daeken

> a good chunk of the action of my work-in-progress Starter Pack is set on a terraformed Earth-mass moon orbiting a Hycean planet of roughly Neptune's mass orbiting its star in the triple phase zone for water (i.e. where water can exist as ice, liquid, or vapour). The moon in question has spin (presumably it got kicked off by a collision with another proto-moon while the moon system was forming), so a magnetosphere, and tides to keep plate tectonics going--but this time tides from its primary planet, not a large sub-moon of its own.

This makes me so curious as to the approach he's taking with this next book, in terms of the biology of creatures native to these bodies (if they exist). I've been thinking a lot about the approach Andy Weir took for the Eridians: start with the physical characteristics of the planet and reverse-engineer biology that was likely to be viable under those circumstances. As someone who typically writes hard sci-fi, I can't help but be drawn to that approach — too many worlds and environments are designed around the characters and it ends up feeling totally incoherent.

No, she was arrested for disobeying police orders. But whether they're lawful orders or not is a different matter; strongly suspect that if this went to trial, she'd have a decent 1st amendment argument, which is why it won't go to trial. (ACAB, but also this is a pretty standard part of civil disobedience -- getting arrested is just part and parcel, for better and worse.)

You can buy them on your phone in some states, e.g. Georgia. Their "scratch offs" look just like slot machines and give the same lovely dopamine spikes; used to drop $100 in every couple months when I just needed happy brain chemicals.

Even better, honestly: a large bloom filter for the data, such that the likelihood of a collision is relatively low, then send it up to the server for a check. That way there are a small number of erroneous potential hits, but the list never needs to exist on-device.

I just ask our fleet maintenance agent to configure the variants of the new model and then run the bakeoff. In a few hours, I get a doc containing exactly how it performed on my real tasks, against the other models we've benchmarked.

We don't do any "prompt engineering" to make specific models work better or worse, so this gives us a direct comparison that lets us objectively compare how they'll work in practice for different types of tasks.

Good enough to have guided multiple model swaps and measured increases in productivity.

> I certainly do find new slang introduced by gen Z like "he got the riz!" to be quite cringey

This is interesting to me, if only because it's such a natural bit of slang. Given that it's a shortened form of "charisma", this one just Makes Sense to me! I figure it'd be incredibly cringe for me to use at my age, but it's a good term IMO.

This sort of mistake is easy to make when you're mixing up your units; if they kept to one system of measure, it would've been trivial to catch, before or after release.

Some people just prefer to listen. I read well and I read quite quickly -- I don't know how many books I've physically read, but it's gotta be in the high hundreds at least -- but over the past ~10 years I've switched primarily to audiobooks. Rather than being something that I enjoy while I'm doing something else, I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew) in order to give my full attention to the book.

The astronaut in question may choose to disclose that they had the medical emergency and possibly its nature, but it seems wholly reasonable to not single them out (when it affects the whole mission) or disclose their medical status.

I've been working in security for more than 20 years and have seen the deleterious effects of security through obscurity first-hand. Why does "adversarial engineering" rely on obscurity?

Yeah, I went with that approach for most of the code generation in the emulator I'm currently working on. Source generators handle a few core things, but more advanced compilation tasks went to just ahead of time generation; couldn't get my parser combinator library to play nicely with .NET Standard, so that was just a dead-end.

I love (and heavily use) source generators, but the development experience is godawful. Working with the raw Roslyn types is painful at best and this is compounded by them having to be written against .NET Standard, severely limiting the use of newer .NET functionality.

Eventually I want to write a good baseline library to use for my source generators -- simplifying finding definitions with attributes, mapping types to System.Type, adding some basic pattern matching for structures -- but haven't found a way to do it that's general enough while being very useful.

Boo and Nemerle both were really showing what was possible in .NET back in the early days. I still miss the metaprogramming they had, not to mention their pattern matching (which C# has closed the gap on, but is still way, way short.)

Back in 2005 or 2006, I was working at a little startup with "DVD Jon" Johansen and we'd have Quake 3 tournaments to break up the monotony of reverse-engineering and juggling storage infrastructure. His name was always "xor eax,eax" and I always just had to laugh at the idea of getting zeroed out by someone with that name. (Which happened a lot -- I was good, but he was much better!)