What? Is this a reference to the game?

Project Zero Dawn but it’s funded by VCs

I never understood it, but business owners seem to have utter contempt for the people who actually make their money. I’m not talking about support staff, I mean the people that if they stay home, dollars aren’t getting printed for everyone else. In private EMS, the billing staff would constantly get parties and catering and gift cards and shit, while the crews actually running the calls and writing the billable reports got third-hand furniture, moldy stations, ambulances held together with a fucking wish, and constant bellyaching about how paying the crews minimum wage was costing the company too much money. I’m starting to notice the same pattern pop up between the dev team and the product team as my software company scales.

I see your line about fusion, and I’d like to raise the point that commercial fusion reactors are no longer coming in thirty years but five. Now, is it hype? It’s unclear to me because I’m honestly fucking drowning in cope, my dudes. But Commonwealth Fusion, a spinoff of MIT’s fusion group, is building, right now, a commercial fusion reactor in Virginia. They did some really cool shit with high(er) temp superconducting magnets in their tokamak design and project that they can break Q10 (that is, get 10x the energy out that they put in) at scale. They’re also licensing and building these reactors for other interested parties IIRC.

They’re not the only ones. There’s a few other companies that are working on fusion that seem to be making some really exciting strides, and I know China’s also made some pretty impressive advances as well. Livermore Labs also claims to have broken unity in 2014 with laser-cartridge-implosion, but AFAIK on peer review, it turned out that they used some sketchy-ass math to make that case, not to mention that that tech can’t really scale well. Since then, I seem to remember that there’s been several other claims of having broken unity (at least one of which was Livermore Labs again) though I have no idea as to how well they hold up to peer review. The point is that we’re actually finally seeing some movement in the field of nuclear fusion, including the ongoing development of commercial grid-scale reactors by at least one venture. I don’t think it’s enough to get fusion out of its infamous doghouse, not yet, but it’s worth being aware of.

It’s definitely to do with work conditions. I’ve been a paramedic for fifteen years, and suffice it to say, I’ve seen (and smelled and heard) some shit. I’ve always felt that I had a harder time processing the stuff from when I worked in a busy metro system and we had to go from coding a kid who drowned just fifteen feet from a party full of adults to holding grandma’s hand and making her warm and comfy on our five minute jaunt to dialysis to “hey, there’s a car on fire and bystanders report hearing screaming from the vehicle”. I would regularly get three hours of sleep over a 72 hour period and have almost no time to process the horrible shit we saw while still having to be a functioning, caring professional for every patient along the way. The also horrible shit we saw in the slower rural area I worked in has haunted me a lot less. There’s probably more to the whole picture than that, but I’m confident that work conditions are a huge factor.

I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!

I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.

Edit: disregard. I thought you meant lanes, you clearly mean sweepers

I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.

Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.

OTOH: Boeing. Had the 737 Max bug been a one-off incredibly bad fuck up, they would have been a good buy. Then it turned out that that bug was just the first sign of many deep seated issues with their production process. Boeing 100% deserves everything they’re getting. Management skipped right over lawful, chaotic, and neutral evil and went into stupid evil, and decided that sacrificing QC/QA on aerospace equipment would be a great way to get returns for shareholders.

[Look inside]

It’s a regex

There is no such thing as making “enough” money under the chicago-school dominated business thought. A business should always make as much money as it can for its investors, always. A friend who read Friedman’s works says that the Friedman doctrine makes room to say that a wise business will optimize investor outcomes by investing in its product, workforce, and other smart long-term choices, but in practice, nobody ever reads that deep into the Friedman doctrine. It’s just “philosophical” license to make (and demand, on the part of investors) the shallowest slash-and-burn business decisions possible to make line go up NOW. I will accept arguments about how it’s capitalism, but I’d like to point out that we experienced a very distinct culture shift in business leadership starting around the time that Chicago school thought became all the rage.

Interesting. It’s kind of interesting, but in the battle of Blair mountain, there’s definitely some hints that there were already communist and anti-communist sentiments at work. I wonder if the red bandanas were a nod to communism.

Oh, both, cool!

I thought it had something to do with union membership, something about red handkerchiefs.

Those tech bros are up to something

Oh, I did. I ended up installing Linux mint and used it on my personal machine for about six months before re-installing windows. I would still be using Linux, I liked it a lot, but I found I had a lot of trouble getting multiplayer to work between my daughter and I. Gaming is 98% of the way there, but that 2% is really annoying and it’s most of what I use my personal machine for. I’m sure I could have figured it out if I’d had a solid 12-36 hours to fine tune configs and Google hyper specific issues, but I just don’t have that. I’m confident I will return to Linux in time, but Windows still has the edge in terms of out-of-the-box gaming, sadly.

And an incomplete product; windows 11 was less functional at launch than windows 10. I’ve been a windows user since 98 and that’s the first time I can remember having said that. Sure, there were off editions that were weird and unpleasant, but I wouldn’t say less functional. Windows 11 just flat out was an incomplete product at launch.

And the live service dependencies: windows 11 pooping its diaper and having a fit about every other thing because it doesn’t have an Internet connection even though an Internet connection isn’t strictly necessary is a terrible UX choice. Anyone with half a brain knows it’s because MS has decided that if you won’t let them slurp that tasty, tasty data, then you shouldn’t be able to use the product you paid for.

And the plans to stuff ads into your operating system

And them basically doing the same shit that landed them huge anti-trust lawsuits in the 90s, but we’re doing it again because they figure they can make more money than the lawsuit will cost them, so fuck it.

There’s a lot to not like here.

They do know, but they honestly, sincerely believe that a government of for and by the people isn’t possible for them.

Source: hosted a Russian exchange student. We had this talk, I suggested that Russia could have a state that works for its people and got laughed at and basically told “we don’t do that here.” And honestly, as an American in 2024 watching our democracy implode in real time so that billionaires can have lower taxes, I get it.