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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • I was super precious about all my cast iron for a long time. Then I had a thought watching this “cowboy” YouTuber wash his cast iron with some specialty thing.

    “This fucking guy is like pretending to be out on the pasture or whatever. In the actual 1800s, this shit was probably just wiped out, or they used lye soap or something ridiculous! Why the fuck am I being so fucking careful?!?”

    Now I do not care, like I’ve had my shit get rusty, crusty, “overheated”, the reality is that it’s a big ass chunk of metal! Short of deformation or intentional or extreme neglect (leaving it in the rain uncovered for 40 years) you will not destroy it.

    If it gets too “sticky”, you oil it up and heat it, and bingo, it’s fine again.



  • Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

    You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

    Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won’t kill anyone, but you’ll make the line go down temporarily.

    If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don’t catch it because you don’t respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.







  • These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

    You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

    The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

    I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.








  • It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

    The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

    I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

    I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

    The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

    That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.