mandevil

22 ms·

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by mandevil 1y ago
The point of the video game was to have a better model for naval damage control than the classic, Star Trek-style "10% damage" that you normally see in naval games. To do that I wanted to model actual WW2 ships, room by room, with
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by mandevil 1y ago
So you think that ChatGPT is a substitute for primary source research?
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by mandevil 1y ago
Proof by counter example: I've been to NARA II at College Park dozens of times, researching and writing various papers or games I have worked on as side projects. So for example I did a lot of research on WW2 era naval damage control f
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by mandevil 1y ago
I recall reading that Gordon Ramsay's first NYC restaurant (Gordon Ramsay at The London) didn't meet its financial projections because, used to London social mores, he expected far more alcohol consumption at lunch and dinner (but
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by mandevil 1y ago
In 2019 per-capita alcohol consumption, the US came in 35th, behind most countries in Europe (1). Latvia, Czechia, Lithuania and Austria all consumed about 25% more pure alcohol per capita than the US did, by this measure. Latvia and Lithua
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by mandevil 1y ago
This is just in our little corner of the Milky Way, but not thought to be the result of just one supernova. I last looked into this about a decade ago so I might be behind the times, but at that time the most popular theory was that the clo
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by mandevil 1y ago
Governments do fall to internal revolt/collapse regularly. I mean, Iran has done so within the memory of most of its senior leadership! They understand this much better than I do- Khamenei himself played a major role in toppling the Sh
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by mandevil 1y ago
Afghanistan was in the middle of a semi-active civil war when the US joined the fray, and by providing large scale air support to Northern Alliance troops on the ground, the situation changed abruptly. Iraq involved multiple US divisions of
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by mandevil 1y ago
Looks like someone just got hired to work at Epic!
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by mandevil 1y ago
I'm not even talking about Down Detector's own infra being down, I'm talking about actual legitimate complaints from real users (which is the data that Down Detector collates and displays) because the app they are trying to u
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by mandevil 1y ago
Down detector has a problem when whole clouds go down: unexpected dependencies. You see an app on a non-problematic cloud is having trouble, and report it to Down Detector but that cloud is actually fine- their actual stuff is running fine.
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by mandevil 1y ago
This is what my wife (a hospital pharmacist) thinks too. She has developed her medical intuition on thousands of patients, through education, rotations, residency, years of working, etc. And most patients are straightforward and easy. But i
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by mandevil 1y ago
You are correct, I had remembered the details wrong- ISS and Mir and Salyut 7 all have the same orbital inclination, so that's clearly the best orbit for Baikonur. So if you were doing your mass launches from Baikonur you would not pay
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by mandevil 1y ago
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110 seems to this non-lawyer to be a specific carve out allowing movies to be shown, face-to-face, in non-profit educational contexts without any sort of license. The Fair
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by mandevil 1y ago
It is a bad example, but not for that reason. Instead, it's a bad example because Federal copyright law has a specific carve out for school educational purposes: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#110
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by mandevil 1y ago
For the most part (there are a few exceptions), in the US lawsuits are not based on "possible" harm but actual observed harm. To show that, you need actual observed user behavior.
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by mandevil 1y ago
ISS is in a bad orbit for this sort of thing: halfway between the best orbit for Baikonur and the best orbit for Kennedy, it was a compromise which was okay because it wasn't getting that much traffic, so the penalty didn't amount
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by mandevil 1y ago
Not sure about what will happen with software engineers, lawyers, or doctors, but I do know how computer assistance worked decades ago when it took over retail clerks, the net effect was to de-skill and damage the job as a career, by bringi
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by mandevil 1y ago
Even with that level of target knowledge (I suspect the US has the investment in the sensor-targeting links to be able to use satellites to know within cm where planes were within a five minute window, but am not sure about other nations) y
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by mandevil 1y ago
"Plan to throw one away. You will anyhow."- Fred Brooks, _Mythical Man Month_ A software engineering book written decades before I was born- my college assigned us the 25th Anniversary Edition- and yet I re-read it every few years
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by mandevil 1y ago
The infinite is possible with AI. The unattainable is unknown with AI.
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by mandevil 1y ago
International law. The US- and many other countries- have long held that enough countries joining make international laws binding on all countries, even if that country did not sign a particular treaty. (1) This doctrine sprang up after the
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by mandevil 1y ago
The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not
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by mandevil 1y ago
You are correct, I meant to say Kuiper Belt, not Oort Cloud, pulled the wrong thing out of my memory. Unlike the Oort Cloud, we are doing a good job of mapping KBO's as we speak.
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by mandevil 1y ago
This is a good question to ask. It can't be, for the reasons you guessed. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When Pluto was found by Clyde Tombaugh he was looking for Planet Nine, which Percival Lowell had calc
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by mandevil 1y ago
Dwarf planet versus comet/asteroid hinges on mass, basically its "enough mass to be roughly round" (technically it's called "hydrostatic equilibrium"). Back from the 1810's to the 1870's or so, most p
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by mandevil 1y ago
A great, detailed explanation of what you are seeing: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... (and the other two parts of the series) The most important point is that your compensation is far more se
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by mandevil 1y ago
A scoutmaster of mine had a theory. Everyone has their own different version of what "9:30" means- to some it's 9:25, to others 9:45. But there is only one 9:32. So he would use weird times like that, we're meeting at 6:
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by mandevil 1y ago
I think you've missed a person in your account. The guy Daisy marries is not working to make ends meet, he's an old-money racist (Tom mixes up Henry Goddard, one of the most famous proponents of eugenics in the 1910's and 1
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by mandevil 1y ago
Both military and civil GPS signals are L-band. Any jamming that runs across the L-band will hit both of them. And since the frequencies are publicly available (and it is possible to confirm that they are correct with your own detecting equ

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