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martinpw

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Solar in California surpassed natural gas in the first five months of 2026

eia.gov
63 points·by martinpw·25 दिन पहले·17 comments

China's NEV penetration hits historic 61.4% in April as ICE sales collapse

carnewschina.com
11 points·by martinpw·2 माह पहले·0 comments

Arctic Winter Sea Ice Ties Record Low, NASA, NSIDC Scientists Find

science.nasa.gov
4 points·by martinpw·4 माह पहले·0 comments

[untitled]

1 points·by martinpw·6 माह पहले·0 comments

The before and after images showing glaciers vanishing before our eyes

bbc.com
5 points·by martinpw·9 माह पहले·0 comments

Rail travel is booming in America

economist.com
121 points·by martinpw·10 माह पहले·191 comments

comments

martinpw
·19 दिन पहले·discuss
Pretty easy to look this stuff up rather than depend on decade old memory. Temperature in Europe is rising much faster than the worldwide average. Here it says +2.3C by 2022 - that is significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Europe
martinpw
·25 दिन पहले·discuss
Was in an Uber in Korea recently traveling from the airport and the car literally beeped every 30 seconds for the entirety of the one hour drive with what presumably was a speed limit warning - a beep AND a verbal message. Seemed to be only marginally over the limit. Drove me insane. I don't know how the driver dealt with it - he must experience it all day every day.

I guess you just filter it out after a while but it definitely makes me think I need to do some research before getting a new car any time soon.
martinpw
·25 दिन पहले·discuss
> When I talked to the dealers, they said that the speedometers only have to be accurate +/- 10% according to the SAE specifications.

I believe the requirement is only one way - they can read high by a certain % but they cannot read low. Which makes sense. But that means in reality they will usually read a little high.
martinpw
·27 दिन पहले·discuss
> Big big shops have "dumbed down" troubleshooting as much as they can - for a lot of reasons. You don't have to pay folks as much because they're thinking and doing less, the more time they spend troubleshooting the longer the server is offline, and if there's no troubleshooting there's not much for them to screw up.

Very true. I've heard stories of how technicians struggle with friends/family perceptions here. Since a lot of these datacenters are in rural communities, they are perceived as being technical wizards to be working there. But in reality they are doing as you say - just following a preprogrammed script with very little scope for any sort of creative problem solving.
martinpw
·2 माह पहले·discuss
> it's a force majeur

I assume you meant something like 'force multiplier"? Force Majeure is an uncontrollable event that prevents a party from fulfilling a contract. Which some may argue is what AI will also deliver. :)
martinpw
·2 माह पहले·discuss
I've always felt bad about not understanding git better and wanted to dedicate time to learn it properly but never got to it. Finally this is a use case where AI is really good. It has always been able to get me out of trouble when I mess up, and often rescued files I thought I had lost for good. And is always able to rebase for me, normally a place where I flail pathetically. And it's easy to human verify the result before pushing.

Honestly this is one area I really like AI - so I can focus on the things I really need to focus on and not spend a bunch of time becoming an expert in things I don't want to be an expert in.
martinpw
·2 माह पहले·discuss
It will still be application dependent.

Code to compute fillets and blends gets incredibly complex when multiple surfaces are involved. And when surfaces are barely intersecting, or almost coincident, all bets are off what the command will do - very much depends on the geometry kernel and the tolerances it uses whether it decides the surfaces even intersect. And if it decides they don't intersect, all downstream commands will fail. Handling tolerances is one of the hardest aspects of CAD. (It's no coincidence that most open source CAD applications always demo with the same relatively basic types of models - they just can't do truly complex CAD.)

So a simple set of operations - cube, sphere, intersect - sure that will work anywhere and will be portable across applications and makes a nice simple demo. But once you start doing any serious CAD modeling the result is kernel dependent. That's why portable CAD formats like STEP do not preserve the commands used to generate the results. And why native CAD application formats do preserve the command history but are not portable across applications.
martinpw
·3 माह पहले·discuss
> The goal of art isn't merely beauty. It's primarily communication.

"Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us" - Picasso
martinpw
·4 माह पहले·discuss
> Thus things dangling from the rear mirror in a car are a bad thing, they need (subconscious) attention.

And open offices with the associated foot traffic. Constant distraction quite apart from the noise factor.
martinpw
·4 माह पहले·discuss
How does this work in combination with age related hearing loss? At some point you will lose high frequency sensitivity in that 11-15Khz range. Would be nice to get some benefit from that, but I assume the tinnitus itself will not go away even if it hangs out at that frequency?

It also means the above experiment will not work since you lose the signal before you reach your tinnitus frequency.
martinpw
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Another great Eric Bogle song is Green Fields of France.

I like this version by The Men They Couldn't Hang best :

https://youtu.be/Kr6OzLJrS2k?si=ZX6lrXqjZktV20-V
martinpw
·4 माह पहले·discuss
Is that really how it works - everything is just weighted equally? I would hope there would be at least some kind of tuning, so <well-regarded-codebase> gets more weight than <random-persons-first-coding-project>? If not, that seems like an opportunity. But no idea how these things are actually configured.
martinpw
·5 माह पहले·discuss
> Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint.

A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets".

Open source tools can handle some cases, but to handle the full complexity of real world problems is a huge extra step that I doubt they will manage any time soon.
martinpw
·5 माह पहले·discuss
Problem is that in an EV world the raw figures are really not going to be that impressive. Plenty of Chinese EVs have 1000+hp at far lower cost, and likely as good or better acceleration that whatever Ferrari can deliver, since EVs seem to be reaching a point where the limit on acceleration is the tires rather than the motor. So don't think Ferrari can deliver anything truly eye catching in those terms. Differentiation needs to come in other domains.
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
I think you are a few years out of date. Certainly they used to be not great. They are way better now.
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something

My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
> Also what's up with the people hiking (by themselves) with a bluetooth speaker. You're by yourself, in nature. If you want to listen to music wear headphones!!

Washington Department of Natural Resources recommended bluetooth speaker playlists for hiking:

https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/08/20/washington-roasts-...
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
Both are true. Costs have gone up a lot over the past few years and are also going down this year.
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
Ah, memories. At my first real job, my desktop machine was an HP-UX workstation with a monochrome monitor. The company did UNIX CAD software, so each developer got a different type of system to ensure we developed on all the platforms we supported - HP-UX, AIX (IBM), SunOS/Solaris, Ultrix (DEC) and IRIX (SGI).

I was instantly jealous of the devs who got the SGI machines, not only did they have color monitors (!) but they got to play networked games with each other (battletanks I think?) at lunchtimes.
martinpw
·6 माह पहले·discuss
Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser and if only they were allowed to be in charge things would go better. I certainly used to be this way. When I was an engineer I used to regularly engage directly with customers, and it was great to be able to talk with them one to one, address their specific issues and feel I was making a difference, particularly on a large product with many customers where you do not normally get to hear from customers much. Of course once these customers had my ear, the feature requests started to flow thick and fast, and I ended up spending way too much time on their specific issues. Which is just to say that I've changed my views over time.

In retrospect, the customers I helped were ones that had the most interesting problems to me, that I knew I could solve, but they were usually not the changes that would have the biggest impact across the whole customer base. By fixing a couple of customers' specific issues, I was making their lives better for sure, and that felt good, but that time could have been used more effectively for the overall customer base. PMs, managers etc should have a wider view of product needs, and it is their job to prioritize the work having that fuller context. Much as I felt at the time that those roles added little value, that was really not true.

Of course agreed that all the points made above for PMs, managers, support having their reasons to obstruct are true in some cases, but for a well run company where those roles really do their job (and contrary to popular opinion those companies do exist), things work better if engineers do not get too involved with individual customers. I guess Google might be a good example - if you have a billion customers you probably don't want the engineers to be talking to them 1:1.