Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod

Man, things sure have changed since I was in college. The university had one /15 and three /16s so every single ethernet port everywhere on campus had a publicly routable IP.

Napster was so goddamn fast…

The guy who wrote this is gone

I’ve gotten about 1,000 alert emails in the last 8 hours because of this

Step 3 of enshittification has begun

I have an idea: Mammoth burgers

It’s not that long gone. There were still mammoths around when the pyramids were built. Plus there’s still huge swaths of tundra and taiga that they could live on, with a lot of the same plants, even if it’s quite a bit warmer.

I appreciate this article for telling me how to disable amber alerts and silence the others.

It’s like people saying it can replace programmers. If they say that they have no idea how either of those things work.

Infinite energy glitch

It’s not pride, it’s just that I know how to use it really well and that makes it easy for me to use.

But it’s really only for viewing files on another system over SSH. For local work I use Sublime Text

Yeah, I totally want a copy of the dream I had last night where someone stole my motor scooter and I was chasing them around a parking lot

Oh, I have no illusions that I’m smarter than other people at their chosen profession. Hell, I’m an idiot at my chosen profession quite often.

Though I do wish people would stop calling me a “miracle worker” and “wizard” because I can get the wifi working.

As one of those weird autists who make computing too hard who’s been using Apple products for decades I really wonder where I fit in.

It makes sense that they’d want to move it to a single codebase rather than have both Wordpress code and Tumblr code in the same organization.

Anyone else old enough to remember when Wordpress was called b2? Good times.

DC can also be used with superconductors for long-distance energy delivery.

They’re already using them in Finland. And there’s a company building them for residential applications

If you take something not unlike a water heater and fill it with sand that you then heat to about 1,000 degrees farenheit. Then when you need heat you just pump some air through it and use that feed of hot air to provide heat where you need it. And unlike heat pumps, this can be added to the sort of baseboard heat you find in a lot of older homes.

And since the heaters are just simple resistive coils with 100% efficiency, it’s a simple and cheap way to store electricity that you’re going to use for heating anyway. Remember that every time you change energy from one kind to another you’re going to lose some of it in the process.

Since most energy is used for heat, storing it as heat makes a lot of sense, and there are sand thermal storage systems that can scale from single household to whole neighborhoods.

Lithium Ion is more advanced battery technology because it’s got high energy density which means it’s used in consumer electronics. Lower energy density technologies exist with better properties for storing at grid scale. They’re heavier and bigger than lithium ion batteries, but can store energy a lot longer and use much more available materials. One example is Form Energy’s Iron/Air battery, which uses rusting iron to store electricity for hundreds of hours.

It is definitely a business problem. I deal with similar sorts of contract work and we always put in clauses about rework and going over time and I’ve got strict restrictions on what work I’m supposed to do. (Actually dealing with this now, honestly. Customer wants extra work done and I need to get approval for it.)

The problem is the VFX firms are at a disadvantage when dealing with studios. The studios have the work and all the lawyers, so they have the power in negotiations. If they studio says do more work and the VFX firm doesn’t they’ll get blackballed and go out of business.

Totally agree that qualified people can do good or even great CGI. But the reason everything is CGI these days - and why end credits are getting longer and why budgets are going through the roof while VFX firms are going bankrupt - is because it allows executives to send shots back over and over to get “fixed.”

This is a real problem in the VFX field, and leads to a ton of burnout. They even have a term for it: “Pixel fucked.”

CGI gives the producers the ability to re-do complex shots over and over again. With practical effects you don’t get to say “That fireball isn’t red enough, make it redder” without a ton of extra work.