yetanotherloser

Gosh, that's one big autoclave. As you say, a sub tank would be even more of a monster bit of engineering. They do exist for more normal depths but I'm not sure if there are civilian / rentable sub test tanks for this kind of ultra deep stuff.

Electronic ones, yes. I have a couple of AEG/Carrera ones with daisywheels.

The advantage of testing pressure vessels with water is that the failure mode is usually less bad than gas (because it doesn't expand through any breach like gas does).

Unfortunately a sub is the opposite of a pressure tank (the pressure is on the outside) so you need a pressure bottle bigger than the sub to test it in. I don't think these are common or easy to come by.

I think this might be one of very few circumstances that can be said to be both at once, sadly.

Hang on a moment. Headphones can be the best in the world but uncomfortable on my wonky head or incompatible with my glasses and they're worthless to me personally, so I'll give him a pass on that. I have some not-audiophile-but-better-than-meh headphones I rate very highly because they're nicely made and super comfortable; they sound good but that would count for zero if they didn't feel nice.

Room acoustics, though, ought not be very important with headphones unless I'm missing something...

You can definitely resharpen bronze. The castings are not perfectly sharp, the edges are further worked (and can be hammered and work hardened). I don't think you can redo work hardening indefinitely but you can a bit and can scrape and grind and hone repeatedly. There are (or were last I looked) some people supplying cast blanks these days for re-enactors to try sharpening up. Always wanted to try that one day.

I love your acronym formation there.

There's another thread running at the moment about BARF degrading the machine's performance. I don't have enough information to be confident, but it sounded plausible and likely.

There's a great, if rather old, word for these machines: "tools".

Option B. Always option B.

More seriously, I get the impression Being A Cat is rather intense and takes up their entire concentration.

I. love. this.

I will never look at my cat the same way again.

He already did the "it's a theme park" ending in MI2 and it was fine. Not tbh my favourite part, but fine in that context in that time. There was something about the new one which was appallingly "fuck you for still liking Monkey Island".

Makes me a little sad to think of it gradually succumbing to bit rot, even though I know everything does and I don't mind that some of my own data is going the same way. If you want to preserve it I bet it wouldn't be too hard to rustle up volunteers to try to retrieve and transfer it.

Been a long time since I was a kid playing with Deluxe Paint, but "fill except where I missed a tiny gap" would have been exactly what I wished the fill tool would do! I don't think I've used a fill tool in earnest since :-(

Ah, I see. Nice work. Thanks for the extra detail.

"compared to a fixed ASIC" seems like a bit of a harsh comparison.

The ideal fixed ASIC is as die-facilities-efficient a solution to a particular problem as you're going to get. The ideal FPGA is as generalised a solution to a large bucket of problems as you can get. Do they have to compete?

Ease of programmability though, there I agree and more. A chip facility can't be exciting or even interesting if it's hidden behind being a giant pain in the backside to drive.

(disclaimer: I used to be really interested in this stuff, but the problems I was interested in were eaten up by general processors and simple uses of GPUs and I'm just not interesting enough to have problems that really justify exciting hardware any more... more power to you if you still do)

You've got me intrigued,but also wanting more specifics. Did you share any details of this anywhere you can link to? (don't worry if not, I'm just nosy)

The original didn't have to share shipping lanes with huge modern cargo ships that often rely on their radar to go quite fast in bad visibility. Faced with adding anachronistic radar vs. dying from hazards that the original ship didn't have to face, most sailors pick the radar.

She's also big enough to be legally obliged to carry radar under SOLAS V regulations.

sure, let's all maximise the time we have available to spend on a couch consuming mindless tv.

The "but it takes tiiiiime" argument against making your own things (and achieving a kind of satisfaction, control and learning that's hard to beat) is simply dreadful.

I've done quite a bit. (never tried a dovetailing machine tbh). It doesn't have to take a huge amount of time and a lot depends on exactly what you choose to do. Also you're moving the goalposts a bit there.

yup. I think it's past time we rounded up a bunch of classicists and just made them go sailing so they stop worrying about this.

I've never tried a jointer to be honest. One of the many uses of the plane is taking out the gaps where bought wood's planed edges don't quite line up. I was a little unreasonable suggesting people could get away with only one plane though!

I make quite a lot of furniture from scrap or salvage - that's quite fun.

That would be pretty slow working. It's more entertaining than television and not bad exercise. And if you start with that attitude there is no helping you.

Not really. Youtubers with sponsors sell this daft idea that you "need" a lot of power tools to do woodwork, but you can do most of it quite precisely with a couple of hand saws, a good chisel and a block plane. Though by the time you've replaced all the particleboard in a Billy you may as well just make a new bookcase from scratch and give it proper joints.

Also a good point. My family desktop isn't quite grandfather's axe but it would be wasteful to just dump it, and if I convert it to Linux some of the games my wife and kids want to play can't follow.

I like your style.

Or you need a niche application that's only available on Windows, or you don't want to rebuy it or a near equivalent for the Mac.

I think it's just a recent fad, but it's a fad I'm quite enjoying.

Thank you. You put it better than I did.

This is a wholly false analogy. If I store most things properly they decay only very slowly and most maintenance tasks are easy. The software equivalent of that is only making sure I don't lose something to bit rot. No software lasts long enough for that, I look away for a year or so and someone broke something it stands on. It's not analogous to keeping an old book in a safe, it's analogous to keeping an old book in the street while random strangers queue up to piss on it.

I have books up to 500 years old that are perfectly readable. I have programs I wrote single digit years ago that I'd need to give up a couple of days just to find out if I can get their build chain back and dig them out of dependency hell. Not worth it to buy, at best, a few years before I get to repeat the experience. Restoring and rebuilding old physical things is also far more rewarding because when I do it properly I never have to do it again.

That looks a lot like a claim that software only deserves to exist if it is made by, or attracts the fanatical devotion of, people who have a deep love of maintaining software against a moving target.

Ugh.

The expectation that once you've made something you can't expect it to keep working without endless catchup, attitudes like this one, are why I have completely given up making software for fun or to solve noncommercial problems for myself and others.

I'm not the only one.