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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

    Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?


  • A system I work with gives all keys a string value of “Not_set” when the key is intended to be unset. The team decided to put this in because of a connection with a different, legacy system, whose developers (somehow) could not distinguish between a key being missing or being present but with a null value. So now every team that integrates with this system has to deal with these unset values.

    Of course, it’s up to individual developers to never forget to set a key to “Not_Set”. Also, they forgot to standardise capitalisation and such so there are all sorts of variations “NOT_SET”, “Not_set”, “NotSet”, etc. floating around the API responses. Also null is still a possible value you need to handle as well, though what it means is context dependent (usually it means someone fucked up).






  • No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

    The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

    The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

    Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.



  • They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

    The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

    Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.


  • Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

    I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.




  • Fun quote from an interview with Chris Sawyer:

    Latterly the machine code came back to haunt us when the decision was made to re-launch the original game on mobile platforms as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic a few years ago, and it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.


  • The only one I really would avoid is passing things between or touching chopsticks together. This is reminiscent of Japanese funeral rituals and thus considered rude to do at the table.

    The others are more about common sense and trying to help you enjoy the sushi as the chef intended:

    • They are bite-sized pieces, designed as a flavour combination, so don’t break them up in any way
    • If you don’t want rice, sashimi is a good way to get that
    • Putting too much soy sauce on the rice can make it fall apart
    • (real) Wasabi is delicate and mixing it with soy sauce will certainly destroy its subtle flavour. In any case in a high-end place the sushi chef will have added everything that’s intended as part of the flavour combination before serving the sushi, so adding stuff is not necessary

    But again, these are suggestions. Enjoy the sushi how you like, you’re not hurting anyone.


  • The confusion arises because there are 5 different ways to do the same thing, the non-experimental methods shouldn’t be used even though they’re recommended in the official docs

    I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but you’re kind of illustrating exactly the point I was making about conceptual simplicity and atrocious UX.