Notices by Thomas Sturm (tsturm@famichiki.jp)

@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”

😄

@isaackuo @nyrath Learned that the hard way playing Kerbal. The Jupiter-equivalent there has challenging delta-v requirements all over the place.

@noondlyt There are several projects out there that are pretty far along. The Ladybird browser comes to mind: https://ladybird.dev/

@noondlyt Pretty sure several people are thinking about it.

It's one of those programmer ticks like "I should write my own editor" and "I'll write my own blogging software" 😁

OK, I'll need to date-limit the data before visualizing earthquakes in Japan. 😅