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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You have it backwards here. Apple needs to support developers. They make it expensive and inconvenient to develop on their ecosystem. But until Apple releases their stranglehold, I would be just fine if I never have to use their shitty OS, development software, and tools ever again.

    my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur’s Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods

    I’m a bit skeptical on this claim, or maybe we have different ideas of what “extended periods” mean. My M1 Max MBP would have just under two hours of run time with VS Code doing .NET Core dev. It was even worse when doing Ruby on Rails work. And that was when MBP was new. My whole team were issued these, and our experiences were the same. Zoom calls were even worse, with about 90 minutes of run time.

    The ARM architecture has amazing battery life when idling, quite unlike x86. But when it gets spooled up, it eats angry pixies just the same as x86. All of my x86 laptops can do .NET Core work… for two hours.





  • My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.








  • Having seen firsthand what happens when someone unknowingly enters a hypoxic enclosed space, I think the difference is foreknowledge. Thrashing sounds like acidosis from holding one’s breath. I was helping an acquaintance work on his old steel boat. There was a watertight compartment. The risk of steel-enclosed spaces is that rusty steel in an enclosed space can consume all of the oxygen, leaving only nitrogen rich air.

    He opened the hatch and, before I could stop him, he just strode on in like it was nothing. He was unconscious before I could get to him, maybe ten seconds. Fortunately, he was near enough to the hatch that I could just reach in and grab him, rather than trying to find an air tank and regulator, and then put it on.

    He recovered just fine, but had a terrible headache. He didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t thrash. There was no drama. He walked in and fell unconscious. Lucky for him it was a small space, so the bulkheads kept him from doing a full header into the steel deck.





  • I see a lot of specific examples, but here is a good engineering guideline: do not skimp on physical interfaces. **Anywhere energy is changing form or if it touches your body, don’t skimp on those. **

    For example

    • tires
    • bicycle saddle
    • heaters/furnaces
    • electrical inverters
    • keyboard
    • mouse
    • engines
    • shoes
    • eyewear
    • clothes (buy used if necessary, but always buy quality clothing)

    Quality usually means more money, but sometimes one is able to find a high quality and low-cost version. In my experience though, trying to find the cheap version that works well means trying so many permutations; it would have been more economical to just get the more costly version in the first place.