trailee

joined 1 year ago
[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

Cool, thanks for sharing!

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Is that weighing system built into the lifting arm on the truck? Does it record automatically, or just beep at you if it’s over limit? Is it adding up everything that goes in so that you have a total load weight when you dump the truck, or do they measure that with a truck scale in and out?

When everyone is putting out full bins, I imagine the truck fills up earlier than normal and then you need to pause the route at an unusual place to return to base and empty. Is that common, or do you generally make it through the entire thing in one go?

What’s the strangest thing you saw happen in that job?

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

“What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said.  “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”

He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.

Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.

Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago

There is particular concern about the continuation of the monitoring at Mauna Loa that began in 1957 – the longest continuous record of CO₂ at a single site. NOAA assists the Scripps-led monitoring there.

“Without NOAA involved, it will be difficult but not impossible to continue measurements nearby,” says Keeling.

I find that hopeful. This is the first I’ve read that there’s any chance of continuing measurements at Mauna Loa against trump’s wishes. I had assumed that the current buildings and equipment are under federal control, as is all nearby land. It would be nice to see some elaboration on how continuation might be possible.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 weeks ago

The new offering includes custom national security tools, AI-powered science and health applications, and cleared engineering support for classified environments.

What happens in the SCIF stays in the…oh fuck it, never mind - send it to the cloud for processing. What could go wrong?

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

He may be proving a point about phonemes and the general sounds of languages, and many others have made similar points as well. That doesn’t make it less weird to listen and try to understand the song as an actual speaker of the mimicked language. Especially if it just shows up on your playlist and you tell your friends it’s just some obscure Elvis song.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Here are several different types of weird. They’re not all on the same playlist.

Autechre - Second Bad Vilbel

Jan Böhmermann - Faschismus is Back

Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol

Too Many Zooz - Noda

Moon Hooch - Tubes, Number 9, Bari 3

Hiromi Uehara - Canon in D

2CELLOS - Thunderstruck

Captain Tractor - The Last Saskatchewan Pirate

The Arrogant Worms - Carrot Juice is Murder

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 weeks ago

OP take note, scrubbles is spot on!

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

You’re not necessarily wrong, but the company is at least invested enough in this candidate to make it worth spending a bunch of engineers’ time on it. That’s why they do the offsite screening interviews in advance. I’ve interviewed plenty of great candidates, but also plenty of mediocre ones and a few surprisingly poor ones. And in the end it’s still a bit of a gamble about how a strong candidate will perform in the job. Hiring the wrong person sucks all around, and the half day onsite interview is merely the least bad method used in the software industry.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You don’t have the job, you’ve just made it past the offsite screening. I expect you’ll be in 3-4 interviews each lasting about an hour with a different person, then they might take you to lunch with a group of people. Lunch is still an interview, it’s just informal. Be a reasonable human that they want to have as a coworker.

Expect some of the interviews to involve whiteboard coding or technical problem solving, all of them to ask you social dynamics questions (e.g. “tell me about a time you had difficulty working with a teammate”), and hopefully all of them will also give you time to ask them questions. Be ready for that last part - presumably you don’t know very much about the company, and this is your time to find out more. You might be so desperate that you’ll take any job, but that’s a turn off for them. They want to see that you are as eager to find a good team fit as they are.

Each interviewer will likely do a written summary with a hire/no hire recommendation, and there will likely be a hiring meeting with all of the interviewers, either one such meeting for each onsite candidate or one meeting at the end of a series of candidates so they can make overall decisions. You probably won’t hear a decision before 8/8, a week after the onsites finish.

[–] trailee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I’ve noticed that anecdotally as well. There are a lot of good points already listed in other comments, and I have a couple merely additive points.

On an individual passenger basis, direct flying has always been operationally cheaper if both options exist, because it’s a more efficient use of resources. In practice, financial efficiency also requires keeping all flights as full as possible, so it was maybe helpful for an airline to incentive a customer to keep hub flights full by pricing connections lower than a direct. The direct flight is arguably more valuable to a customer because it’s a better experience, so it can cost more. All three flights are going to fly anyway, so making the sale is most important to the airline.

But equally or more important, the overall volume of air travel passengers has grown enormously over the past several decades. I’d bet that many direct routes didn’t used to have enough pairwise volume to run a regularly full profitable flight, let alone multiple competing direct options. Now I expect a ton more pairs of cities to make economic sense.

Looking at it another way, that increased travel volume over decades also came with larger airports to support more total trips, and each of those new flights need to go somewhere. Airlines can add more options throughout the day to cities already served, and they can add new cities. They naturally choose both, therefore more direct routes are created. As more direct routes have supporting volume, the inefficiencies of the hub and spoke model dominate the bottom line.

 

This is the swivel mechanism for the high pressure air at the center of my Campbell Hausfeld automatic retracting air hose reel. That hose is crimped directly on the swivel mechanism instead of adding negligible cost with a threaded fitting.

The upshot is that the hose is not replaceable by itself if damaged. And of course parts are not readily available. Throw out the whole thing instead and buy something new. Assholes.

 

The link is to a year-old article that helped me decide not to pay Alaska Airlines’ voluntary SAF carbon mitigation fees. I’m still not certain about the right choice, and would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The big picture includes acknowledgement that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption within capitalism, so in some ways this choice is entirely irrelevant. Also that flying is by far the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile so we should each minimize doing it. Finally that flying has the most challenging logistics of shifting energy sources, fundamentally because batteries are heavy.

Alaska offers me a choice during the checkout procedure to contribute to SAF accounting for between 5% and 20% of the fuel that my flight will use, but it has nothing to do with the fuel actually consumed by my flight. They are already buying some amount of SAF and using it in their SFO hub only, so the program is hand waving about the fungibility of fuel consumption. Really they’re just offering me the opportunity to donate money towards their SAF usage, indirectly supporting the growth of the SAF industry.

It seems to me that the whole SAF industry is currently greenwashing bullshit, piggybacking on the big lie from the past few decades that adding ethanol to automotive gasoline is “sustainable” in some meaningful way. But that ignores the water usage depleting aquifers at an accelerating rate, necessary fertilizer use and soil depletion, using food-producing acreage for fuel instead, energy usage in planting/harvesting/refining/distilling, and so on.

Please validate my choice not to donate to the current state of SAF, or provide links to interesting reading that supports your claim otherwise.

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