BariumBlue

The world we work with is entirely artificial and ephemeral. Anything is redoable, ctrl-z-able. You can "create" and explore a luscious forest, but there's no smell, no permanence. It's a simulation we create for ourselves, created for self-satisfaction.

Software engineers get lost and subsumed into the virtual world, so I don't think it's surprising we look for and pine for ways to exit.

There does seem to be a limit - we have found 0 life in the Dallol Geothermal vents in Ethiopia, which are simultaneous highly salty, highly acidic, and highly hot pools of water.

Problem is that the Federal Highway Association only spends for new projects, not routine maintenance (please check me on that though).

Therefore cities who need maintenance done will bundle routine maintenance they can't afford with expansion (lane expansion, streamlining). This lets them access federal dollars they wouldn't otherwise get.

Over decades, this has created a lot of infrastructure that isn't financially responsible as stuff has just gotten built and built and built. The ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) always grades the overall US as a "C" or worse for maintenance.

Part of the problem is that building things is sexy, maintaining them is harder and not sexy. Lotta money and focus on new stuff, maintenance is a secondary concern.

I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "

For pet project folks, I used to think "person who's excited to refactor the entire codebase because they're excited by some new technology they read a post about, but doesn't actually understand the codebase nor the technology" was an exaggeration until I got one as a team lead.

You're implying it was intentional, when it clearly was not. I'd be OK with calling it criminal negligence.

My annoyance was the focus on something that aligns with a narrative some people love to push (US bad), and ignoring the bigger issues that actually plague the Iranian people that just get ignored because no one actually cares.

Wasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't?

This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.

It literally may be a syntax thing, but I too can never remember the exact arguments to put where so I never use it.

I think if `reduce` looked more functional or more like Erlang code, it'd be easier to read and digest.

Those feel very ink-blobby - like they were drawn by someone who can barely hold a pen stick-stopping across each line and then redoing parts of each line to correct mistakes. Looks elementary schooler.

I prefer Excalidraw look and feel - a couple of smooth and mostly straight lines per line, which looks more like intentional competence with a quick and imperfect tool.

The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now?

> They are also less likely to start random wars EU lack of aggression, to defend themselves physically, economically, or otherwise, has been criticized constantly - slow and late to react to the Russian invasion, slow and late to react to new technologies like AI, electric cars.

Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition.

The grass definitely looks greener though, especially if you've been in one pasture a long time.

I suspect my oldest memory, of me getting into a booster car seat as a child, is no longer the actual memory, but the accumulated imaginings of me trying to remember that specific memory, masquerading as a memory.

As per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable?

I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?

It really depends on the kind of war being fought.

If the cheap solution involves having troops only a dozen miles away from the enemy, then you're going to take casualties, and funeral costs are FAR more expensive then the cost to buy a large bird and fly it from a 100+ miles away.

An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.

An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.

You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.