Just a basic programmer living in California

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 23rd, 2024

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  • That’s almost what I do with my work journal too. Daily logs with an index. A page for deferred tasks. A page here or there for tracking things that need to be done for a given project. I find the index helpful even if I only occasionally put an entry there.

    For my personal journal daily logs are the core feature for sure. But I also get a lot of value from a future log, and a page for the current month with a list of events, and scheduled tasks.


  • I use bullet journals, and I have one for work. It’s not exactly the same - instead of my thought process it’s mostly what tasks I’m working on each day, and meeting notes. It helps me to organize what I what to get done so I don’t have to keep thinking about what I want to get done. It also helps me to get an idea of where my time went, and is a good place to write down anything I want to refer back to. Like when a coworker trained me on a deploy procedure I took notes, and added a line for that page number to my index.










  • hallettj@leminal.spacetosolarpunk memes@slrpnk.netFusion
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    2 days ago

    In the past I’ve been bullish on nuclear fission for a similar reason. But we’re at a point where fission is very expensive, and solar is extremely cheap - even including battery cost it’s now the cheapest form of energy production. When fusion is working it’s also going to be very expensive. Fusion isn’t going to fix all of the problems with fission either - fusion also produces radioactive waste, and IIUC Tokamak designs require a steady supply of metal to replenish the blanket. (Although I thank all that is good ITER switched their blanket material from Beryllium to Tungsten.) We should keep up the research to hopefully get to a point where fusion and fission are cheap some decades in the future. But solar is there now, so current production expansion should be solar.

    Yes, solar uses a lot of land. But we have a lot of land to use. For example the US has about 30 million acres devoted to growing corn to produce ethanol. Not food - ethanol. Solar produces far more power per acre than ethanol. Here’s an article on a PNAS study with some details, including this quote:

    [I]f farmers took a bold leap and covered 46% of land currently used to farm ethanol with solar panels, that would then generate enough energy to reach the 2050 decarbonization goal for the US.

    There’s also a detailed Technology Connections video on renewable energy FUD that I recommend.


  • Capitalism is where there is a class of people whose role is to own things. Or put another way, it’s where substantial portions of industry are owned by private interests that the public has little oversight over. Money and markets don’t necessarily require capitalism. Free markets can exist without capitalism with systems like these:

    • All businesses are employee-owned, such as through cooperatives, or employee stock ownership plans where employees own effectively all the stock.
    • Businesses are publicly owned via a democratic government, but those businesses are expected to operate in a largely self-sufficient way, and are allowed to compete with each other.
    • Public ownership like above, but by industrial unions

    Those are forms of “market socialism”. A real system is likely to have a mixed economy, such as cooperatives, with some state-controlled or union-controlled industries for cases where trade-offs don’t favor market competition.



  • Some serious problems with that bill! But looking specifically at the restrictions on Class 3 - where I live, California, Class 3 e-bikes are already banned from multi-use trails. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. 28 mph is awfully fast for places where one could easily hit a pedestrian. Pedestrians have been killed in collisions. Some of those were confirmed to be illegal e-motos, and I’d guess that most of the unconfirmed cases are too. But at least one case looks like it may have involved a Velotric Go 1 with an unlocked speed of 25 mph.

    Impact energy increases with the square of speed (KE = ½mv²), so Class 3 is 40% faster than Class 1, but carries nearly double the kinetic energy (1.96x) for the same mass.

    I’m inclined to agree with the take from Berm Peak: no restrictions on riding Class 1 e-bikes, but treat bikes with throttles, higher speeds, and more powerful motors with more scrutiny. That way there is one thing called an e-bike, and it’s much easier for everyone to understand. Fewer deadly accidents means reduced threat of sledgehammer legislation. We could still have start assist - some states, including California, explicitly allow start assist on Class 1.

    Edit: Linkified the Berm Peak reference



  • Eh, it’s taken extraordinary circumstances to hold the very rich accountable basically forever. For example tobacco companies were found to have been knowingly, aggressively lying for decades about cigarettes killing people on a huge scale. But none of the tobacco CEOs saw any personal consequences. That was well before 2001.

    The first Gilded Age ended when monopolistic trusts were broken up, but that only happened after a rare confluence of factors: wealthy misbehavior became so obvious and egregious that public outcry reached a high point; and at the same time William McKinley was assassinated, putting Theodore Roosevelt in the presidency. Republicans had put Roosevelt in the vice presidency to make him stop causing trouble for them - they didn’t expect him to end up with actual power. That’s what it took to get some control over the country’s most influential businessmen. But even after Roosevelt’s trust-busting campaign, the consequences for the very rich were that they became somewhat less rich.

    You do sometimes see CEOs serve jail time, like Elizabeth Holmes, and Martha Stewart. But those are people who just aren’t on the same level as the CEO of the nation’s sole energy company (in the case of Monsters Inc.).




  • Interesting! I would not have guessed that “novella” predated “novel”. But it seems that the modern English meaning of “novella” being a story with a length in between a novel and a short story is pretty different from the older Latin and Italian meanings. I’m going to imagine there was another process where “novella” picked up that specific meaning.

    It happens I watched The Decameron series on Netflix recently, which was entertaining. I’m sure it’s very different from the original book - probably only sharing the setting, and some character names.


  • Good points! This reminds me of a thought I had the other day: why do we use the word “novel” meaning “original, of a kind not seen before” to mean “a fictional written work on the order of hundreds of pages”? I’m sure there was a process behind that etymology. Someone could have made up a previously unused word, but novel words sound too silly to get people to repeat them. As an example consider the French Academy’s attempt to get people to say “courriel” because they didn’t like French speakers borrowing the English word “email”. Or probably more accurately: unless you’re speaking French in recent history, no one is in charge of words, and there is no plan.