Notices by Thomas Sturm (tsturm@famichiki.jp)

@yogthos What a great contrast in one working life. Really shows how much China has changed in just one generation.

@kims If the other generals would have any spine, they would all quit on the spot.

@bouriquet @ai6yr
People in the US are used to enjoy their parks freely and since these areas have always been maintained to a very high standard, most of us just drive in with a bare minimum of preparations. But those are wilderness areas, and if the guide ropes are removed, they are inherently dangerous.

People. Will. Die.

@ai6yr Laying off all the National Park rangers and the maintenance crews is just shitting all over the crown jewels of the US.

All those extreme conservatives that like to take their giant SUV with a bunch of ATVs in a trailer up to the parks will have to deal with no toilet paper in the overflowing toilets and paths impassable because of landslides and fallen trees.

People will literally die in some of the more remote areas of the parks. If you slip and fall, good luck making it out.

@aral @cstross If they would just talk to a single person under 40 (who is not a “consultant”) before making any technology decisions, the world would be much better off.

@cstross @nyrath Somehow I had no idea that the third stage have attitude control. And apparently it had both solid motors and the hydrazine engine for ullage. Options!

@nyrath I'm seeing there that the third stage of the Saturn V also had a auxiliary hydrazine propulsion system. Wonder what that was used for. Never heard of that.

@nyrath To clarify: Only in the diagram are the ullage motors described as "solid".

@nyrath Actually found this: The ullage motors for the second and third stage were solid motors.

https://apollo11space.com/what-is-the-ullage-rockets-on-saturn-v/

@futurebird I recently have been thinking of what it would take to run my own spider... for the first time in about 25 years. The search results I'm getting lately are so bad, that a DIY spider might actually improve the situation for me.

A new blob-headed fish just dropped: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/20/blob-headed-fish-and-amphibious-mouse-among-27-new-species-found-in-thrilling-peru-expedition

@mrdiamondj @ai6yr I've had full teams of professional product people try and describe to our team what they want in a web site UI and fail miserably over weeks of meetings.

Translating the expected user behavior into actionable outcomes with software is very, very hard.

And even once the requirements are written, a good engineer will still often need several hours and quite some experimentation to translate this into maintainable code.

Writing the code is then often the easy part.

@ai6yr And also the process of "listening to stake holders to unscramble their mystery requirements".

Good luck having AI figure that out.

A wheat & rye & hazelnut bread fresh from the oven. Mastodon needs to implement federated smell-o-vision to really bring this experience across. 😋

@jartigag @alcinnz Yep. One of the most influential computers in the history of our civilization is the Sinclair QL.

From personal experience, every person that owned a Sinclair QL was inspired to write better software by its complete lack of quality control. 😆

@billyjoebowers People took the gadgets out of every dystopian sci-fi novel as ideas for their business plans, but not enough people actually read the books all the way through.

I wish more people would have read near-future science fiction in the 1980s and 90s. Like, really read it and thought about it.

@davidaugust @smach @mekkaokereke @lorihc The person complaining is a “former aide” because they couldn’t fucking cut it to work for a boss that reads their work. Tough luck.

@mimsical I’m afraid to ask what it looks like from behind.

@clacke “Qingdaoist”

😄