joshvm

I remember in Transport Tycoon, under certain conditions, you were no longer allowed to bulldoze willy nilly. If you wanted to put in a new bus station and were out of favour with the populace, you could try the old fashioned way: with bribes (and tree planting).

I feel obliged to say that while it gets cold over winter, the weather isn’t particularly bad by Antarctic standards; the coast is much worse. In places like McMurdo it can get bad enough that travel between buildings is prohibited, South Pole not so much. I also wintered for SPT which involves one of us going out to the telescope, daily. There were only a couple of days when it was marginal. Even then, winds and low visibility usually means cloud cover and warmer weather (-40 vs -90). The worst days are windy with clear skies.

As for darkness; consider a single day is stretched out over the year. There’s only a two months of astronomical night and the moon is up every couple weeks. You’re correct though, that the station is isolated between mid Feb and late October.

Must have been a while ago!

IceCube sends housekeeping and priority transient events (like a supernova) over satellite, selected high quality events get synced over satellite daily and everything else gets stored and shipped out in the summer. There is a redundancy everywhere - it’s a very thoughtfully designed system.

I wintered for IceCube - most of the job is on-call Linux admin, cluster management and a bit of field work depending on the year.

Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.

Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.

Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.

If you still want the experience, go and browse McMaster Carr. Wizards designed that website.

Any expat who has lived in Europe knows the pain of having to run to the train station on a Sunday because you ran out of some ingredient.

When I was younger, I used to think the Shard was daylight robbery. But 16 quid for a signature cocktail and a view (or 12 for a spirit + mixer) is no longer outrageously expensive in London and you'd pay that to go up a skyscraper in many countries anyway. Both Rockefeller and the Empire State are $40+, though you can go outside. Even Aqua Shard, which is apparently in the Michelin guide, "only" charges about 20. Which is bordering on outrageous, but the view is great.

I recently started playing around with my Palette 3 again (on a MK3.5S). It’s an amazing piece of engineering that has a reputation for being frustrating to use. It’s now discontinued but Mosaic still sell spare parts and it’s designed to be stripped down and repaired. Despite the problems, it was built by good engineers - it uses one torx head for all screws (and comes with a driver). The next printer I get will probably be an INDX system though, the future is multitool.

I had written it off, because of how irritating Mosaic’s cloud slicer is. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it works with a fork of P2PP (vhspace/p2pp), a post processor for PrusaSlicer that is completely local. All it does is swap out the filament change commands with Palette splice instructions. I fixed a few gcode interpreter bugs that solved the issues I had with bed calibration and extrusion, and even splicing seems quite reliable. I’ve been using it for simple 2-color same-brand prints that would require a lot of manual changing, so not complex but it’s much nicer to use than an MMU2.

I’m excited to try this out for sure.

That one has a strange rendering error for me, the trees and horizon are in front of the mill building and the exterior isn't properly rendered unless you are in orbit mode. But my mind was a little blown when i discovered that I could walk up the stairs. It needs shift to run!

The scene desperately needs some clipping on the boundaries. If you use an app like Scaniverse, you can add a bounding box to cull far away points which are often poorly reconstructed.

If you have a newer iPhone with a LIDAR scanner, highly recommended. You can make dolls-house renderings of your house or garden which is surprisingly useful for planning and measuring walls/features.

I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).

By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.

This is the sort of economics that small companies face when working with large companies, particularly when physical things/CAPEX are involved. Large companies expect net 30/60 terms to pay you. That's much simpler for their accounting/purchasing department. This bureaucracy occasionally necessitates nudging, especially if the intermediary you're dealing with didn't set up the invoice request on time in whichever SAP/Salesforce/Oracle system they use.

This is usually the same the other way; many vendors will give business clients net 30. That's nice if you're a small company and need to plan ahead. But occasionally, because you're considered small (liability), some vendors will want the money up-front. So unless you're very careful with cashflow, you end up in situations where your main sources of income (big contracts) are coming in after you need to spend money on a widget to fulfill deliverables.

Depending on the situation, the contract can demand the client purchase/ship things and work doesn't start until you have them in hand. This is usually the best route as you now have an out, and it's not an unreasonable request, but it doesn't always pan out that way!