• 0 Posts
  • 89 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle


  • There’s a lot of “And then for some reason we did this, and it was more complexity” in this paper. I think that’s missing the point of languages, as a conversion layer between machine code and weird, squishy human brains. We think better, hold abstractions in our minds better, when the language maps more closely with how we’re structuring the problem in our minds.

    Not sure if you were even looking for paper reviews.



  • Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?

    I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.

    (I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)

    Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)





  • There’s a kernel of something positive in decentralization, though. Me pointing this out feels a little bit like someone saying how good COVID lockdown was for the environment, but I still feel like it’s an important point.

    An internet made of lots of small sites is better at resisting censorship and centralized control. People should remain accustomed to using a bunch of individual sites, not JUST the biggest sites on the internet, and amateur sysadmins should maintain their “host a public web server from an at-home business internet connection” chops.

    There being lots of small porn sites makes it harder for anyone to apply pressure and make certain kinds of affirming content disappear.

    That’s … just about everything positive I could say about this idea. Not a fan.





  • I can’t tell if I communicated badly or I’m really just off the mark. But we already encrypt storage at rest, when we have valuable or sensitive data, because of the risk that thieves might read stolen data.

    So take that a step farther. A thief can “know a guy” who spent a few hundred on soldering equipment and watched some tutorials on YouTube. We don’t consider sensitive data to be unavailable to thieves just because it isn’t readable via plug and play.



  • The available food is mostly things they can pop into the fryer: Think fish and chips, except you can also choose “planks” of chicken breast, or breaded shrimp, or little balls of seasoned dough called “hush puppies”.

    My wife hates them, and they’re an occasional guilty pleasure for me.






  • Thank you. I stole that from Philip (I think) in Off To Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. He was describing that book’s antagonist but I’ve taken it to describe people who casually break rules to get ahead.

    And I think that’s kind of what they’re doing, flooding social media with stories of how they broke rules in ways that make me go “foul! That’s a foul! Why is the ref doing nothing? This breaks my brain and I have no idea how to respond to this!”