You're off on this... Aluminum is largely unsuitable for spaceship construction due to its temperature sensitivity and the fact that it makes anything constructed of it unsuitable for thermal cycling. Aluminum, unlike stainless, becomes extremely brittle when it's thermally cycled. It's an almost 5-fold temperature difference (150C to 1500C). That's not a small difference.

It also has additional cost savings over any other forefront material (eg. CF or Ti5) - like 30x for similar capabilities. If cost was no object, inconel would be the clear winner in most regards, but since cost is a significant factor.. We've known (NASA has) since the 50s that SS would be the superior metal used for such things, and here we are.

There is, arguably, nobody else in the space/rocket industry doing what SpaceX is doing, so I'm not sure how you could even have that criticism.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlemMFXNXRIg

Yeah I would love to see an NFC standard that didnt extend the range, but instead specified where in the (*^^*&^#@ the reader was on the POS system, or at least a lit up nfc logo where you want me to tap.... Every POS I go up to has it somewhere else, and finding it is a pain

I've been doing the same for almost 20 years. The first one I made with light cardstock (leftover high grade 'artisinal' paper from wedding invitations that looked antique / unbleached), and I sewed up 3 mini-books with a sewing machine, which I then glued into a spine made out of cardboard from a cereal box. Then I made a 'cover' for it out of some scrap deerhide I'd bought from the 'junk' bin at Tandy leather for like $5 that sleeves over the cardboard.

Now, anytime I need a pocket notebook, I just make another insert, and I've got a stack of "used" notebooks on a shelf that someone, a descendant maybe, might be able to page through and see how banal my life is.

But then, I think I'm probably a bit different than the populace at large. People frequently ask me (even my wife), "how did you learn how to do this?" or similar... well, I didn't learn how to do this, I just did it... but I did learn how to do a dozen+ other things that lead me to having the skills to do this, and I'm using techniques and process I learned while figuring those things out to do this.

Ya know what? It's typically not Democrat states like CA which get called out for being overly conservative - and this absolutely is, verging on neophobic.

This is along the lines of conservatives wanting to ban the Internet because it allows people to communicate (this was a thing for a hot minute in the 90s).

Do that many people have such a problem with temporal permanency that they're not able to realize how rapidly things have changed over the past 5, 10, 25, 50 years? You can't hold back progress by banning it. Hell, there's nothing you can really hold back by banning it, and in many cases, banning it only makes it more prominent and more desirable.

In the specific case of AI, it's out of the bag. Anyone with enough computing power - something which becomes increasingly irrelevant as time passes - will be able to run any of the publicly available models, and anyone with enough money will be able to train them to do anything they want. Our governments (eg. groups like DARPA) have all started exploring how it can be used to kill, monitor, and control people in ways we can only now guess.

I fail to see what benefit the fearful approach provides here except feel-good placation of busybodies. Bad actors will do whatever they want, and the above-board businesses which weren't going to (intentionally) do anything that would be dangerous to their bottom dollar - and that's what keeps them (mostly) ethnical. It's just like every other time they try to ban or heavily regulate things, whether it's knives, emissions, drugs, guns, or porn: good people are unreasonably jeopardized and inconvenienced and the bad actors "cheat" (as do many/all major corporations on almost everything that impacts them) or outright ignore the system itself and operate in the black.

(Forgive me if this was autistic, I'm offensive. )

The biggest three issues I've experienced in years are:

1) different formulas and way of doing them than Excel, so there's compatibility issues.
2) The UI is hideous on Mac (and Windows, presumably) at this point.
3) It's very slow to start (on Mac and Linux, haven't used Windows in years).

It's my go-to when I need to do things that I can't do in google sheets/docs, at this point.

I sympathize with your situation - this used to be a hard scenario to deal with, and there are a couple things you can do to make an upgrade break... but I don't understand how, frankly. I've not had an install break that wasn't my own fault in years (eg. specifying an arbitrarily small /boot partition).

apt update && apt upgrade, update the sources.list to the next major release; apt update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y and.... wait. Accept all defaults (unless you know better).

This has been foolproof for years for me.

The pay is fantastic, and as most of the Amazon employees working in an office are AWS employees working in "Sales", it's great for people who can babble and bullshit but with no real skills - particularly as their sales people don't work on quota and can do a very large number of things that contribute to looking busy but accomplish nothing. Even skilled people struggle to get anything done there due to their "gotta follow the rules" formulaic "success criteria" culture. This is partially why you end up with a lot of Indians working there.

Think of the worst parts of writing reports or doing homework in school - that's working at Amazon.

Let's not conflate things here.

It's trivial to click the "I've got a disability" box when applying for a job, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're disabled or have a disability, except per the definition of law.

Eg. things like alcoholism, prior or current, ADHD/autism, prior cancer, anxiety disorders, and/or being morbidly obese.

Also covered under the ADA, would be something like ripping a tendon or breaking a knee in a sporting activity and needing to (temporarily, albeit for more than several weeks) walk with a cane or need other special considerations.

I don't NOT have sympathy for a lot of these, but they're hardly a basis on which a person shouldn't be able to come to the office.

(That also doesn't change the fact that these RTO efforts are draconian and stupid, and 100% aren't being used for honest purposes by Amazon.)

what do you call a beach with 100 lawyers buried up to their neck in sand?
A sand shortage

What do you mean sloppy - the comma does exactly what is intended.
Lawyers (almost exclusively) write laws
Very vaguely
Then companies pay lawyers a LOT of money to interpret those laws
When two companies interpret the law differently than each party hires VERY expensive lawyers to fight it out in front of a judge - that is another lawyer getting paid a lot of money.
In the end it is the lawyers creating a problem and benefiting from the problem that they create.

Ever hear the joke about a small town having 1 lawyer and the lawyer goes broke - the second the second lawyer moves into town they both get rich

In fact, the best thing to do is to use the gaps between cars to absorb speed differences so as to allow ALL traffic to flow more smoothly

I agree with you, and I find that this is easier to do in a manual because the acceleration is instantaneous. I have found that I don't have to accelerate as hard if the response is immediate, versus delayed. I don't have to brake as hard because I start slowing as soon as I back off the gas.

With most automatics, the off-pedal cruising speed is 20 to 25 mph, which means that driving any slower than that requires riding the brake. From behind, a slow, steadily moving automatic appears the same as one which is stopping, or stopped. So they create a situation in which drivers behind a steady 15mph automatic vehicle have a harder time estimating traffic speed - which leads to the inevitable traffic accordion.

Many years ago, when Motorola was in buyout talks with Google, they used Google docs extensively. One can only wonder if Google got a better deal because they were able to read Motorola's internal discussions. I don't know if they used Google docs for the discussions, but I do know there were quite a few people at the company who expressed no concern for the possibility that Google docs could leak proprietary information.

One of my vehicles has an automatic transmission, and the other, a manual. The car with the automatic transmission has about twice the horsepower of the manual, but drives as if it's twice as heavy.

What I've noticed is that when driving the manual in heavy traffic, I use the brakes much less than with the automatic; one pedal both brakes and accelerates. Because I can keep the engine in its power band when crawling along in traffic, I get instant acceleration when traffic speeds up again. But with the automatic, the "delay, downshift, overaccelerate" conniption fit of the automatic transmission often allows other drivers the space to cut in front of me.

I've started leaving off the prepositions, pronouns and such from sentences, and my 'pro' writing is starting to look more like casual writing - more terse. "You've got to lean into it." becomes "Lean into it."

Or I'll just resort to what an idiotic feminist college English lit prof used to call "antiquated 19th century writing style": writing long, syntactically complex but linguistically communicative sentences which convey a complex yet nuanced thought, something AI will absently and superfluously munge.

Often these are interspersed.

In the long run, we'll lose out on more people being able to do the "hard" things. Sort of like when schools start hiring on non-excellence criteria, you end up with students who can't do the coursework and the field suffers as a result. That's what's happening here.

In 5, 10 years when people are like "we fucked up, quick, hire good developers again" - or good voice actors, or good whatever - there won't be anyone in line to take those jobs. They'll have moved on - either finding different things to pay their way, and are no longer looking, or they'll have fully checked out. Either way, they won't be looking for the jobs. You'll probably have a mess of H1B types take their role instead.

It's going to be a huge mess.