And while we're talking about highly specialized firefighting apparatus... while I don't think Chicago FD ever ran anything quite like the FDNY Mack Super Pumper, they are well known for their use of a piece of apparatus known as a "turret wagon". Basically, it's a big-ass truck with a huge deluge gun (aka "monitor" or "turret") mounted on the back, and with a big intake manifold for receiving multiple supply lines. You could think of a "turret wagon" as being conceptually akin to the "Satellite" units that were part of the FDNY Super Pumper System.
Anyway, one of the best known Chicago Turret Wagons was "Big John" (aka 6-7-3).
Not sure if CFD still maintain any Turret Wagons in contemporary times or not, but variations on the concept are still found, particularly in industrial fire departments that protect high hazard sites like oil refineries, certain chemical plants, etc.
You might know this, but sleep debt doesn't just keep piling on. Eventually, and rather quickly, you may begin to experience permanent brain damage after a few nights of sleep deprivation.
From one insomniac to another... In the past I've been lucky if I get 3 hours total of sleep in a night due to physical pain disorders. I have deep trouble getting into NREM. I lucid dream often and my brain is active even when I'm supposed to be sleeping. In my dreams, I have to be careful not to be too energetic or overstimulated, or I will wake up.
I've had insomnia and night terrors since before I was regularly forming memories. An abusive childhood intensified that. I'm in my early 30s now and the damage is clear, both physically and to my life in general.
As much as I fear them, sleeping medication seems like the only way to save myself from early onset dementia or not accomplishing certain goals due to a perpetually low energy budget. It also has prevented me from losing weight. Sleep studies have shown that people who get frequently woken up while sleeping can burn around 50% less fat.. In my case, that's my entire calorie deficit which means in order to lose weight I have to basically starve myself. Melatonin, etc. have never worked for me.
All this to say... Don't wait for the damage to build up even more. Sleeping medication might change your life. I'm hoping it restores mine.
I miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this. Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes.
I bought a small press book with a collection of this art and it was a fun little trip down memory lane, as I’ve owned some of the hardware (boxes) depicted in it.
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.
As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?
When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.
If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.
People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts?
One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.
In Superkey, all of the matches are highlighted yellow, and the selected one is highlighted green with a line to it from the text field. You can keep typing to narrow down the match, or you can navigate matches using the arrow keys (and optionally, cycle through them with the semicolon key, which is what I use). There's a screenshot at https://superkey.app.
For the Canon Cat, I'm actually not sure as I've only watched videos of this functionality there.
> It also works the other way around, where you can change the lightness value to create various color shades and there is no hue or saturation drift unlike in other color modes.
> In the example above, you can see that the OKLCH colors maintain consistent blueness across all of the shades, while in the HSL example, the lighter shades drift to purple and the darker ones muddy out towards grayish.
I see lots of automatic palette generator projects where the shades of each color are generated with OKLCH by only varying the lightness value on some chosen base color. The problem I find is if you look at popular open source palettes, the way the hand-crafted hue and saturation values vary across the shades for different hues isn't that predictable (the curve of the hue/saturation values over shades aren't straight lines or typical easing curves).
Hawking my own tool (using HSLuv with RGB for now), but you can load and compare the hue and saturation curves as they vary over shades of a color using example palettes from Tailwind 3, USWDS and IBM Carbon, plus tweak each shade to your liking:
So I think OKLCH is a nice starting base for palettes and a quick way to generate a color you need in CSS, but I think designers will always need to tweak the hue and saturation of each shade so it looks just right as there's no single right answer you could encode into the color space.
Also check out oklch.com, I found it useful for building an intuition. Some stumbling blocks are that hues aren’t the same as HSL hues, and max chroma is different depending on hue and lightness. This isn’t a bug, but a reflection of human eyes and computer screens; the alternative, as in HSL, is a consistent max but inconsistent meaning.
Another very cool thing about CSS’s OKLCH is it’s a formula, so you can write things like oklch(from var(--accent) calc(l + .1) c h). Do note, though, that you’ll need either some color theory or fiddling to figure out your formulas, my programmer’s intuition told me lies like “a shadow is just a lightness change, not a hue change”.
Also, OKLCH gradients aren’t objectively best, they’re consistently colorful. When used with similar hues, not like the article’s example, they can look very nice, but it’s not realistic; if your goal is how light mixes, then you actually want XYZ. More: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value....
Also, fun fact: the “ok” is actually just the word “ok”. The implication being that LCH was not OK, it had some bugs.
This is right. People ask my how on earth I know what every one of my high school classmates is up to, when we were the last class of the millennium. Along with a number of old teachers and other randoms from years ago.
I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message. The message doesn't have any warnings on it like "oh I know it's been a while" or "you might not remember me". I write to everyone as if we are best buddies who just had lunch last week. People I've known since the age of 4, to people I've known for four days.
If I see someone I know at a wedding, I just go and talk to them about whatever we have in common. Normally someone we know.
I really think it's the guarded, tentative, "you don't have to talk to me" that turns people off. Of course people are free to not talk to me, but I don't lead with that. If you lead with that, people feel awkward, like "is he just being polite?". If you just pretend you are best buddies, people play along and they end up quite comfortable quite quickly.
Heh, of all arguably-valid definitions of "LAN Party" I think this one is as far away from mine as you can get.
Traditional LAN party: Everyone brings their computers to one place to connect via a LAN, where they play games, swap files, demo stuff to each other, etc.
My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the computers that I have already set up for them. Nobody brings their own. The point is to interact face-to-face, with video games as a catalyst. Swapping files and demos doesn't really happen since nobody brought their own computer. (My house: https://lanparty.house)
The Promised LAN Party: The LAN is extended, virtually, across multiple houses, so that the participants can play games, swap files, and demo stuff without actually leaving home. It's arguably no longer "local" but functionally it enables the same activities as a LAN party, other than the face-to-face interaction part.
I wonder who gets told their definition is "wrong" more. :)
If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memo...
Its funny isn't it - it doesn't lie like a human does. It doesn't experience any loss of confidence when it is caught saying totally made up stuff. I'd be fascinated to know how much of what chatgpt has told me is straight out wrong.
> I cannot imagine how dangerous this skill could be when deployed against someone who doesn't know how the sausage is made. Think validating conspiracy theories and convincing humans into action.
Its unfortunately no longer hypothetical. There's some crazy stories showing up of people turning chatgpt into their personal cult leader.
[EDITED to add:] I don't know how close to identical this is to the Chronicle article; at the end it says "Adapted from an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education"; my guess is that essentially nothing was changed, but I haven't tried to check.
It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends. https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes:
> [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser. The document representation and canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++ development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide a better debugging environment.
> Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity.
> [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and stability.
It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.
There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect transmission across a large expanse of time.
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
That example of liability only seems very tangentially related to third place activity. The lawsuit was over a discriminatory employee firing that was seemingly undertaken for reasons of public relations and community reputation, to mitigate these aspects of the impact to Starbucks of the original event.
The triggering event could just as easily have been any number of other scenarios unrelated to third place usage patterns - and even unrelated to customer behavior. It was just an employment discrimination matter, period.
What’s more, this original triggering event was arresting a Black person who didn’t order anything, whereas most people who go to commercial third places (including most such Black people) do order at least one thing, even when they occupy their seat for far too long for the amount of money they spend.
Honestly, outside the context of a movie or education, I find it pretty off-putting altogether. The videos of brand new cell phones being destroyed, TV's kind of less so but still, cars being crushed or vandalized, etc. If I put my psychoanalysis hat on (always dangerous when your subject is yourself, but anyway) I feel two big things:
1. A part of me just does not like waste. I'm keenly aware of our rampant consumerist culture's slow and continuing march towards collapsing our biosphere, and one of the ways those thoughts manifest themselves is being really upset with people buying products simply to turn right around and destroy them, while barely using them, usually for profit in the attention economy but sometimes seemingly just because they're wealthy and bored.
2. And another part: growing up poor, I'm keenly aware of how valuable things can be for people like me, who didn't grow up with much. Maybe that old computer that works fine that you're going to run tannerite through for a YouTube video means nothing to you, but I vividly recall many points in my life I could've really used it, and I know I'm the absolute opposite of alone in that fact.
The "artistic" angle that a lot of the outrage this is drawing didn't really hit me as hard as these things did, but that's just my subjective experience. I respect people who love these beautiful things and don't want to see (probably) completely functional, or even repairable, useful things destroyed so a multi-billion dollar company can sell more products. (And let's be honest, given the nature of video production, the ones we actually saw destroyed were likely a fraction of the ones actually destroyed.)
The artistic angle I do understand though is if it's done for something like a movie, it doesn't hit the same for me. When it's done to make other kinds of art, even schlocky hollywood crap art, at least that has... a result, I guess? It's destruction to create something. This was destruction for... another fucking ad. That will be forgotten in probably 2 weeks.
Edit: The more I've thought about it, the more gross it feels, and I find myself really sympathizing. Times are pretty tough right now and artists have it rough during good times. How would you feel if you, as a piano player, who hadn't gotten to play in years (or maybe even ever!) on a piano like that, how would you feel seeing Apple buy one that at least looks to be in perfectly good working order, and smash it, in the service of selling you a stupid iPad? I really think this is impossible to comprehend without taking into account that everyone is hurting right now: inflation, Bidenomics, whatever it is you want to call it: people are broke, our expenses are going up, and our salaries remain the same. Yeah, I totally understand why this ad in this cultural moment hit a nerve: a whole ton of people, especially creatives, are struggling right now and here's Apple, buying up a ton of awesome things, and smashing em to bits and being like "here, you don't need a piano, you need an iPad!" Yeah, no shit people are upset.
* An ENEMY STATE has controlling influence of a widely used social network in the USA. People's minds are influenced by it .. "You are what you eat" holds for what you read/watch and consequently think
* This legislation won't lose Biden the election, banning abortion by an insurrectionist will win it
* We are in a country that needs people to work together to be a successful country - we are big and highly populated democracy
* Rugged individualism - "me first" - is easily attacked by influencers, subject to divide-and-conquer techniques. From marketing to foreign influence, it is a weakness.
* Healthcare (even as expensive as it still is), reproductive rights, free ability to vote, and ability to have civil-war-free existence in our lifetimes are contingent on a healthily functioning government.
* To support OUR STATE we must find a middle ground of unity. We must recognize the forces that divide us. We must choose the path to that maintains our ever-evolving sense of personal "freedom". We must be good citizens.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...