jdranczewski

2개월 전discuss

They were originally planning to not do hot staging, aiming instead for a somewhat funny approach where they spin the ship and booster slightly so they are passively separated by centrifugal forces. A bunch of things went wrong in the first test flight, so this was never attempted, and they switched to the "simpler" hot staging in flight 2.

jdranczewski

3개월 전discuss

I've really enjoyed reading the Grid World piece linked at the bottom of the post: https://alex.miller.garden/grid-world/

jdranczewski

5개월 전discuss

The article mentions this only briefly, but browsers already do this kind of heuristic protection! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending... or https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i... for a Chrome-specific blog post.

I think the lack of exploration of the context around the problem and current mitigations is an issue with the article - it spends a lot of time talking about the possible threat, but very little time on whether the attack is actually practical with modern mitigations.

jdranczewski

5개월 전discuss

On Android they've actually rolled out the 3D view in Maps recently! Took them long enough. I now have an "aerial" button in the bottom left corner when viewing Street View imagery that switches between the two.

jdranczewski

5개월 전discuss

If anyone in the comments is in a similar predicament to the author and would like a book logging app, I will say that I disagree on their judgement of StoryGraph - I've found it a pretty decent interface, the search function is very good, and the (anti)features mentioned in the footnote are incredibly easy to not use, as the creators seem to understand that many of their users have a very strong preference to avoid AI bloat.

jdranczewski

6개월 전discuss

For large communities, the very granular role-based permission system of Discord can be put to some good use, I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.

jdranczewski

6개월 전discuss

You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.

jdranczewski

6개월 전discuss

To add to the points raised by others, "just install LaTeX" is not imo a very strong argument. I prefer working in a local environment, but many of my colleagues much prefer a web app that "just works" to figuring out what MiKTeX is.

jdranczewski

7개월 전discuss

If you've managed to find more details about what process exactly they're implementing I'd be glad to see it - I assumed plasma-based growth, since the BBC article mentions that it's a plasma that is at 1000C here (making heat dissipation less of a problem too), but if they're growing ingots that would usually be done from liquid silicon, which sounds like a mess in space. So are they doing plasma-growth of ingots (which I haven't heard of, but I haven't heard of many things), or are they bringing wafers up and growing ultra-pure layers on top... The website is not super clear on this from what I've seen.

jdranczewski

7개월 전discuss

An interesting use case of OpenSCAD is open source hardware with many contributors - the reasoning being that we only have mature version control tooling for text-based files (say git), and so your CAD design should be text-based. I was introduced to this idea by https://openflexure.org/projects/microscope/ - they managed to build a fairly complex 3D printed microscope project on this principle.

I'm aware of Onshape having a git-like workflow as well, wonder how the two compare! A fully cloud-based suite would probably not work well for an open source project.

jdranczewski

7개월 전discuss

The article says they visited both the US and Israel registration addresses and didn't find the organisation's offices. I was impressed by the amount of "on the ground digging" by the journalists here!

jdranczewski

8개월 전discuss

Following on on the DoD example, the field of astronomy is infamous for its terrible acronyms: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html

jdranczewski

8개월 전discuss

Yes! The ring reminded me of the Core too. Perhaps with voice processing and the infrastructure around MCP (which I haven't used myself, but Eric brings up in the blog) a fully headless, voice-based device like this is more feasible now than in those days

jdranczewski

8개월 전discuss

I may be misunderstanding it, but the examples shown don't seem to be illustrative? It seems reasonably obvious that the prints will happen in this order in any language, because in example 1 we are explicitly (a)waiting for the child to finish, and in example 2 both of the parent prints are above the await. So I don't feel like either of these makes the point the author is trying to get across?

jdranczewski

8개월 전discuss

I think in your first point the difference is between "calculation" and "conversion". For calculations, it's generally accepted that arbitrary numbers are possible and a calculator may have to come out. For conversions, it's nice to be able to say that 1250m is 1.250km - I bump into conversions much more commonly than having to do calculations, and it's nice to be able to do them in my head.

I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).

Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well

jdranczewski

8개월 전discuss

I've always found the weather argument somewhat unconvincing, because 0°C being the freezing point of water is very much a useful point of reference in weather contexts - it's roughly where one may expect iced-over pavements and rain to turn to snow! And then the higher temperatures are a question of getting used to it - 40°C instead of 100°F is very very warm, 30 is pretty hot, 20 is reasonably warm, etc.

But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!

jdranczewski

9개월 전discuss

I agree that having a reliable main environment for quick experiments is great! On Windows I just use the main Python installation as a global environment, since no system stuff depends on it, on Linux I tend to create a "main" environment in the home directory. Then I can still have per-project environments as needed (say with uv), for example for stuff that I need to deploy to the VPS.

Note that I'm mostly in the research/hobby environments - I think this approach (and Python in general, re: some other discussions here about the language) works really well, especially for the latter, but the closer you get to "serious" work, the more sense the project environment approach makes of course

jdranczewski

10개월 전discuss

https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.

jdranczewski

10개월 전discuss

Ah, my bad! I did not know these were a thing, but that makes more sense! Teaches me a thing about only quickly trying things in an online REPL on mobile and jumping to conclusions - I forgot curly braces were also a way to denote a set

jdranczewski

10개월 전discuss

I was rather confused by the dictionary comprehension syntax used there, because I wasn't aware that you could write one without the ":" to delineate the key: value pair. Turns out you can, but it just creates a dict with no values stored, just the keys! This works here because the returned dict is an iterable that returns the keys on iteration, and "update" accepts an iterable of (key, value) tuples - and the keys are just that in this case. So the effect is the same as if it was a list comprehension! Just slightly more confusing