maxander

It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough fluids. I don’t know whether you freeze over or dry out first, but I’m sure someone at NASA has done the math.

The interesting thing about this blog post isn’t the point it makes (which was endlessly made about cafes in all blue-state U.S. cities in the 00s) but that it’s an Iranian writing in English, and thus for an Western audience, about Iranian culture.

What is going on with that? I don’t even dare to speculate. But something more interesting than bougie coffeeshops, certainly.

Sadly, I think the modern alternative for ncurses-based interfaces is javascript.

Yeah I was unclear there - I meant the other use of the & operator, 'foo & bar' where bar starts after foo completes. AFAIK, if you ran foo by itself, there's no way to make bar automatically run after foo completes.

My primary project the past couple weeks has been applying the AI interpretability technique from Anthropic's famous paper this past summer (you know, the Golden Gate Claude one) to single-cell RNA-seq data. What works on one huge, inscrutible vector space ought to work on another, right? In either case, a fun way to keep in practice, both for comp bio and deep learning.

My side-project, in essence, the bash '&' operator for cases where the first process is already running. It took me months of searching before I could believe that this doesn't already exist, but there you go. I gave in to feature creep, of course, so it's a bit more than that now (I made a ncurses-based dashboard? Why??) but someday soon I'll make it public.

I don’t know whether this is a provocative or tedious thing to say, but the quintessential ‘enlightenmentware’ to have come out of the past several years is ChatGPT. Name anything that brings as much functionality with so simple an interface and so elegant a core!

(It’s simply a pity that we can’t install it locally or tinker with the internals. :) )

I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.)

An app, though, not a website.

It’s not news to anyone that NATO could win a (conventional) war with Russia. The important result is that any sizable chunk of military force in Russia itself stands a good chance of it.

Is this true? Flat rectangles pack more efficiently than tubes. With mattresses, afaik, the big difference was vacuum-packing reducing overall volume, not shape.

It’s definitely not too old for anything, if you want to do it. Source: I transferred from local college to better college at 20 myself.

There will be plenty of 20-year-olds where you transfer, and no one will care what year you technically are. Don’t worry about that. College is not like high school.

As other commenters have noted, the big question is whether you want to spend the extra time in school (and spend the extra money for the extra time - college debt is serious business!) But you know your own situation best, and an extra couple years of classes can be spent profitably if you’re thoughtful about how you use them.

But, here’s another possibility to consider- finish undergrad at your current place, and then go for a Master’s degree at the more prestigious school? It’s an extra two years in either case, and then you have a whole postgraduate degree as well.