IvyMike

OP here. I don't want to hide the fact that this whole thing was mostly vibe coded. That being said, I have looked at the code and the output and think they're both legit. And at least to me, the results are fun and fascinating.

Once upon a time in the 90's I was at work at 2am and I needed to implement a search over a data set. This function was going to be eventually called for every item, thus if I implemented it as a linear search, it would be n^2 behavior. Since it was so late and I was so tired, I marked it as something to fix later, and just did linear search.

Later that week, now that things were working, I profiled the n^2 search. The software controlled a piece of industrial test equipment, and the actual test process would take something around 4 hours to complete. Using the very worst case, far-beyond-reasonable data set, if I left the n^2 behavior in, would have added something like 6 seconds to that 4 hour runtime.

(Ultimately I fixed it anyways, but because it was easy, not because it mattered.)

From the linked article:

> By directly harnessing near-constant solar power

Implies they would not spend half of their time in the dark.

I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of all of this to do an actual calculation, but note that the ISS spends half its time in the shadow of the earth, which these satellites would not do.

The Dash Cart was pretty close.

The "just walk out" surveillance system sucked, but the Dash Cart shopping was actually pretty nice/

This is very forthright (misleading)

"If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking." - Leslie Lamport

Writing a blog entry to simply clarify your own thinking makes it worth it.