Thrashy

Thrashy , 15 hours ago

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn't tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing -- this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower's use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as "a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation" but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it -- flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That's a lot of bad choices to make at once.

Thrashy , 11 hours ago (edited 9 hours ago)

If it ain't leaking that means it's empty, etc...

Thrashy , 16 hours ago (edited 16 hours ago)

It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!

I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

Thrashy , 10 hours ago

I exaggerate -- but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee's across the state, and I'm currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn't even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

Thrashy , 1 day ago

This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or

2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he's quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

Prolonging the war doesn't guarantee he won't end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he's running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don't matter to him.

Thrashy , 1 day ago

Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.

At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately faced antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn't able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn't time yet).

This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo -- which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel's process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.

Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we're in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they're finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there's a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn't been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that's exciting.

Thrashy , 1 day ago

The only link I am aware of is that Intel operates an R&D center in Haifa (which, it happens, is responsible for the Pentium M architecture that became the Core series of CPUs that saved Intel's bacon after they bet the farm on Netburst and lost to Athlon 64). Linkerbaan's apparent reinvention of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the contrary, the only real link seems to be that Haifa office, which exists to tap into the pool of talented Israeli electronics and semiconductor engineers.

Thrashy , 3 days ago

I can't wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

Thrashy , 3 days ago

...and that, son, is why at some point in the distant future the universe will be an undifferentiated soup of unvarying temperature, full of depleted and inert mass slowly evaporating into photons. In the end, everything you've ever been, ever done, and ever seen will be nothing more than a diffuse haze of light, racing unobserved and unobservable through a dead and infinite void. Any questions?

Thrashy , 5 days ago

On the one hand, I agree with you that the expected lifespan of current OLED tech doesn't align with my expectation of monitor life... But on the other hand, I tend to use my monitors until the backlight gives out or some layer or other in the panel stackup shits the bed, and I haven't yet had an LCD make it past the decade mark.

In my opinion OLED is just fine for phone displays and TVs, which aren't expected to be lit 24/7 and don't have lots of fixed UI elements. Between my WFH job and hobby use, though, my PC screens are on about 10 hours a day on average, with the screen displaying one of a handful of programs with fixed, high contrast user interfaces. That's gonna put an OLED panel through the wringer in quite a bit less time than I have become used to using my LCDs, and that's not acceptable to me.

Thrashy , 6 days ago

Unfortunately, recent Supreme Court rulings would seem to put the kibosh on my "the Confederacy is coming from inside the house" theory of outlawing the GOP as a whole for seditious conspiracy.

Thrashy , 7 days ago

Through the course of my career I've somehow lost office space as I've ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.

Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody's obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don't have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.

Thrashy , 8 days ago

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they're considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I've only ever used their PLA(+) but it's always been bulletproof.

Thrashy , 8 days ago

I used to have a coworker whose daughter was in competitive cheer. It's like any youth competition -- the parents can lose their goddamn minds over it. If there was a chance somebody could DQ a competing team, or perhaps open up a spot on a team by narcing on one of the current members, somebody is gonna do it.

Thrashy , 9 days ago

I mean, at this point an "ideal" solution (such as it is) would be for the US to stop stonewalling UN Security Council resolutions so that the other members can greenlight a peacekeeping operation a la Kosovo, that would stop the fighting, open up aid flows, and create an avenue for effective enforcement of the 1948 treaty boundaries on the way towards implementing a functional two-state solution. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.

Thrashy , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

They're flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you're right up next to them -- and once they're past the front lines Russia doesn't have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine's reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine's air force is to support efforts on the ground.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

Well, that'll happen if you don't take your Neuropozyne. Their test subject should have budgeted for that before getting augmented.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

I tried using ChatGPT to distill my LinkedIn profile down to a summary paragraph for a marketing resume (what gets included with a RFQ response when a design or engineering form is pursuing a project) and everything it spat out was worse than what I had already written and wasn't happy with. Ultimately I lifted a phrase or two from ChatGPT's output, but it didn't do much to save me time or improve the quality of my copy.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

Given that hunting is a very common pastime in the US, and that hunting rifles are statistically the firearms least likely to be used in a homicide, I think you'd find that information to be a pretty useless outlier, on the level of asking about bow or fencing foil ownership.

Thrashy , 11 days ago

Here's a direct link to the study. Of note is that there wasn't a significant trend in detected levels by year (odd, since you'd expect the amount off-gassed to decline over time), but that electric cars in the study had ~10 times lower levels of the chemicals being studied. The authors note that this may be more an effect of vehicle brand since most of the electric cars in the study were from one unnamed manufacturer (probably Tesla?) but it suggests that even within the current regulations there are ways to reduce exposure.

I'd like to see the scatter plot for detected levels by year of manufacture, and maybe it'd be good to extend the study's coverage of vehicle age a bit further, because the lack of a noticeable trend doesn't jive with my intuitive sense of what ought to be happening. That said, it's a reasonably solid study, I think.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

As fun as it is to dunk on Elmo I think we both know it's not the seat foam that's the problem there. 😅

I'm actually right now in the process of developing design criteria for a battery testing lab, and as part of that I had to do a hazardous materials analysis. Lithium as it is in batteries is considered a water-reactive chemical, and the code only allows you to have ten pounds of it in a building before you're pushed into a special hazardous occupancy type with lots of extra fire and explosion precautions required. I ran the numbers and figured out that's about 8000 of your typical cylindrical cells -- which is right about the number of cells in a Model S. And in a Model S, you're just kinda... sittin' on 'em. Fun thought...

Thrashy , 10 days ago

Right, it's the weight of lithium inside batteries, not the weight of the batteries overall. I think the biggest laptop batteries I've seen had something like 6 16850 cells, and you'd need north of 1,300 of those laptop batteries in a building before it crossed a threshold for hazardous materials.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

I should clarify that the actual language in the building code is per control area rather than per building, and in most cases a control area only covers a single floor (and in some cases not even that, if there's a sufficient fire separation between tenants sharing a building floor). I think that the amount of lithium batteries in laptops and mobile devices is a bit of a blind spot in code enforcement these days, but from a practical standpoint it's not likely that a typical office is going to cross the threshold into hazardous-occupancy territory.

Thrashy , 10 days ago

Don't look at the pile of old phones and laptop batteries that's been sitting in the trunk of my car for the last month. I tried to get rid of them at a community hazardous waste event, but the computer recyclers didn't show, and they're just gathering dust at the moment...

Thrashy , 15 days ago

I highly recommend the Kill James Bond episodes on Charlie's Angels which break down just how much of each movie is basically just (executive producer) Drew Barrymore perving on her co-stars.

Thrashy , 16 days ago

This is the guy who couldn't even be bothered to spell his own name correctly, after all. I don't get the sense that he's going over anything with a fine-toothed comb on the best of days.

Thrashy , 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

Looks like the stroke was a complication from a systemic MRSA infection, which would not be my assassination agent of choice if I was trying to kill somebody on purpose, even if I did want it to look like an accident. MRSA only kills about 1 in 4 people infected with it, and many of those are people who are already hospitalized for some other serious illness. It strikes me as a rather low-probability way to kill a healthy adult.

Thrashy , 17 days ago

I don't like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It'd probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it's anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you're talking about reactors that aren't pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that's reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

Thrashy , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

Thrashy , 19 days ago

It's all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there's 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc... I think you'd have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.

Thrashy , 19 days ago

It's the first clip in this compilation, but they're all pretty good... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wgwtc1U6c4

Thrashy , 20 days ago

The "I'm gonna give you $100 to fuck off" school of military strategy.

Thrashy , 22 days ago

I fully expect a dissenting opinion from Alito and Thomas that attempts to retcon nominative determinism ("Donald Trump can do whatever he wants, but Joe Biden is a stinky poo poo head and must go directly to jail") into a core pillar of Constitutional originalism, but I don't think there's a majority on the court that would sign on to an opinion legitimizing drone strikes on the opposition party. I'm fairly certain the end result will be a significant narrowing of Trump's criminal exposure regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the biggest impact that the court has made with this case is dragging out the process of trying it to the point that it likely will not be decided before the election. If they help Trump run out the clock and it winds him the election, then he can instruct the DoJ to kill the case, and his toadies on the court will have handed him a win while being able to maintain the thin veneer that they're not nakedly partisan operators. If Biden wins anyways, they're not in danger of catching flak from the MAGA crowd because they will have done their part.

Thrashy , 25 days ago

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I'm so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request

Thrashy , 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

Folks, there's a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I've owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I've had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I'm actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that's not a job I honestly don't know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

Thrashy , 26 days ago

In @GreenTacklebox's defense, I've had a couple awful landlords (see the post in my comment history about being charged for carpet cleaning in a house with all wood floors... I could tell some stories about that shithole, too) but when I've rented directly from a human being, who had a personal connection to and investment in the building, it's been great. I lived in an old "bachelor's apartment" building several years ago which was purchased by a well-to-do commercial real estate developer who just wanted a nice penthouse unit in the neighborhood, and she was the best landlord I've ever had. Hired one of the longtime residents as a live-in super, got to know her tenants, and put a lot of effort into fixing the place up while keep rents very reasonable. One month I forgot to drop off my rent check, and two weeks after it was due, she called to ask not where her money was, but if I was okay or if I needed any help. She wasn't exactly a mom-n-pop operation, but I'd classify her as quite decent.

Was she the exception that proves the rule? Possibly. On the other hand, I think that in this field as in many others it's the corrupting presence of megacorporations seeking yottabucks of ROI off the backs of the little people that distort the healthy functioning of the marketplace. If we could get Wall Street out of the residential real estate market things wouldn't be so insane as they are now.

Thrashy , 29 days ago

Bees are basically an introduced domesticated animal outside of Europe. Other parts of the world have their own native pollinators that are at significantly greater risk than bees, which are heavily managed and extensively studied due to their agricultural importance. For all the popular alarm over Colony Collapse Disorder, bee colony populations have been basically stable for decades and certainly haven't seen any measurable decline in recent years.

Thrashy , 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago)

This used to hold broad cultural applicability, back in the Before Times when the "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" crowd was still excluded from the political mainstream. Norms excluding out-and-proud ethnofascists from official, public participation in the English-speaking political right started to seriously slip around the time of Obama's election and certainly ceased to exist after Trump's win in 2016, but prior to that time "Nazi" was very much more often an ad-hominem attack than an accurate description of somebody's politics.

Thrashy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The South being The South yet again. Certain folks just can't achieve orgasm unless they first work a brown person to death and reap economic gain from it.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

For those of you who recognized the Transport Tycoon graphics, enjoy this magnificent recreation of the soundtrack with live instruments that the original composer put together several years ago.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Studies have shown that in most cases that you'd care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

It's been many years since I read them, so I don't know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:

• most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren't thinking about consequences
• a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain

and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn't well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.

If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out... and if I'm perfectly honest, I'm fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that's not the world we live in.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

The management agency that leased the house I lived in while I was in college tried to withhold our security deposit because we didn't provide proof of carpet cleaning.

The house had all hardwood floors.

Thrashy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

Thrashy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The personality types needed for each role

The personality types attracted to each role, mind you. Cops become cops because they like the feeling of having power over people, and tend to behave that way on the job. Social workers enter the field because they want to help others, which is why when somebody is in crisis, you should want to send a social worker rather than an emotionally-stunted high school bully who's armed to the teeth and trained to see deadly threats in every shadow.

Arguably you need somebody else to fill the role of police as well, but if you tried to do that the current demographic of officers would probably become something like an outlaw biker gang overnight, so it's hard to see how we get there from here.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

It's the equivalent of "become a Hollywood superstar" for engineering specialties. Lots of grads chasing relatively few positions in the industry -- many will ultimately take positions working in related engineering fields like mechanical or automotive engineering, but at the end of the day the aerospace sector just doesn't develop enough new products to employ all the grads coming out of school with a degree.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

There are so many things that were horrifying about the US's prosecution of the Global War on Terror, but at least when confronted with the same problem the US was like, "what if we invented a knife missile that can hit a guy in the driver's seat of a car without hurting anybody standing next to the car?" whereas the IDF took the position that a 100:1 ratio of innocent bystander to presumed militant (in an environment where fully half of those innocent bystanders are children to boot). Just absolutely ghoulish levels of inhumanity.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Given what they've done elsewhere I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren't big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it's important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80's computing power, and it's only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.