Jeopardy style, Who is Lee Child?

Dang that 6k is pretty prohibitive not for the overall level, but because it's 4 hobs or nothing. Hardly a "give it a swag" kind of level. I assume they are probably somewhat comparable to the Breville Control Freak, so at a single hob you'd be competing against $1500.

But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circuit can provide.

The marginal cost of a hob is likely not the price driver.

Not sure if any of my anecdata when I was a contractor are relevant anymore given current circumstances, but among all the NASA facilities I worked with, JPL really seemed to be doing its own thing, mostly for better. They were a bit quirky to work with though, because they did seem to do so much more in-house than elsewhere. So I don't know if it's that independence or their zip code that has made them such a target, but I wonder if it has been that they have less political capital from moneyed interests keeping them off the chopping block. But any gutting of JPL is probably irreplaceable damage.

I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to work with. I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the news" and matter-of-fact he was just like "oh, yeah that's legal"

my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be). but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.

To get to the engineers, you need to get through the viper pit that is the sales first.

The only time I have seen this incredible feat accomplished was in a company large enough that they had a department dedicated to dealing with other large companies.

This is what sticks with me the deepest.

With immigration are unquestionably tough decisions, tradeoffs, philosophies on the issue, and demographics in general. It gets heated, fast. I know I'm biased, but I wish trust had not degraded to such an extent you could believe people could deal with these topics in good faith.

But how can anyone support this kind of craven policymaking where uncertainty and cruelty are features and not bugs? Just shock and awe and deafening silence.

That's what's so dishearterning. Is that who we are now, or is this just a timely excuse to be who we always have?

The President’s very first speech as a candidate denigrated Mexicans. Xenophobia is his signature issue even more so than tax cuts. 62 million Americans approved this platform in 2016 outvoting 65 million Americans who chose the other candidate.

77M chose his platform in 2024, and that’s after seeing him govern for four years, and talk for four years more after that.

America knows what it wanted and it got it.

Yes. As The NY Times phrased it, 2024 proved 2016 was not a fluke.

People will eventually elect the person who will have the same agenda as them and do what was promised while campaigning.

I always wondered how to gauge how effective Apple's Dialog carveout was, in terms of was it just instant PMIC department or even effective at building a foundation for them? Given their long relationship, I would think it might be pretty seamless.

I assume Apple probably do that more than I know, it is just interesting that their vertical acquisition history feels the most boring and the most interesting.

At least looking from the outside, it feels like relatively small pieces develop into pretty big differentiators, like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity and Passif paving the way to their SoCs.

That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.

I remember running the class with the giant radar dish on top to keep the comms up, running skirmishes till the wee hours of the morning. Definitely biased but I agree it was such a cool game.

The three-sided conflicts and aesthetics of the civilizations also felt a bit ahead of their time, with the NATO-like, Eastern Bloc, and the Middle East civs.

Though to be fair, before Chromehounds was Armored Core, so it's not like FromSoft's mecha pedigree is that obscure.

It’s also a game that you just can’t play with people online because they would cheat, especially regarding communications. There’s a lot of really fun games systems like the way it did comms that just don’t work in an online world sadly.

There's an interesting digression in the article itself here on the question about even if Sega had kept footing the server bill a bit longer if the game would have survived the Xbox Live's Party Chat which opened up just a few months later. It's an interesting question. Was it that much of a game technically unique to those few months in the 360's lifecycle that it lived in where 360 multiplayer game players were expected to have ubiquitous voice chat support but only in ways that were game controllable?

This new community is building itself on Discord, so the knowledge that players have access to ubiquitous Discord voice chat is a given going in. I've got a feeling that as the open source effort builds voice chat capabilities (this article suggests supporting Xbox Live Voice Chat isn't currently available in the emulator that this open source server relies on) the Community as a whole will try to work towards arrangements for avoiding out-of-game comms to recreate the original feel. That's probably a hard task in general scale (cheaters will always exist), but bans can matter in a small community and maybe they'll have just enough enforcement tools.

Thinking about this project in particular from the technical side, Discord could even be an asset to the community like that. As an armchair engineer taking a glance at this project from a distance, one interesting way to bootstrap an emulated, not-quite-fully-Open-Source Xbox Live Voice alternative would be by automating Discord Voice Channels. If you did that Discord itself might help maintain the invariant that users are only in one voice channel at a time, and admins have visual ways to see that in the Discord interface in addition to whatever automation tooling/bots are built to moderate the game voice comms flow.

I've seen fun games make use of interesting automation of Discord voice comms. There's also a "TTRPG" designed for Discord channels called "This Discord Has Ghosts In It" [1] that makes fun use of channel permissions to set play areas and define game classes/roles.

[1] https://willjobst.itch.io/ghosts

Yeah really, Truss really is the most salient yardstick, with the complication that any analogous action in the mechanisms of american politics feels slightly unfathomable. And I was shocked enough at Truss' ouster.

It's all so divisive, but it frustrates me to no end that likely the biggest end that people trying to defend this, without any admission this is a crisis of confidence waiting to happen if it's not already there.

The amount of political capital immolated for the sake of this course of action is flatly embarrassing. It doesn't really matter what they want or how long they think it's going to take to get it, the damage is already done.

One thing I am mostly against is nationalized property/casualty insurance. California seems to have taken every opportunity to not properly price risk. My worry is that while extreme, their logic and priorities do not feel unique for government decision making. The last thing I'd want to do is expand it.

When you distort risk pricing, you distort the market, and if you do it hard enough for long enough, you are basically pulling back the slingshot.

While this also applies to mutual insurers, my philosophy is being serious about solvency is the best way to know if you are properly underwriting and pricing. I feel like the government operates too much knowing that they can backstop it either themselves or by imposing an assessment on the market.

You are right that the really big disasters are very correlated events. While not a silver bullet, reinsurance and other risk transfer stuff can help smooth those kind of events out. The good-ish thing with those risks is that while they are uncertain, they are sort of identifiable, known unknowns in Rumsfeld parlance.

I agree with that sentiment, the thing that always seems crazy to me is that California's housing pricing in the face of all these things, but perhaps it's sort of pick your poison. Like I don't want to harp on it, but the only implicit or explicit thing everyone appears to agree on given the decisions that have been made is protecting housing prices above all else. But don't expose people to the ramifications of the housing appreciation (Looking at you, Prop 13).