o7 Vile Rat, but grr gons

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.

Based on how quickly behavioral and morphological changes happened in Soviet experiments on silver fox domestication, I suspect that domestic cats are about as domesticated as they’re gonna get.

The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think nobody would bat an eye.

Here’s the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don’t have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it’s a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don’t want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

My high-school friend group adopted “it goes” from our French class (“Comment ça va?” “Ça va!”, roughly meaning “How goes it?” “It goes!” being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

It’s the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said… Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that’s still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

It’s French (on account of Exocet and Storm Shadow/SCALP both being French-made) and Exocet is saying “but what would you say to side-by-side with a friend?” To which Storm Shadow replies, “Ah, yes, I could do that.”

Their numbers are declining, but it’s leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don’t toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham… which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.

The entire history of the nation of Israel is basically proving the axiom that “hurt people hurt people,” but on a geopolitical scale.

Former child prodigy with a Special Interest he immediately shares with anybody who takes a passing interest in him, prone to over explaining, so uncomfortable with emotionally charged situations he sends an astral projection to fill in for him… I personally don’t think it’s intended to be read that way, but I can see how some might choose to do so.

Gale is my least-favorite party member from a personality standpoint, so I asked my wife why she’s always romancing him in every playthrough. She said, “I dunno, why would I be attracted to an autistic-coded nerd who talks like he ate a thesaurus?” and I don’t know how to process that.

I’ve averaged about a 4 year tenure at my previous employers – some a bit more, some a bit less – but usually with a competing offer or two in that time period that I’ve used as a lever for a pay raise. Nobody’s complained about me being a job-hopper or short-timer.

I have noticed that my two last employers, both large national firms, have moved towards a model of career-tracking with a defined pay structure, similar to government work where different positions and experience levels have a pay range attached to them and you’re not able to negotiate out of that range. This has been framed as a protective move against wage inequality suits, but I suspect it’s more about preventing employees from negotiating especially high compensation packages. I haven’t had it cut against me yet – in both cases I got a very minor pay bump when my employers actually went out and compared their pay scales to what the market was demanding – but if enough employers start benchmarking against each other and using that to cap pay, it will functionally become like a wage-fixing cartel similar to what’s happened to rent in the last 5-10 years.

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.

North County was previously where all the middle class white people went after fleeing the urban core. Then as more African American families moved in to get away from urban decay, the white population moved to suburbs south and west of the city. This isn’t civil rights history, either – it’s been an ongoing process as recently as the 90s. My (white) dad grew up in Blackjack, just a short ways from Ferguson, and his parents only moved out of the area around 1995. When the unrest around Michael Brown’s death kicked off, he turned on the evening news to see the supermarket where my grandmother used to buy groceries going up in flames.

This is a reference to upscaling algorithms informed by machine learning a la Nvidia’s DLSS – seems like AMD is finally going to add the inference hardware to their GPUs that will let them close that technological gap with the competition. I’m guessing it won’t come until RDNA5, though.