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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Changes the torque and the application of said torque for each bolt. As in “tool head has 5° of give until in place, then in ramps torque to 5nM over half a second, and holds for 1 second and then ramps to zero over .1 seconds”, and then something different for the next bolt. Then it logs that it did this for each bolt.
    The tool can also be used to measure and correct the bolts as part of an inspection phase, and log the results of that inspection.
    Finally, it tracks usage of the tool and can log that it needs maintenance or isn’t working correctly even if it’s just a subtle failure.


  • Oh, it’s definitely interesting.
    I think people here just got rubbed the wrong way because these articles often make it seem like Roman concrete is better than ours, rather than “look what they accidentally did occasionally”.

    We can make self healing concrete today, we just usually opt not to, because the downsides or unpredictable nature makes it unsuitable for the significant cost increase.
    The phrase “the bridge is infested with bacterial spore colonies” isn’t one that makes engineers happy.


  • We mostly know how they made theirs, and could make our own version of it, but we optimize for different things.
    The Romans optimized for “that’s cement and it works well”, because they didn’t have anything close to the level of chemical understanding we do now.
    We optimize for strength and predictability. Ours can hold a higher load and will likely need repairing about when we predict.

    Roman concrete can sometimes, in certain circumstances and with variable effectiveness, repair certain types of damage by chemically interacting with the environment. So maybe it crumbles in a decade or maybe it lasts a millennium.

    Article basically points at some researchers who are looking to see if they can bring that healing capability to modern concrete in a predictable and more versatile fashion.


  • I believe their point was that even encrypted messages convey data. So if you have a record of all the encrypted messages, you can still tell who was talking, when they were talking, and approximately how much they said, even if you can’t read the messages.

    If you wait until someone is gone and then loudly raid their house, you don’t need to read their messages to guess the content of what they send to people as soon as they find out. Now you know who else you want to target, despite not being able to read a single message.

    This type of metadata analysis is able to reveal a lot about what’s being communicated. It’s why private communication should be ephemeral, so that only what’s directly intercepted can be scrutinized.



  • If you have an unutilized asset, there’s pressure to get rid of it for the cost savings.
    If you sell your asset at a loss, it looks bad for you and the company. Same for paying cancelation fees.

    If you legitimately think that you’re going to need that space in the future, for example because you think that we’ll find an equilibrium between “everyone work from office” and where we are now, and that we’re trending towards an organic level of office need/desire higher than we’re at now, you might see selling now as the first step to needing to buy again later, likely for higher than you sold for. So you try to “mandate” the equilibrium that you expect so you’re not in a position to have to explain why you’re holding onto a dead and losing value property.

    Executives spend a lot of time talking to people and having meetings. The job selects for people who thrive on and value face to face communication. Naturally, they overestimate how much that social aspect of the job is true for everyone else, so they estimate that the equilibrium will have a lot more office time than other people would.
    To make it worse, the more power you have to influence that decision, the more likely you are to have a similar bias.

    This isn’t an excuse of course, since you can overcome that bias simply by telling teams to discuss what their ideal working arrangement would be, and then running a survey. Now you have data, and you can use it to try to scale offices to what you actually want.







  • I don’t think they work the same way, but I think they work in ways that are close enough in function that they can be treated the same for the purposes of this conversation.

    Pen and pencil are “the same”, and either of those and printed paper are “basically the same”.
    The relationship between a typical modern AI system and the human mind is like that between a pencil written document and a word document: entirely dissimilar in essentially every way, except for the central issue of the discussion, namely as a means to convey the written word.

    Both the human mind and a modern AI take in input data, and extract relationships and correlations from that data and store those patterns in a batched fashion with other data.
    Some data is stored with a lot of weight, which is why I can quote a movie at you, and the AI can produce a watermark: they’ve been used as inputs a lot. Likewise, the AI can’t perfectly recreate those watermarks and I can’t tell you every detail from the scene: only the important bits are extracted. Less important details are too intermingled with data from other sources to be extracted with high fidelity.



  • Actually, I think that the opposite of a bad example. If I see you flying that flag, I’m not going to assume your an enthusiast of finish WW1 aviation.

    I chose the swastika specifically because some other people used the symbol at some point and had it ruined for them. That’s a thing that happens to symbols, they get associated with shitty stuff and you stop showing the symbol, convince people to drop the objectionable meaning, or accept that people will think you endorse the shitty one.


  • They can have whatever they want, but you’ll have to forgive people for thinking that you align with people who display the same symbols as you.

    I assume anyone flying a swastika is antisemitic, when to be fair, they might just be a fan of the Nazi stance on affordable housing and infrastructure.

    If you have a problem with symbols you identify with being co-opted by people you don’t, take it up with the people you disagree with who took your symbol, not the people who also disagree with them.




  • So, I think the thing to do is to let workers talk frankly with their immediate supervisor and they’re team mates, and then let people decide for themselves where they would work best from. Weirdly, most people don’t go to work with the intent to do a bad job and can be trusted to make that choice for themselves.

    That being said, there are some legitimate reasons why some people want a return to office that extend beyond the “butts in seats means productivity” and “people will realize I’m not providing value if we work from home” that a lot of people jump to immediately.

    Some professions benefit a lot from face to face communication and coordination. The job can be done remotely, but it’s a lot more work. Because rather than accidentally coordinating, you have to be deliberate with every interaction. Wfh has led to a lot less idea spread between teams in those areas, and often there’s little idea about how to promote “so I was talking with Jan on the other team, and we had this idea…” Outside of making it so people can randomly talk to one another.

    Some businesses have significant investments in their office space. If they’re not using it the pressure to divest from an unneeded asset is strong. Because everyone has this pressure, they might lose significant money selling at a loss, or as a penalty for breaking the lease.
    If they believe that the wfh trend will slow and possibly reverse to some degree, then they don’t want to sell when it’s cheap and be forced to buy when it’s expensive again. This is often coupled with the previous point.

    The final reason has to do with attachment and people. When people don’t see each other, they’re less attached to one another. If your job is just a place you quietly work and get paid, there’s less human connection stopping you from jumping ship immediately.
    You are also slower to adopt the company culture, which aside from bullshit buzzword stuff actually has value as the set of poorly defined social contracts about how the company interacts with customers, and generally “does stuff”. The actual company culture that makes you know that project plans go in spread sheets, the project proposal in a text document, and how people expect the documentation wiki to be formatted. What style of gif to use to get a chuckle and make people remember the important bit.
    It also creates some difficulties for new entrants to the workforce. A lot of people with little or no office experience have reported a much harder time getting situated without people nearby to lend a hand. That process is much harder if there aren’t people nearby, so some people want to encourage more people to come back to let that work better.

    In the end, these aren’t enough for me to think we should be forcing people back, but they’re worth considering and talking about as a company or team.



  • I mean, if they want to make it more enticing, go for it. Just leave me the option to not be enticed.

    My workplace lets everyone work from home or an office as they see fit. Some people need different things to work best. Some people miss the face-to-face that they used to get in the office, so management put together monthly “we’re catering lunch, and teams are encouraged to plan whatever activities they think might work better in office for this day, but make sure it’s optional”.

    So once a month I go and get some free food, and we do some face to face planning which benefits a bit from being together, and last month the team hung out and chatted for a bit after work, which was nice.

    If management wants people in office, I’d much rather they try to make that happen by making being in office worth it, as opposed to telling people they have to or else. Carrot > stick.