gdubs

33 ms·

421.
by gdubs 5y ago
It’s surreal to be sitting here in 2021, with the permafrost melt imminent — something I remember Al Gore talking about fifteen years ago as a really bad feedback loop we needed to avoid at all costs.
422.
by gdubs 5y ago
> We need to start reducing our carbon emissions aggressively within the next 5 years. Just need to point out that a price on carbon is a mechanism for achieving exactly this. The goal is to make emitting energy sources expensive enough
423.
by gdubs 5y ago
> humans aren't wired to think about the wellbeing of large groups, even less about the entirety of the world. It’s even trickier than that. Humans have a hard time putting their “future self” above their immediate gratification. Yo
424.
by gdubs 5y ago
Check out the Carbon Farming Solution - it’s essentially an encyclopedia of land use and its effects on Climate. Incredibly well researched, and doesn’t present anything as a panacea. The tl;dr is that while pastures and agroforestry can be
425.
by gdubs 5y ago
The big one was ballpark 115’/120’. We had to have a crane remove it. Sad day; as much as poplar drive me crazy — they’re invasive weeds really — it was a giant. We’ve planted a lot of oaks and maples (and a bunch of other stuff).
426.
by gdubs 5y ago
FFS people - we don’t need a peer reviewed study of every extreme weather event to tell us it’s Climate Change. It was 115 degrees in Portland Oregon today. Beating the previous record that was [checks notes] … yesterday .
427.
by gdubs 5y ago
If I dump a bunch of wasps in your house, and I say, “hey, watch out for the wasps”, and then you get stung by some wasps — well, it’s pretty damn obvious what’s happening. Can you prove it? Eventually, maybe. And often times these extreme
428.
by gdubs 5y ago
We had to take out a lot of giant cottonwoods that someone planted for shade a long time ago. Super hazardous, right on the house. The previous owner also installed gigantic west facing windows — no doubt to optimize for every ounce of PNW
429.
by gdubs 5y ago
I implemented NVIDIA’s parallel prefix scan as an Apple Metal compute shader a while back, for this GPU based ‘blobby’ thing. [1] The marching cubes algorithm I was implementing generated a lot of sparse datasets, and I wanted to send only
430.
by gdubs 5y ago
Thanks - it’s definitely been a disturbing event, and hard to convey just how unusual it is. Portland was a couple of degrees from the Las Vegas record yesterday, and the infrastructure just wasn’t built for it. We’re just south in the Will
431.
by gdubs 5y ago
Hello, from NW Oregon — currently one of the hottest places on the planet. Feels like a convection oven. My puppy found a bunch of dead baby birds last evening — almost certainly related to the heat. Hard not to read the symbolism into it.
432.
by gdubs 5y ago
Portland was hotter than most places on earth yesterday. And today it’s set to break the record again. I’m down in the Willamette valley, not far south of Portland, and it’s about 100 degrees, noon, and see to get up to 108 this afternoon.
433.
by gdubs 5y ago
Mac OS tripped me up with their new-ish “group things by month” in the recent folder. I didn’t realize those buckets were side scrollable. Scrolling is so easy to do that I’m not sure why it’s even necessary to limit the number of items in
434.
by gdubs 5y ago
I loved Softimage — sad when the big 3D apps all consolidated and we lost the competitive development of Wavefront / Softimage / Alias. I’ve been getting into Houdini this year — the app is still going strong, and actually afford
435.
by gdubs 5y ago
If I recall they were marketed as “screamers” for Lightwave3D distributed rendering. The main customers seemed to be the 90s TV visual effects houses (Babylon 5 etc).
436.
by gdubs 5y ago
A watercolor artist doesn’t necessarily sit down and think about the Navier-Stokes equations, but they sure do take advantage of the fluidity of their medium.
437.
Saffron as an Antidepressant (2018)(ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
122 points by gdubs 5y ago|104 comments
438.
by gdubs 5y ago
There was another thread on 4 day workweeks, and I’ll reiterate what I wrote there: people had the same concerns when society shifted to a 40 hour workweek and productive actually went up . Fewer injuries and illness, etc. 1: “The Rise and
439.
by gdubs 5y ago
No, not at all. I’m pointing out that people fought against limiting the workweek to 40 hours but productivity ended up rising. Point being: fewer hours doesn’t mean productivity will necessarily go down. So if we’re gonna go to a four day
440.
by gdubs 5y ago
Why though? As I pointed out in my other comment — based on actual historical data — productivity went UP when people switched to a 40 hour workweek. We need to get passed this idea that the literal number of hours are somehow sacrosanct. W
441.
by gdubs 5y ago
People are not machines. This is the argument presented when the 40 hour workweek was proposed. Instead, productivity went up! Because people had fewer injuries and illness. (1: Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” is pret
442.
by gdubs 5y ago
I’ve always been more on the skeptic side, FWIW — but the two pilots on 60 Minutes came across as very credible. And they — and others — claimed to have seen these things with their own eyes. The one pilot described the object as being arou
443.
by gdubs 5y ago
If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change until they're undeniably upon us – at which point people will say, "how did no one warn us about this?" Unfortunately, barring
444.
by gdubs 5y ago
Another aspect of personal projects is that if they’re truly enjoyable they can be a kind of salve for burnout.* If you feel like you can’t even open your IDE, a personal project can generate the excitement that reinvigorates your passion.
445.
by gdubs 5y ago
Sorry you’re going through this. I have a close loved one with long Covid related issues and it’s been a miserable year for them, with a lot of uncertainty about the future. A young, otherwise healthy person. I understand your sentiment — w
446.
by gdubs 5y ago
Check out Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture” and “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”. He breaks things into principles across different climates. They’re also generally inspiring books.
447.
by gdubs 5y ago
And if you’re gonna grow tomatoes, throw some marigolds in there too! They’re a nice companion plant — they look pretty and help with pest control for your tomatoes. (I also like growing basil in that mix.)
448.
by gdubs 5y ago
Autocorrected ‘low risk != no risk’
449.
by gdubs 5y ago
I’m pretty blown away by how ... vibrant TikTok is. There’s so many interesting niches. Photography, film making, philosophy, humor. I love seeing random accounts with 300 likes and then they’re million-plus a few weeks later. Like the guy
450.
by gdubs 5y ago
My biggest question right now is with my kids who are 7 and under. But also just kids in general. Mainly I’m wondering what kind of evolutionary pressure will be put onto the virus in a population where young children represent a larger and

More ›