Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…

All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

Only in the world of scrappy “low-cost” commercial endeavors, AFAIK. The appeal of FRC-style reactors has more to do with lower cost of construction than any inherent physical advantages. Tokamaks are still where most of the nationally- and internationally-funded research is happening.

I was personally rooting for stellarators, but whatever operational benefits they offer over tokamaks seems to be outweighed by the incredible design complexity that they add, and they’ve stayed small-scale research projects relative to tokamaks.

Intel’s problems, IMO, have not been an issue of strategy but of engineering. Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error, but refusing to change course when the node failed over and over and over to generate acceptable yield was not, and that willful ceding of process leadership has put them in a hole relative to their competition, and arguably lost them a lucrative sole-source relationship with Apple.

If Intel wants to chart a course that lets them meaningfully outcompete AMD (and everyone else fighting for capacity at TSMC) they need to get their process technology back on track. 18A looks good according to rumors, but it only takes one short-sighted bean counter of a CEO to spin off fabs in favor of outsourcing to TSMC, and once that’s out of house it’s gone forever. Intel had an engineer-CEO in Gelsinger; they desperately need another, but my fear is that the board will choose to “go another direction” and pick some Welchian MBA ghoul who’ll progressively gut the enterprise to show quarterly gains.

Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that

Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm – the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it’s businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that’s great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

Given that the first perovskites studied had lifespans that could be measured in minutes, this is great progress, but the fundamental problem is that as a class of materials they just don’t want to exist outside of an inert atmosphere. Without significant progress in stability and encapsulation materials, they’re more of a research curiosity than a viable real-world PV tech.

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

Any time you see perovskite-based cells mentioned, you can assume for the time being that it’s just R&D. Perovskites are cool materials that open up a lot of neat possibilities, like cheaply inkjet-printing PV cells, but they have fundamental durability issues in the real world. When exposed to water, oxygen, and UV light, the perovskite crystals break down fairly rapidly.

That’s not to say that the tech can’t be made to work – at least one lab team has developed cells with longevity similar to silicon PVs – but somebody’s going to have to come up with an approach that solves for performance, longevity, and manufacturability all at once, and that hasn’t happened yet. I imagine that when they do, that will be front-and-center in the press release, rather than just an efficiency metric.

It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!

I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

Well, that’ll happen if you don’t take your Neuropozyne. Their test subject should have budgeted for that before getting augmented.

Problem being, because big tech money has so distorted the economies of the cities it’s clustered in, many of these people can only choose between finding another tech job ASAP, moving away from their industry to a lower cost metro with limited job opportunities, or imminent homelessness. Driving a forklift won’t pay the rent, and commercial real estate is so absurdly priced that there may not even be a restaurant to wait tables at.

USB-A is only rated for 1,500 mating cycles, whereas USB-C is supposed to last for 10,000… Though in reality the ports on my phones seem to start getting too loose to hold the jack in at around 1,000 cycles. Still, it’s not a totally unreasonable standard, and any device that hasn’t been designed to be thrown away should have ports broken out onto replaceable subassemblies – as is the case with many business-class laptops, for instance – so replacing a failed USB-PD port shouldn’t be too much trouble.

"We’re not colluding with our competitors to fix prices on rental units, we all use a third party service to collude for us" is such a bullshit legal excuse that I’m shocked they even floated it.

There have been studies (this one, for example) that suggest the total radioactivity-related health impacts from coal power exceed that of nuclear power by an order of magnitude. That’s not all pollution-related deaths for coal – just those associated with radon exposure inside of mines, and radioactive materials embedded in coal going out into the environment. For all the fear-mongering about nuclear, it’s hard to find a less dangerous source of base load generation using present-day technologies. Maybe once grid-scale batteries are available at scale, they could replace nuke plants, but that’s a solution ten years too late for an environmental problem we have to fix right now.

My wife and I also met on OKCupid, probably around the same time as you – Tinder-like features were starting to appear, but the core of the experience was still about reading other users’ personal essays and comparing compatibility quiz responses. Of all the services I tried, OKCupid (in that particular incarnation, at least) seemed like the only one that was genuinely aimed at fostering deep personal connections. I haven’t been on any of the apps in almost a decade now, but it really seems like the shallow, gamified Tinder model of “swipe right if they look hot” ate up the marketplace, to the detriment of everyone.