Thrashy

Thrashy , 6 days ago

My high-school friend group adopted "it goes" from our French class ("Comment ça va?" "Ça va!", roughly meaning "How goes it?" "It goes!" being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

Thrashy , 17 days ago

Insert Legolas and Gimli meme here, except it's an Argentinian Exocet and a British Storm Shadow.

Thrashy , 17 days ago

Yep, but it doesn't change the fact that the most noteworthy targets of Exocets were British, with the missiles being launched by Argentinians.

Double funny that the Storm Shadow is part french, too...

Thrashy , 1 month ago

I live in an old, once-redlined streetcar suburb, and my folks are about a half hour away in a new, nearly-exurban tract home development. They love to see their grandson and are happy to babysit him when my wife and I want a date night, but we've just about stopped taking them up on that offer because every restaurant in a reasonable distance from their neighborhood is some mediocre, mid-market national chain that's utterly devoid of charm, serving plates that have been ruthlessly value-engineered to minimize the need for specialized equipment or skilled talent in the kitchen. The area is quiet, I guess, and I'm sure the land was cheap, but there's no there there.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Can't take credit -- it was originally coined by Gertrude Stein -- but it's a very apt turn of phrase to describe the placelessness of American suburbia.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn't tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing -- this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower's use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as "a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation" but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it -- flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That's a lot of bad choices to make at once.

Thrashy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

If it ain't leaking that means it's empty, etc...

Thrashy , 1 month ago

It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!

I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

I exaggerate -- but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee's across the state, and I'm currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn't even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or

2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he's quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

Prolonging the war doesn't guarantee he won't end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he's running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don't matter to him.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.

At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately faced antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn't able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn't time yet).

This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo -- which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel's process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.

Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we're in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they're finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there's a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn't been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that's exciting.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

The only link I am aware of is that Intel operates an R&D center in Haifa (which, it happens, is responsible for the Pentium M architecture that became the Core series of CPUs that saved Intel's bacon after they bet the farm on Netburst and lost to Athlon 64). Linkerbaan's apparent reinvention of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the contrary, the only real link seems to be that Haifa office, which exists to tap into the pool of talented Israeli electronics and semiconductor engineers.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

I can't wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

On the one hand, I agree with you that the expected lifespan of current OLED tech doesn't align with my expectation of monitor life... But on the other hand, I tend to use my monitors until the backlight gives out or some layer or other in the panel stackup shits the bed, and I haven't yet had an LCD make it past the decade mark.

In my opinion OLED is just fine for phone displays and TVs, which aren't expected to be lit 24/7 and don't have lots of fixed UI elements. Between my WFH job and hobby use, though, my PC screens are on about 10 hours a day on average, with the screen displaying one of a handful of programs with fixed, high contrast user interfaces. That's gonna put an OLED panel through the wringer in quite a bit less time than I have become used to using my LCDs, and that's not acceptable to me.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Through the course of my career I've somehow lost office space as I've ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.

Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody's obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don't have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they're considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I've only ever used their PLA(+) but it's always been bulletproof.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

I mean, at this point an "ideal" solution (such as it is) would be for the US to stop stonewalling UN Security Council resolutions so that the other members can greenlight a peacekeeping operation a la Kosovo, that would stop the fighting, open up aid flows, and create an avenue for effective enforcement of the 1948 treaty boundaries on the way towards implementing a functional two-state solution. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.

Thrashy , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

They're flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you're right up next to them -- and once they're past the front lines Russia doesn't have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine's reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine's air force is to support efforts on the ground.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

Well, that'll happen if you don't take your Neuropozyne. Their test subject should have budgeted for that before getting augmented.

Thrashy , 1 month ago

I highly recommend the Kill James Bond episodes on Charlie's Angels which break down just how much of each movie is basically just (executive producer) Drew Barrymore perving on her co-stars.

Thrashy , 2 months ago

The "I'm gonna give you $100 to fuck off" school of military strategy.

Thrashy , 2 months ago

They've got drawbacks, too, especially since most examples of them in residential construction are the efforts of, shall we say, enthusiastic amateurs.

1. Because soil holds moisture for an extended period of time, they tend to get saturated, and then excess moisture migrates down to the waterproofing system, which will inevitably leak over time. Most amateur-built earth sheltered homes are not using particularly sophisticated waterproofing materials, and rarely take a defense-in-depth approach to them that could mitigate a failure in one layer of the system.
2. Maintenance is expensive: once any part of the waterproofing fails you are going to have to dig it up to repair it.
3. Soil - especially wet soil - is heavy and the prescriptive structural parts of residential building code aren't really intended to address this kind of construction. You need an engineer to ensure the house is properly structured for the loads involved, and if you're building new that extra structure is going to cost money and limit design options.
4. Building into a slope to allow roof access for planting, mowing, etc., limits daylighting options, and particularly in the US where bedrooms are required to have an egress window it can be nearly impossible to design a floorplan with the expected gradient of public to private space.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept, and I've even drawn up plans for one I'd like to build on the lot next door to me once the nigh-derelict rental house currently occupying the space gets condemned... But this is one case where I absolutely do not want to be buying somebody else's project. I don't trust the other people who build them to do it right.