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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.



  • 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.



  • Look at their actions, not their words specifically.

    It’s a culture where being unkind is particularly unacceptable, not specifically where you’re not allowed to be honest or forthright.

    You’re allowed to not like someone, but telling someone you dislike them is needlessly unkind, so you just politely decline to interact with them.
    You’d “hate to intrude”, or “be a bother”. If it’s pushed, you’ll “consider it and let them know”.

    Negative things just have to be conveyed in the kindest way possible, not that they can’t be conveyed.


  • Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.

    Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
    Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
    Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

    Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

    He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

    Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
    In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
    Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.




  • FDA approval is contingent on so many factors that even if it was entirely open source, including all hardware design and the instructions for assembly, maintenance, and manufature it would be entirely plausible for it to lose approval if the company responsible for continued development went bankrupt.

    Without approval, no reputable surgeon will do anything beyond remove it.

    A device not having a clear and unambiguously documented path for addressing defects found in the future is more than sufficient reason to lose approval.





  • 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.