martinpw

This hits hard.

He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.

A sad loss.

The problem with any theory of modified gravity is that there is just no physical justification for it. It's only motivation seems to be to explain away dark matter by adding and tweaking free parameters until you fit the data, which you can always do given enough variables.

van Neumann's quote comes to mind - "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

I was thinking exactly this. Example - a 3d app I worked on. There is a tool that does a set of complex modeling operations on geometry. The operation description seems simple, the attributes that control the tool are easy to understand. But underneath it there is 50k lines of code - 1k for the common case and 49k to handle all the (literal) edge cases you can have with complex real world data, which came in from dozens of customers over the course of decades, mostly highly proprietary one off models.

I think agents can absolutely write the default path correctly and it will work most of the time and seem to be feature complete. But I don't see how they will quickly handle all those dozens of edge cases.

Over time it can happen - each time a case fails, send it to an agent and have it implement the conditional case. But that will take a long time. There is a reason most solid CAD kernels are decades old - they have been battle hardened and just handle all those edge cases better than other kernels.

> fire drills exist for a reason

I remember doing a fire drill once at work - we all headed down the emergency staircase and every single one of us missed the big sign on the door saying EXIT and ended up down in the basement - even those of us who were the floor marshalls.

A great wakeup call for what can go wrong even if all the right signage is in place, and how easy it is to just trust the person in front of you assuming they know what they are doing. As the parent says, fire drills exist for a reason.

> I remember many sleepless nights where the power went out

Genuine question - how did people sleep there pre-AC?

> The thing is, if they had gotten rid of that stuff themselves, I would never have missed it.

I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.

Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.

> dealing with some life event such as moving, a death in the family, divorce

The 4 Ds of self storage: Death, divorce, dislocation, downsizing

This post inspired me to go through my box of cables and I actually found a full HTC Vive headset with controllers in there buried several layers deep that I had completely forgotten about. I think it ended up there because it came with about a dozen cables so the cable box seemed like the natural place to dump it all.

Now I need to go through that box in detail to see what else might be lurking.

Are you sure that will be enjoyable? Lots of articles out there about people opening coffee shops with idyllic dreams of what it will be like, only to find the reality is a daily grind (hehe) of dealing with delayed suppliers, broken machines, absent staff. All that not-fun stuff falls on you while the customers sip their cappucinos.