I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.

Ew Windows 11

CHICKEN JOCKEY

I had that exact AMD 486DX4 100mhz. It was awesome! It was on an older socket, where Intel was pushing people to go onto a new socket. But motherboards were super expensive back then and often you would need to do a memory upgrade as well. Then AMD came along with a 3x multiplier for a really good price. It gave my system a couple of extra years.

Later they did the same with the K6 series, where they pushed socket 7 systems to their absolute max. Those 550 mhz K6-III chips were super fast and cheap and you didn’t need to upgrade your entire system. And in my experience the 450 mhz models were much cheaper and could be overclocked to 550 mhz without any issue.

It’s all fun and games until your computer turns into a black hole because there is too much information in too little of a volume.

You might want to look into using some form of parameterized queries.

NASA gave SpaceX a bunch of money because they were developing Starship. It’s this super powerful super versatile do all launch system and platform to do a lot of stuff. With NASA being required to use and fund private companies for part of what they do, they put out the call for a bunch of missions. SpaceX said they could do it with Starship and do it for cheap, much cheaper than any other company. They also have an amazing track record with the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule. At the same time other companies are either startups with pretty much nothing but a good idea. Or the old garde which were used to getting a bunch of government money to do very basic shit for way too high of a price. ULA and Boeing seriously dropped the ball lately.

It’s easy to shit on Musk and his bullshit. But there are some really talented people working at SpaceX and a lot of the stuff they do has been impressive.

As far as Starship goes, for now it’s still a total pipe dream. Nowhere close to being what they promised it will be. But the same was said for Falcon and they pulled that one off (eventually) with the block 5 Falcon 9 being one of the most reliable rockets ever made.

I was very critical of the Starship booster. The whole we have a whole bunch of engines concept isn’t a good idea in my book. Sure if one of them fails, or even a couple, you can still do the mission. And each engine can be simpler, smaller and easier to build. And take advantage of scale to build them faster and cheaper. This is why the Soviets tried this concept with their Moon missions back in the day. However the issue is, you need to be able to detect issues and shut down engines fast enough. All the engines are close together and when things go wrong, so much energy is involved it usually leads to shit flying places it should not. This means a single engine going wrong has the potential of throwing pieces of itself at great speed into other engines, control systems or fuel tanks. And a whole lot of engines means a whole lot of points of failures. It also makes things like pipe and cable routing much more complex. Monitoring and controlling is much more complicated as well. So it isn’t all upsides, there are significant downsides also.

However their testflights have seem to have shown the engines to be reliable. The monitoring to shut down engines in time when issues are detected. And a whole lot less big booms than I was expecting. Before hand I thought the thing would just explode every time. So I have to admit, they might have figured it out. Now a couple of testflights doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough, but at least it works some of the time.

There is however also a lot of BS, as usual when Musk is involved. NASA has figured SpaceX isn’t going to deliver in time or within budget. The booster might work, but Starship is still very much a dream at this point. Some other companies have since received money for missions which earlier were claimed by SpaceX. And I believe there are multiple lawsuits going on, claiming SpaceX just under bid to deny the contract to its competitors with no expectation of delivering.

Starship was an important part of the now canceled Moon missions. But before it was canceled a lot of folk didn’t think what SpaceX promised was viable. Even if they had Starship working the way they said they would have, their plan was never going to work. It relied on launching a Starship to orbit and then have it be refueled by other Starships. But after calculating how much fuel the thing lost while waiting in orbit and how much a single Starship could provide after using most of the fuel to get itself to the other ship, it turned out best case scenario you’d need a dozen launches. And these would need to be back to back, so no refurbishment time. And this assumed the booster would be lost or at the very least land in the ocean, no returning to base. With more realistic scenarios there would need to be many more launches. And keep in mind the Starship to Starship fueling hasn’t been done before and is extremely difficult.

But as always people believed all of the BS Musk has been spouting. And to be fair SpaceX does have an impressive resume. So the NASA folk were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Deny SpaceX, even though they had the best papers and the best price? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or grant them the contract, knowing there is a good chance SpaceX isn’t going to deliver. But the same can be said for all the other companies, many of which only had concepts and not the track record like SpaceX. And we’ve all seen how good Boeing is doing right now, that crew needed a ride home provided by either the Russians or SpaceX, total embarrassment.

I think it has gotten a lot better in the past 10 years, but there are still a lot of places where there is too much lead in the environment. It doesn’t degrade at all, so unless it’s dealt with it just stays there. Given we’ve only gotten rid of leaded gasoline less then 3 decades ago, the effects are still very much there.

On the other hand, we have seen exhaust being very efficient in distributing chemicals with adverse health effects across the planet. Leaded gasoline was a huge oopsie that still has adverse health effects today.

Another effect is micro-particles from the jet exhaust that form a lot of nucleation sites, this allows the vapor in the air to condense into tiny droplets more easily.

Its profits are plunging, as is its share price.

Looks at share price: Up 10% in the last month…

The minimum requirements one is a bit of a weird one, as those were definitely a thing back then. Gaming pushed computer technology a lot and personally many of my computer upgrades were motivated to play the latest games.

I remember upgrading my PC for Duke3D from 4MB to 8MB, it cost me my entire paycheck.

Yes the myth that irradiating something makes it radioactive is a very persistent one.

The reason radioactive material is so dangerous, is because it has the tendency to spread around. Not the radiation, but the material itself. Then people get exposed to that radiation and hurt themselves. There is a particularly tragic accident that happened in 1987 in Brazil where thousands of people got exposed to a stolen radioactive material. Especially when the material sheds dust it’s very dangerous because it can then easily be ingested and even low levels of radiation which normally wouldn’t penetrate the skin can cause issues inside the body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

Another reason the myth persists is because high enough levels of radiation can cause other materials to become radioactive. However on Earth this is only the case inside of fission and fusion nuclear reactors. And the source of a lot of the radioactive waste. But outside of that, nothing on Earth will make another thing become radioactive.

I know a lot of the food used in the military is normally irradiated. This allows for a long shelf life, which is particularly useful if you are killing kids spreading freedom on the other side of the world.

You would pay to watch a man get ripped apart? No thanks, I’d rather not have that image on my mind for the rest of my life.

Even something smaller like a chimp can bite straight through a human and has enough strength to rip an arm straight off.

I don’t even know how they managed this. I regularly create test repos to reproduce bugs in open source software, to go with the bug report. When it contains some random generated credentials only used within that repo, Github freaks out and I need to tell it it’s just testing shit and perfectly fine to publish.

You’d have to be intentionally publicing shit like that.

Impossible to tell

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Very fun and puzzly and you get to play as Zelda this time.

HOW CAN SHE SNAP?

My kitchen faucet is like this. It’s one of those with single little stalk to regulate both temperature and pressure. Not only do you need to get it precisely right for the correction temperature, you also need to get it right for the pressure. Not far enough up and you get a little drizzle, too far and it splashes everywhere. And the stalk is kind of sticky as well, as you push it there is no movement until suddenly it moves. So making small adjustments is really hard

He will have the concepts of a plan in a couple of weeks. Literally any day now…