George Budd @Gbudd@social.cleverlibre.org

This past week we performed some annual maintenance on the rodwell. Over time, the ~160 foot hole from the surface to the reservoir begins to close up and needs to be re-melted. We do this by slowly lowering a 400 pound cone of naval brass heated to 250 F back down the hole.

David Mills, a true Internet pioneer, passed away on January 17, 2024. Probably best known for having led the development and maintenance of #NTP for decades, he was also involved in great deal of early Internet protocol development.

https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2024-January/009265.html

The nature of emergency medicine means I can walk out of a room where someone was just pronounced dead after we did CPR on him for an hour and immediately have someone start yelling at me to get them a turkey sandwich.

After reading all about Stirling engines, I bought myself a miniature desktop model that can be powered by my cup of tea!

Atlassian have been studying the experience of their employees and that of other companies as they work remotely. They feel they still have things to learn but they have released their study.
#wfh #RemoteWork

In brief, they have found so far:

~ 92% of Atlassians say our distributed work policy allows them to do their best work.
~ Representation of women has doubled in certain geographies
~ 91% say it’s an important reason why they stay at Atlassian

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/distributed-work/distributed-work-report

async await async await async await async await
in the function, the mighty function, the child thread sleeps tonight 🎵

I love this, h/t @codinghorror

> Nobody wants developers to reinvent the wheel (again), but reading about how a wheel works is a poor substitute for the experience of driving around on a few wheels of your own creation.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/when-understanding-means-rewriting/

At the #library

Me: Okay. I’m going to go browse some books. You two stay here and read quietly.

9yo: What if we get abducted?

Me: Be annoying until they let you go.

Other library patron: *snort*

#parenthood

All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough.

Jim quietly smiled in response while looking away from the young software engineer, “You know what I did before this? Before coding?”
“No.”
“I was a chemical plant operator. You can’t just restart one of those. The fire, the spark, the pressurization, the catalyzation, it has to keep running. Has to be tended at all times. You walk the jungles of process lines at 4AM and feel their swirling and vibration and heat. They are a physical thing. An obligation. They are more a child than the thing back there will ever be, John. You drop them and they break forever. You talk about your fear of machines. But I know someone killed by a machine.”
John started to talk, but was gently preempted in a rumbly voice.
“A human decided that. Not the braided stainlessless steel hose rotting away. A human decided it could last longer, to save money. That machine was just a messenger for the choice of a man.”

Being afraid doesn’t say anything bad about you, it’s your body’s signal to you that something in your environment is possibly dangerous. It’s just as right and worthy as any other feeling of being felt, and doesn’t mean you can’t handle the thing you’re afraid of - just that there’s possibly danger.

this is the only xkcd that matters and i've kept it bookmarked for years since i first found it

In desert climates of the US a suburban lawn, with irrigation and soil aeration "maintenance" is basically a fire ant paradise. Fire ants love direct sun. They hate bushes that shade the ground, diverse clumps of plants, and fire ants can't live in the desert. They are tropical and the sprinklers for lawns complete the picture. Fire ant paradise!

But then people get so angry when they show up to live in something clearly made for them.

@futurebird
That's what the javelina was saying! 😂

https://defector.com/i-ate-all-your-precious-golf-worms-and-id-do-it-again

#lgbtq