uranium

Have you spoken to Michael about the coils on Black Knight? I took a pinball repair class from him once at the Crucible [it was awesome--highly recommended if it's ever offered again!] and he specifically covered how to juice up flipper solenoids. He cares a lot about play experience, but I'm sure he's also pretty busy with that many machines to maintain.

Commented; thanks for the pointer.

Why is this evidence of recursion rather that evidence of recognition of symmetry? The sequences they show are all simple symmetrical ones, e.g. {()}.

That's a bit of a stretch.

The point of the ADA and similar laws is to improve access for people with disabilities.

Does it increase costs? Yeah, it does. Are the costs "vast"? Generally not; it depends a lot on the situation.

Does it make life worse for people without disabilities? That's mixed. Those who bear the compliance costs get some disadvantages. However, lots of people who aren't strictly speaking disabled benefit from the accessibility and usability improvements of captioning, wheelchair ramps, improved light switches, grab rails, etc. Making your business/website/rental-apartment more accessible, even where it's not required, may end up making you more money as your clientele grows and pay for itself. And of course we all end up with disabilities if we live long enough; let's hope we all last to the point that we appreciate the ramps, larger text, captions, etc.

+1 this helps even if your angels are out of state. At least in Kansas, they can sell the tax credit to someone in-state for maybe 80% of its face value.

That's how and why I got down to 3 days a week. I went to 4 to get my next job, then down to 2 at my current job. If you can afford it and arrange it, it's fantastic.

"I'm Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but am a secret math nerd"

Uh...you know that secret got out some time before your doctorate, right? =^>.

This. To space folks, that is plummeting. It's enough of a difference, and a surprise, to have a significant effect on business models.

Yup.

Dunno if that's true, but the terrible performance was because it was running off a single box under Orkut's desk. He threw together a prototype in asp.net and launched it, with zero preparation for scaling. It took quite a bit of help from an experienced engineer just to get it split into pieces so that it could run on 2 machines.

A big reason that Orkut fell behind other competitors was that it needed so much work to port it to a scalable architecture while scaling up exponentially.

Nope, it requires root, as it should, really. Anything that can mess with networking at a low level needs root; there's no Android permission that I know of that lets you get down to iptables level.

Exactly. Tracking me, wasting my resources, etc.

Same with "run at startup" and some other important ones; there's no way to deny it once installed.

One of the permissions I'm really reluctant to grant is "run at startup". As far as I know, that's granted at install time, not prompted for, and there's no way to disallow it. Is there now going to be no way to know if I'm granting that or not?

I'm just so happy a journal actually published a negative result.

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear."

Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack].

"The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity importing. One study found that the nuclear phase-out caused $12 billion in social costs per year, primarily due to increases in mortality due to exposure to pollution from fossil fuels." --[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany]

California's likely to have serious shortages [again] if they shut off the rest of theirs. Plus: "California's electricity rates are among the highest in the United States as a result of the changing energy mix within the state, including aggressive construction of new natural gas power plants." --[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California]

I don't know enough to check the rest of the article, but this certainly gives me some doubts as to its accuracy.

I hadn't known about the sequel; thanks for mentioning it!

Multiple countries have tax incentives for carbon reductions already, such as the 45Q credit in the USA. Companies can outsource their reductions to CCS companies such as Heimdal. See e.g. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-facebook-stripe-have-a-925m...

[Disclosure: I've invested in Heimdal.]

OK, since some folks have commented on the candy thing:

That was a one-time event, on the Muni, with both parents there, and with the giver asking our permission to give our son a sealed lollypop. I don't recommend kids take candy from strangers without parents there, but I do talk to strangers in front of my kids, and encourage them to also.

I don't tell my kids that all strangers are dangerous. First, because it leads to a culture of fear and disrespect. Second, because I obviously don't act as if they are, so it would lead to distrusting my advice.

They have to learn the difference between "stranger who seems reasonable and nonthreatening with whom you can casually chat" and "stranger telling at clouds whom you should avoid". They figure that out pretty young, if you let them.

"Would you send your 5 year old self down the streets of San Francisco or Seattle?"

Yes.

We live in San Francisco, and our kids went to a daycare in the Civic Center. We walked [with the kids] by many homeless people every weekday for years. Our interactions with them were almost universally positive; they'd clear the sidewalk to let kids through, try to keep kids from seeing drug use, chat and share candy, etc. On cold days when our kids would refuse to wear shirts [love that young metabolism], homeless folks would yell out, "Put a jacket on that kid!".

Most homeless people are just people in terrible situations, not boogiemen to be afraid of. Sure, some of them are mentally ill--if they weren't when they became homeless, it can make you so--but that doesn't make them dangerous.

Every assault makes the news, but cities are safer than they've ever been, and I'm very glad to be raising my kids in SF. The public transit and density of services will give them much greater autonomy than if we lived somewhere where you need a car to get anywhere.

My older kid's first errand was at age 5.5, to get a loaf of bread IIRC, from a market 1 block away, crossing 1 street. He was stopped by the police. The cop told him to tell his parents that he was too young to be out alone. No CPS, no arrest, fortunately, and he let my kid complete his errand alone, but that's the biggest danger around our neighborhood, not the homeless. We're not in the Civic Center, granted, but we're still in SF proper.

They also appear to be working with Quaise. Scroll down to "projects" and click on the mmWave picture.

'AltaRock Energy,” in partnership with Quaise Energy, is developing millimeter wave (mmWave) technology...'

There's the heat that comes out regardless, and the additional heat that comes out if you drill a bunch of boreholes down to let it out, accelerating the transfer.

That being said, it doesn't look like we'll get to a significant magnitude of effect for a long time.

My guess was that when this happened to me, it meant that Google had figured out it was spam after the notification got through, likely due to people marking it as spam. So I got the notifications, but the files had gone away before I looked.

Ah, I wonder what happened to my old IFL boxers...I've still got dozens of different Google t-shirts and some Alphabet-related hoodies, baseball caps, fleece, a scarf, a raincoat, and snow hats. I think the beach towels, water bottles, and flip-flops are all gone now. Still have my lava lamp =*).

The best schwag I've gotten is probably my daypacks [2 companies].

Jobs come and go, but the wardrobe lives on.

Folks here are likely talking about employee stock options [NSOs and ISOs]. They've each got their pitfalls, but generally if you exercise them, you immediately owe tax [or AMT, depending--talk to an accountant first!] on the difference between your strike price and the current fair market value. If your employer's public, you know what that value is and can generally sell to cover your taxes. If your employer is private, you need to find out what the FMV is from your employer, and you still owe tax on it [if there's a gain], but you likely have no way of selling to pay the taxes.

For former colleagues I'm personally always willing to answer a reasonable number of questions for free. But after leaving one particularly-unpleasant situation, I did barter that I'd give a friend a brain dump if we could do it over dinner and he'd expense it =*).

This.

I've worked past the point that my access started expiring and I had to make sure not to reboot anything important so I could keep making progress, even after they came and took my chair away [yes, seriously]. When I absolutely had to reboot the dev system to continue, I sent off my final notes and left.

I do agree that knowledge transfer is top priority, but sometimes there's also work I'd really like to hand off in a completed, easy-to-take-on state, that will save the next engineer ever more time than another few hours of brain dump.

Still, try to do the brain dump first.

That's lovely, thank you. I just laughed out loud playing it.

I'm not the hiring manager for any of our open positions, so I can't make any promises. But we're a flexible place, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the positions were part-time-friendly.

Oh, and outside of work I spend a lot of time co-parenting 2 kids, cooking (especially since covid), doing personal projects, practicing guitar, exercising, etc.