Recent content by Loren Pechtel

Exactly. Ignore the big changes, they can only happen with cooling. But humanity has a strong preference for living very close to sea level. A large portion of the major cities of the world are at the junction of a river and the ocean--thus likely on a river delta, and river deltas are very...

It would be very unlikely if we don't. The air is already +1.5C. The depths are a source of heat (geothermal), surface temps are solar input + geothermal - radiation to space. Geothermal won't change, why should we see an equilibrium state where the water warms less than the air? It will...

Yup, we are already seeing problems with ocean water warm enough that it just keeps feeding a hurricane parked on top.

I've never run into 8badfood, but it's obviously the same idea--seed memory with an unusual, recognizable value (both are hexadecimal representations of 4-byte numbers--unless hex is expected you would expect an 0x on the front, but any old school programmer will recognize them without that) so...

In years past I would have loved a deadbeef allocator, but haven't used a language that would permit use of an uninitialized value in years.

No. Programming is fundamentally a translation exercise between sloppy requirements and logical code.

There's always something new that will make programmers obsolete. It never pans out because it never touches the fundamental job: translating loose requirements into bulletproof approaches. All that really happens is it takes over more of the scutwork.

Good programmers generally understand that they'll spend more time verifying the AI code than they would just doing it themselves.

Unquestionably. Putting the people with their own assets in charge produces a better outcome that when you put people using other people's money in charge. The problem is that this is far more a matter of unreasonable expectations than a true economic problem. It's just the internet has made...

Most art is effectively a remix because life is mostly a remix. That's not theft. The mediocre crap part is the problem.

A program that is mediocre crap is a detriment. Management has this insane view that AI can greatly increase output--but it doesn't appear. You turn around and think it's you have bad people rather than AI is shit at anything that must be right.

A perfectly reasonable statement from the CEO of Orion Asteroid Movers.

If an AI can handle your issue a decent search of their website should also be able to handle your issue. Chatbots can make it more friendly, but at the expense of accuracy.

There actually is an indoor-safe rocket launcher. Instead of an ordinary rocket the launch motor ejects a whole bunch of plastic bits--you have junk flying everywhere but it doesn't kill you. Downside is the low ejection velocity means more mass must be ejected and thus each round is heavier...

Did you not notice the part where I said 5% for the hardware? Let's look at the Falcon 9. Kerolox will degrade the overall performance but won't have much effect on the stages. The second stage is about 20% the weight of the first stage. You seem to think you can make a magic rocket with...