Somewhere, some patent lawyers are going to make millions debating about whether or not this constitutes “public disclosure”.

how much you can build without a complete understanding

We’ve never actually never had one. I’d have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing “there’s a bad bug or bad gene that’s making me sick”. Like you may not know the details, but you’ve got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked… sometimes.

My favorite example of “knowing without fully understanding” is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is… because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as ‘half a base pair’) it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like “well I don’t remember much about quantum tunneling, but…”.

And that’s all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it’s easy to fall into the “Terrance Howard” style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we’re discovering, but if you don’t have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn’t actually supported. It’s like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could “fast forward” to the future, because time moves “more slowly” for you when you’re going faster, right?

oh I’m not shortchanging it, I work in the field. It’s crazy how “simple” it is in concept and hard to deliver. But it’s on par with antibiotics with how many lives it’s changed. Like you said, it’s like a lot of civil stuff. A solid highway system, for instance. Just some dirt with fancy rocks on it right? Righhhhhhht?

And don’t get me wrong, wastewater has tons of complications. Any plant is operated in equal parts science, engineering, and art. It’s a living, breathing, bioreactor. They’ve each got their own distinct personality.

Thrilled you asked! So yes: Treatment is always required, but the final destination of the treated water can vary. For instance, in a lot of places they may have municipal water TO a home or business, but that may be discharged to septic, as opposed to the river. Also in a lot of areas, water may be taken out of an underground aquifer (either by private well or a municipality) but when treated it may be discharged into a river or ocean. That can create problems because if you’re near the coast, the empty space in the aquifer may be filled by salt/brackish water that can lead to salinity rises in the aquifer. To solve that some places turn to “ground water recharge”, which is just a fancy way of saying “we built a big well to put it back in the aquifer”.

Increasingly, you’re seeing some places essentially sell their treated water. Santa Rosa CA, for instance, built an entire pipeline that goes from their treatment facility to another municipality to be injected into their groundwater.

So yes, everywhere treats it, but the final destination makes a difference. Las Vegas (or anyone else on the river) only gets credit for what goes back into the river, so any evaporation etc is a problem. It sounds trivial, but there is a reason those other strategies exist. It essentially doubles every pipe, limits where you can park a treatment plant etc. Vegas also does some great grey water re-use. That essentially means it doesn’t go “back” but can get used many many times, limiting the initial draw.

Wastewater is funny because it’s far from rocket science, but the numbers to implement any of it get staggering very quickly.

I don’t know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they’re not allowed very much, but it doesn’t “count” if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it’s actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.

… I had never thought about it this way. You’re totally correct though. I spend way more time fighting with my windows machine than I do my linux these days. I also just have a lot less patience fighting it because it’s always due to some dumb shit it didn’t need to be doing in the first place.

Prey (2017) is an awesome FPS/immersive Sim. As in, it plays like a shooter but how you take each engagement is highly up to you. You can go in guns blazing, there’s usually some way to use the environment, go out of your way to get robot helpers, mind control one of the enemy, sneak past entirely. It’s one of my all time faves because it has depth but draws you in like an fps. I love stuff like obra din but don’t always have the energy to get lost in them.

And the plot is awesome. Not a ton of replay ability (imo, but I’m difficult there) but definitely a meaty amount of time. highly recommend headphones.

Haven’t run it on the deck but a quick search shows people are really happy with it’s performance there.

Same. I started with Ubuntu like a decade ago. I hated it and didn’t really see the fuss, kind of gave up.

But then I started putting in tons of time in rasbian, and windows kept getting more and more… Well, windows. I eventually realized how much more I liked working on stuff on the pi, and just needed proper hardware. That’s also when I started to understand the differences between distros. I’m not flaming Ubuntu (I’m not really smart enough to have an opinion), it was just a lot of hastle for something I didn’t understand the upside of yet.

Been wrestling with my first all Linux (Debian) box. It’s a bit of a learning curve but there’s this weird headspace it frees up. It does what I tell it. There’s no random software that shows up. There’s nothing I can’t nuke. No surveys on my favorite BBQ dish in my Taskbar (true story). It’s so godamn nice. It’s the opposite of a black box.

Im getting another (3rd) box specifically to slowly replace my current desktop. Ill be fooling around with WINE and whatnot for the software I need for work, probably setting up a small windows partition for when I absolutely need it. But all in all I’ll be 90% penguin by years end.

for posterity: I don’t think that was it (although it does seem to be a common issue especially when you have an SSD). I never did try initramfs modification (not correctly anyway, I don’t think).

Problem was resolved by purging nvidia, and installing the driver manually. There also appears to be an issue with the secure boot signature, so for the time being I addressed it by disabling secure boot. Another day’s problem. edit: so it was likely never a race condition issue, it was likely secure boot rejecting the keys. It should be easily resolvable, even if I need to purge again, reinstall, and put the key in the proper place, but I’m ok for now given whats on this machine, what it has access to, and other shit I have to do.

edit: I forgot, I confirmed that the system is, infact properly utelizing the driver to get the most out of the card.