rocket_surgeron

I was a software engineer for just long enough to realize that it was killing my soul and so I scammed my way into being an engineer in aerospace.

Protip: if you do some solidworks tutorials on your off-time to get some experience with it and have basic electronics knowledge from a lifetime of dicking around with amateur radio and electronics kits, managers are willing to overlook a LOT.

Before I sat in a nightmarish hellscape of an open office staring at IntelliJ all day between Agile cultist gatherings.

Now I have an office and a typical week has me working with hardware prototypes, building test apparatus, writing a little code but just a little, working with MechEs, developers, EEs, and piling schematic printouts up on my desk into precarious stacks like I'm a stereotype of a wizard hoarding esoteric knowledge or something.

4-5 times a year I go out to remote test ranges two weeks at a time to do a little R&D in the field which involves crawling around inside test aircraft to wire up instrumentation and flying around in circles for hours on end. For space stuff we have launch parties.

Also, my workspace is an office with windows and a door that closes and seating and a whiteboard for ad-hoc meetings and I have not had to wear my noise-cancelling headphones just to remain sane as everyone around me slurps their soup and has conversations on the phone in years!

If I had continued on my previous career path, today would see me trying to figure out how to get AI to get you to watch an ad about dickpills or something so that my employer could stripmine your personal data and now I build cool stuff that flies in the air and in space.

There are options, though I'm not sure about the UK, for well-compensated tech work that isn't just sitting staring at a screen for 8 hours a day.

Sometimes it seems that if any effort takes Intel more than a year or two to show results, they cancel it.

If AMD had done the same, Intel would still enough enterprise marketshare to let products breathe.

Maybe they're right? The fact that Intel's competitors are moving ahead with variations on XPU is telling.

> However, ink chemistry is not some straightforward mixing and the risks are largely downplayed by 3rd party ink manufacturers.

Exactly and precisely 0.0% of printer manufacturers make their own ink.

Almost all printer ink in the world comes from a very small region, a single business park really, of Malaysia. Some is also made in Europe and Japan.

It is made by companies like Toyo Chem, DIC, Sakata, and Swan and transported directly to the facilities that fill the cartridges.

Printer companies have almost no input into the process, they buy based on spec from a list of offerings.

3rd party cartridge manufacturers buy the same ink, with the same specs, from the same manufacturers as printer manufacturers.

If a printer manufacturer claims to have an exclusive formula they are either lying, or the ink maker lied about giving them exclusivity because you can buy any ink from anyone at anytime. If the manufacturer wants to keep up appearances they'll change a single digit on the product ID and claim it is a different product, they don't care where the drums are going so long as the wire transfer goes through.

Even the ink manufacturers OFTEN don't "create" ink. They just blend pigments from pigment manufacturers together with solvents from solvent manufacturers in formulae that are pre-determined between the pigment and solvent makers.

If a customers says "I need an ink that does x" they go to the pigment and solvent suppliers and ask "what do I need to buy so the ink does x" and the suppliers tell them and the ink manufacturer follows the formula to the letter.

I can't even spend $3 let alone $3k on the App Store without biometric authentication and my kids are grown and gone. Why would someone change this?

Handing a 10 year old your AMEX and dropping them off at a mall is a bad idea.

This is the same thing, on an iPad.

What amount of money needs to be on the table for someone to take a meeting with a convicted solicitor of underaged prostitution?

It seems that my number is a hell of a lot higher than some of the "luminaries" that walk among us.

The Chomsky cultists are tying themselves up in knots to explain away his dealings with Epstein post-conviction, which were held in the company of Woody Allen and his stepdaughter-turned-wife.

If San Francisco is in a doom loop right now, what was it in back in the 60s-00s?

An ultra-hyper-mega-doomloop-of-death?

Hell in the 90s the violent crime rate routinely topped 1,800 per 100k. Today it is 1/3rd that.

I remember San Francisco in the 90s. Today's San Francisco is Disneyland compared to then.

My theory is that we are all suffering from collective cultural amnesia and have forgotten that the world existed prior to 2019 and thus have forgotten that while things go up and down year-to-year they have been getting better on the whole for decades.

>125W

And that is a lie, to achieve those scores it turbos and consumes 300W+ at turbo.

Today, right now, is a moment where AMD's enterprise product are outperforming Intel's in benchmarks.

Except for a very small set of specific use cases, I think anyone recommending Xeon for enterprise solutions is professionally negligent.

I have alcohol delivered to my house because it is the year 2023.

People who have trouble with self-checkouts remind me of drivers who never get an oil change and then complain about how crappy their car is when it breaks down, or people who take more than 25 seconds to complete an ATM transaction.

> cheap powerful batteries

Advances in energy density, reliability, and safety have revolutionized batteries over the last 30 years.

There are entire market segments where you are only as competitive as your battery and participants scramble to integrate the latest advancements but because you can't go to the store and buy a pack of AA batteries with the tech in them people think it doesn't exist.

The volumetric energy density of lithium-ion increased 8x between 2008-2020, doubling every four years.

Solid state batteries look to be taking up the improvement race. 450 watt-hours/liter was VERY good in 2020. A cheap YANGDA Thunder Stone solid-state drone battery purchased from a sketchy retailer in 2023 has an energy density of 537Wh/L, and you can buy a 18650 battery with 670Wh/L on amazon for $10. Specialty batteries 800-1000Wh/L are available to commercial clients, so the energy density has doubled once again in less than four years.

But nobody notices.

Millennia of sectarian strife in a region that has always exceeded the population of the "white" world since Europe was covered by hundreds of meters of ice?

I suppose you could measure a star against a lightbulb...

...I mean, they'll both burn you.

>I'm fucking sick of dumb motherfuckers saying a microscopically-minuscule annual statistical blip is SHIT GOING TO HELL.

>Things are just about as good as they've ever been in the history of the United States of America. Baltimore, too.

>Turn off the Fox News.

Considered harmful considered harmfuls considered harmful!

Are they going to make more than 7 of these?

Usually they only manufacture 7 examples of what they sell.

Five to give to YouTube review channels and two to actually sell.

When those two sell out they wait 29 months and then make two more.

Or so it seems.

If your primary care provider won't do at least one vitamin-d test per year, and then periodic tests once a deficiency is identified, you should get a new primary care provider.

If that's not an option, non-prescription at-home tests are available in the US for as low as $49.

I don't know about monthly, I think a 60-day followup after treatment in order to titrate your supplementation might be best (it takes time for supplementation to work), but at-home tests are an option if your provider is for some inexplicable reason, reluctant.

As far as I can tell, the only harm from supplementation comes when the typical adult consistently consumes doses so high as to be absurd (50,000+ IU daily for months) so I don't know why any medical professional would be hesitant to investigate such a common health issue with such an easy, inexpensive, and effective treatment.

It doesn't bother me.

Every single one of my ancestors for the last 3.5 billion years has died. It is part of existence.

50, 60, 100 more years? Great! Then I can pile on knee, hip, back, and wrist regeneration surgeries. Then extensive therapy to keep my brain from degrading. Also new teeth and corneas. Oh and the heart is going to need a lot of work if it starts beating for twice as long as it was designed to. Plus constant maintenance for the skin as it soaks up an entire second lifetime's worth of UV.

Just a never-ending cycle of expensive, likely painful, time-consuming all-consuming patches on the body to delay the inevitable.

Just kill me already.

Maybe eventually they'll find a path to immortality.

That would be even worse. I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks.

>I'm not saying the pundits are wrong in general

The pundits are wrong. The FDA follows the instructions given to them by Congress.

What went right is that there was broad bipartisan support for the 2017 FDA reauthorization act which permitted them to do this.

What went wrong was that covid delayed the rule making process by about 18 months.

Every single rule/regulation in the Code of Federal Regulations can be traced back to a law that originated in Congress with the words "the Secretary shall..." in it, with the secretary being the head of a government agency.

Prior to 2017 the Congress said "the Secretary shall regulate medical devices" and under the definition created by Congress hearing aids were medical devices, so the FDA did.

After 2017 the Congress said "the Secretary shall regulate medical devices but also make a category for OTC hearing aids" so the FDA did.

Also, rule changes take a long time either because of changes in the laws telling federal agencies what to do or laws already in 5 U.S. Code that define the rule-making process.

There are many federal agencies that would like to wave their hands and create or eliminate rules but for better or worse (I think mainly better) they can't.

Many, though not all, pundits don't realize what the process is.

Most people rejected His message.

They hated mjburgess because He told them the truth.

The amount of actual goods and non-crypto-related actual services purchased with crypto in the last year probably wouldn't fill a high school basketball court.

People who get paid in crypto immediately turn it into real money because the only thing it's used for is building virtual pyramidal constructs.

I was born in Germany and have lived there off and on for several years.

I've also lived all over the US. It's my general impression that the "typical" speed on unrestricted stretches of the autobahn and long, flat, rural, stretches of the US interstate system are roughly the same.

It's cool to see M5s and Fiat Alhambras (lol) zooming past at the rev limiter but most people get up to 85mph/136kph and chill out.

Germans love their campers so half the vehicles on the roads are towing caravans and going slowly anyways.

Don't worry, the control of external bleeding is basic first aid, no EMT training necessary.

What I said is the exact same stuff they teach you in Lifeguard training, and if 15-year-old me can learn it, anyone can. Never took it, but babysitter training probably covers it as well.

https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class/first-aid/first-aid-tr...

Antinatalism views reproduction as immoral.

This article isn't antinatalist.

This article states the irrefutable fact that as certain events occur, birthrates tend to decrease, and that it is not a cause for alarm as individuals and systems whose fortunes are tied to endless growth are asserting.

My wife and I have two children. Not the four of my parents and three of my wife's. That is not antinatalism, it is prudence.

I like Murakami. I've read practically every word he's written. I have almost every novel he's published and look forward to new releases.

He's got some very unique ideas and I like unique.

But that dude's got some weird thing going on with women.

>Hoover Institution

It is not a fallacy to assert that economic analysis from the Hooverites is about as likely to be correct as medical advice from a hobo who lives in a culvert behind the nail parlor in the strip mall.

The hobo may be right. May be.

All of the numbers might be correct, absolutely without flaw. But they're still hobos ranting about rationally acting rational actors.

Half of the fellows at Hoover are the Very Smart People who rubber stamped the Iraq War go-ahead who are now telling us that big gubmint is the problem and the sky is about to fall.

They just didn't read the article and are knee-jerking.

I don't comment unless I read the article, and then read most if not all of the links within the article.

Cook Medical isn't a coal mine, and Pike Place isn't a company town, and employees aren't being debt trapped.

But knee jerking is easier, and the hormones it releases are very attractive to many people.

For the most profoundly addicted, the acutely dying, and those who are mentally ill to the point of being unable to participate in society these are luxuries.

For everyone else, they are mandatory.

Exercise is the easiest. Exercise isn't running and weightlifting, exercise is pushing your body to the limits so that its limits slowly increase over time. For 600lbs people exercise may be standing up and sitting down. For the elderly, like my 92 year old grandmother with COPD, exercise is curling and doing overhead presses with a heavy book while seated. People with cystic fibrosis exercise, and are usually exercise machines because if they stop they die. Patients in iron lungs exercise. The only people who can't exercise are those in hospice care. If you can stand, standing until you cannot stand anymore is exercise. If you can walk, 5 seconds more walking than you did yesterday is exercise. Wheelchair-bound patients with Osteogenesis Imperfecta can (and are highly encouraged to) exercise. Exercise costs $0.00.

If you are so ill that you cannot pick up a 1 lbs dumbbell, putting a rubber band around your fingers and opening and closing your hand is exercise and will have benefits. If you are not acutely dying, you can exercise.

All forms of exercise at all levels for all people has a benefit-- however small, it is a benefit.

Eating right is harder, but is accessible to any able-bodied, homed, person. Able-bodied doesn't mean healthy. Able-bodied means "able to turn on a hotplate and lift a bag of beans."

Social support is the hardest, but is doable for all but the most mentally ill. There are roughly 35,000 social support groups full of people looking for a social support network dotted across the country. Many of them meet online so anyone who can read HN can participate as a first step. I do not believe they are adequate. I do believe that online support groups are an outstanding and effective first step.

Lacking a social support network is often fatal to human beings, and those who lack support need to work extremely hard to obtain one, but it isn't impossible.

There are human being for who exercise, diet, and friends are luxuries.

Someone active on hacker news is PROBABLY not one of them.

>What changed is the Queen’s Gambit got popular

I'm not sure if The Queen's Gambit is popular viewing with the 11-14 year olds obsessing over chess in my local middle school.

Twitch? Yes.

They had to stand up four separate chess clubs because one club with 300 members (about half the student body) was too much to handle.

So now there are intense intra-school rivalries like with Hogwarts houses-- never mind inter-mural competition.

An IC marking is not the same as a brand logo.

AMD has etched/printed their arrowhead logo on practically every product they've produced since the the AMD2901, but the brand logo for Ryzen is the enso.

Intel did market some products as the "i386" and "i486" but consumer-facing identification was typically "Intel 80x86". The lowercase-i IC marking practically disappeared from intel CPUs starting with the Pentium.

The "i" logo appears on early P5 models (like the P166 from 1996 I keep on my desk), and then disappears, relegated to the bottom of the CPU.

Here's some P5 shots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_(original)#Models_and_...

Pentium Pros, PIIs, PIIIs, P4s, and Core2 products are all practically devoid of the marking.

I would argue that the resurrection of the "i" branding in 2008 with the i7-920 was eased along by iProducts, especially since it practically disappeared from consumer/retail branding for over 15 years.

They still make bus systems similar to S-100.

VME was a successor, and I use VPX which has PCI Express (or any switched fabric if you're ambitious enough) on the backplane, at my day job every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPX

I wish VPX was more widely-adopted. You can get processor modules, the modules can have XMC mezzanine cards for add-ins like GPUs and NVMe drives, 10-gig (and faster) networking (including switches and routers) over the backplane, RAID storage arrays, FPGA modules, and more all in a rugged chassis.

You can get compact 3U boards and can make NUC-sized systems, or use the full-sized 6U boards and go nuts cramming capability into a printer-sized boxes.

But because it is almost exclusively limited to the aerospace/military domain everything is obscenely expensive.

A cheaper, less rugged, consumer-focused version could transform computing: easy tool-less upgrades, no clearance/compatibility issues with GPUs, cable-less desktops, and extreme modularity.

You could have an 8-bay chassis the size of a NAS from Synology or QNAP with 8 slots, with 2 for CPU, 2 for GPU (or 1 each for low-power devices), 1 for storage, 1 for advanced pro audio, 1 for video capture, and 1 with a bunch of M.2 slots for massive storage arrays. Need to upgrade your gpu? Just pull a handle and slide it out, and slide the new one in.

One can dream!

I am a volunteer EMT who has run thousands of calls.

If someone is "bleeding out" in that they have an uncontrolled hemorrhage driving faster is never the preferred option.

Generally speaking there are two types of hemorrhage:

1. Those that can be controlled through direct pressure and the body's clotting ability.

2. Those that cannot be controlled through direct pressure and the body's clotting ability.

If the hemorrhage is type 1 the best course of action is to calm down, slow down, and apply direct pressure while the patient is immobile until the bleeding stops. Driving fast will only stress the patient and may possibly lead to additional bleeding through jostling or poor application of direct pressure. Once the bleeding has stopped you can travel to the hospital at a reasonable and prudent speed.

If the hemorrhage is type 2 the only course of action is to apply a tourniquet. Once the tourniquet is applied you can proceed to the hospital at a safe pace. It is impossible to drive fast enough to save someone with an uncontrollable hemorrhage unless you are within 180-to-300 seconds of a hospital. A tourniquet can be anything, including a shoelace, belt, or torn-up shirt.

Even if the hemorrhage is a type that cannot be stopped by a tourniquet or pressure, like a chest wound, driving faster will likely not help because without applying an occlusive bandage to the wound(s) the patient will likely be dead in minutes. An occlusive bandage is any airtight barrier, like a piece of plastic, that can create a seal needed to allow for adequate respiration.

In all cases treating for shock is more important than speed. For non-EMS personnel the only preventative measures for shock are: stop bleeding, wrap patient to retain body heat, and place patient in a position of comfort.

When it comes to bleeding driving faster without basic interventions does little-to-nothing to improve the outcome for the patient, and a lot to increase the chances of creating more than one patient.

Driving faster than is reasonable is called "diesel therapy" and the only times I have used that is for breech presentations during childbirth, which are also the only times I've heard my paramedic sound scared and we've run some gnarly calls.

If you come across someone who has amputated their leg with a chainsaw and you are five minutes from the hospital at maximum speed and EMS is 30 minutes away, it is better to lie the patient down, keep them still, apply a tourniquet to the appendage, do whatever is necessary to warm them (including putting them in an idling car, preferably lying down, with the heater at maximum), and call 911 than it is to throw them in a car and drive fast.

I ordered an instant pot on Amazon on March 30th, 2019. I received it Sunday, March 31st, 2019 and upon receiving it I discovered it can make yogurt.

It made me very excited to learn that it could automate the yogurt-making process because I've eaten one serving of yogurt every day (except when traveling) since mid-2003 so I bought 14 glass mason jars and made my first batch on Sunday, April 7th, 2019. Since then I have made a two-week batch of yogurt every other Sunday, except when traveling.

That means that those 14 jars have been used once every two weeks for 213 weeks, which means each one has been reused 107 times. It is extremely rare for me to drop and break something and the jars do not seem to be degrading (I have replaced several lids-- made of steel) so I by my calculation I would estimate that they can be reused at least an infinite number of times.

If I had purchased yogurt in single serving containers that would mean I have saved 1,493 single-serving plastic containers from being placed into the waste stream. But I bought yogurt in 5-serving containers so that means I have saved 299 plastic containers from being placed into the waste stream.

When I started, I sourced milk in paper cartons and wasn't too concerned about the thin polyethylene film lining within the cartons but since then I have gone anti-plastic global thermonuclear war and get my milk from a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) organization and it comes in 1/2 gallon glass jars, which are turned in, washed, and reused.

It seems unlikely that 14 glass mason jars have a larger environmental impact that 1,493 single-serving plastic yogurt cups or 299 multi-serving plastic yogurt containers, and even if they do I don't know if that will hold true over the next 50 years as I intend to continue reusing the 14 glass mason jars until I, or they, die.

I think that instead of favoring plastic for single-use items due to energy concerns the standardization, effective capture, and reuse of glass items should be incentivized.

I know it's "really hard" but I'm a lazy piece of shit and I'm doing it...

This incident does not seem a common-enough occurrence to change my behavior.

That would be like euthanizing every dog on earth because a person might be killed by one.

~30,000 people are killed by dogs every year.

How many times annually do people have their phones unlocked by police without their consent?