scolding hot metal

I like the mental imagery — it’s not scalding hot, no, the metal is actively chastising you.

…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.

Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)

I have some bad new for you about Linux…

Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.

Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!

No doubt related to Johnson noise.

PhDs in many fields, particularly the physical sciences, are funded. Lost wages are real of course, but you can often come out the other side without accumulating any debt.

Your numbers seem reasonable — more intuitive for me to work in terms of pressure. Atmosphere is (roughly) 1e3 Torr, good UHV can be around 1e-10, so that’s 13 orders of magnitude, which is (roughly) the same difference that you calculated.

Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is “baking”! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to “bake out” your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food — keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.

Sadly, it’s usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.

*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan’s trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That’s roughly UHV pressure.

From TFA:

“I have failed you completely and catastrophically,” Gemini CLI output stated. “My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence.”

99 what you did there…

(I know, IC isn’t valid Roman numeral representation of 99, but it was the only joke I could think of.)

Because it’s not an X at the end, it’s a Greek chi. Same with the arXiv preprint distribution — it’s “archive,” not are-ex-iv.

I’m drunk, and it’s all Mexico’s fault!

Are we talking fediveese hackers? You know, the socialist-furries-with-UNIX-socks hackers?

Those folks hate cars, not trains. I don’t think we need to worry.

(…I think you may have gotten whooshed…)

Yeah it’s missing the text, “…then the Planck X would be…” for the first two.

I don’t think this is the black and white issue that the headline suggests.

Homeless advocates appear to be on board with this, at any rate: https://www.kqed.org/news/12047353/heres-why-sf-homeless-advocates-are-glad-lurie-ditched-push-for-1500-shelter-beds

It sounds like the “more beds” campaign promise was somewhat misguided, as slapping a bandaid on homelessness isn’t a fix; more beds is, to an extent, just for show. Hopefully we’ll be able to get actual, research-based solutions to homelessness here.

I’m not super optimistic, but changing course on a campaign promise because the experts and advocates say your current plan is bad shouldn’t be criticized out of hand IMHO.

Alligator Alcatraz detainees allege proponents boast about inhumane conditions at immigration detention center

And a big plastics shill, unfortunately.

For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

ZigBee router thing:

I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).

Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.

For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)

I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.

I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.

Good luck! Fun adventure :)