vast majority of humanity well into the foreseeable future. But for the people up there, asteroids could be a better source of mass and materials than sending things up from the bottom of the well.

Thinking about space habitats, or very-large-mass spacecraft made from asteroids, may seem fairly far-fetched, but it's fair game in opposition to the author's 'Never, Ever'.

The 'what makes science work' is stored in the scientists.

They learn by reading the literature, but also by communicating, and by an active process of testing their own understanding and resolving gaps and inconsistencies. Even when a self-taught genius like Ramanujan comes along, they benefit from being brought into the community.

The question of how one would determine the state of the art in a field has an answer, but at present it would be indistinguishable from training a scientist, rather than running a clever software tool that could synthesize from the literature.

There are safety-critical systems, though.

Big vessels full of poisonous (but useful!) chemicals. Aircraft control systems. All carefully designed to be far more nines than 99% reliable - provided that the components behave according to their datasheets and how they behaved during validation.

Yeah. I'm not qualified to judge the quality of an instruction set, but this writer destroyed all credibility with me by claiming that an undergraduate could design a better architecture (than this enormous collective effort) in a term. It's right up there with claiming you could create Spotify in a weekend or whatever.

The promise of crypto(currency) is that you buy some and then you get rich.

I'm not even trying to be super-negative here - after all, if it does become a lasting store of value, accepted as money in the long term, then early adopters will be holding something valuable. It could happen. But right now the hype is self-perpetuating.

Great post, but somebody has to care about base load, round-the-clock power, grid frequency and so on, right?

The cost argument is quite compelling, but there seems to be a narrowing menu of options at the whole-system level. Bet on battery storage to save the day. Keep burning fossil fuels (internationally unacceptable, plus they're not renewable!). Massive degrowth (far from acceptable). Edit: fusion! (I love this one, but betting society on it would be a stretch right now).

Gritting our teeth and paying the cost of nuclear seems to have some value as an option on the table.

This event happened back in the eighties and there have been changes to warning symbols in response to this and similar incidents.

ISO 21482 specifies an extremely scary-looking radiation symbol [1], to be placed inside such equipment (radiography/radiotherapy etc) as a last-ditch warning. The message might well get through even to a barely-literate scrap thief.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...