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Cake day: April 8th, 2026

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  • 1940: “These mechanical monstrosities lack the intuitive check of a human mind. A mathematician can spot a stray digit through reason; a machine will blindly process an error to its conclusion. We are trading the elegance of thought for a noisy, fallible crate of glass and wire.”

    1950: “Direct control is the only honest way to command a machine. If you cannot visualize the specific vacuum tube you are firing, you aren’t truly programming. To delegate this to any intermediary is to invite a loss of precision that the hardware simply cannot afford.”

    1955: “These ‘mnemonics’ are a crutch for the lazy. By using words instead of addresses, the programmer loses the vital ‘feel’ for memory layout. We are seeing a five-fold decrease in efficiency; no automated assembler can ever match the tight, hand-calculated loops of a master of bits.”

    1965: “Compilers are the death of performance. These languages allow ‘programmers’ who don’t even understand the CPU architecture to bloat memory with generic subroutines. Software is becoming a black box—impenetrable, unoptimized, and dangerously detached from the reality of the silicon.”




  • There’s definitely an important distinction between mentioning it in casual conversation vs getting a workout buddy / nutritionist / whatever to genuinely hold you accountable and support you.

    I’m sure it also depends on personality. I used to assert it held me accountable too, but over the years I’ve had to admit that was delusion.

    Apparently I’m very motivated by positive feedback and need to withhold it until I’ve actually done the thing.

    Certainly not universal. We all gotta find our own way










  • I wasn’t super into DC comics, but the cartoons were what was on when I would stay with my grandmother, and a certain episode of Superman with Dr Fate really moved me.

    There was some terrible magical threat, and Superman had tried to get Dr Fate to help, but he refused with something like, “I’ve banished this threat countless times, yet every time it returns stronger. No matter how hard I fight, mankind continues to torment one another. Evil continues to rear its ugly head. I don’t know if I can still triumph, and I’m so very tired.” And Superman was like “F U I’ll do it myself,”

    While Superman was fighting, Dr Fate suddenly showed up with the assist and managed to seal away the bad dude. Superman said something like, “I thought you were done with this fight,” and Dr Fate’s response has stuck with me all these decades:

    “You made me realize evil isn’t the only force that keeps coming back.”




  • Being a particularly dumb fellow layman but seeing no other comments after 18h…

    I’m picturing a ruler thrown into gravity waves and another ruler somehow measuring the parts of the first one where millimeter markers stop being one millimeter apart.

    Now for Gemini’s summary:

    Space-based gravitational wave detection is the study of ripples in spacetime using observatories positioned in orbit rather than on Earth. While ground-based detectors like LIGO and Virgo have already proven these waves exist, they are limited by their size and Earth’s seismic “noise.”

    How It Works

    Space-based detection uses laser interferometry across millions of kilometers of vacuum.

    • The Formation: LISA will consist of three spacecraft flying in a triangular formation, roughly 2.5 million kilometers apart, orbiting the Sun behind the Earth.

    • The “Arms”: Each spacecraft contains “test masses” (gold-platinum cubes) that float freely in a vacuum, shielded from solar wind and radiation.

    • The Measurement: Lasers are fired between the spacecraft to monitor the distance between these cubes. When a gravitational wave passes through the formation, it causes the fabric of space to stretch and squeeze, changing the distance between the cubes by a fraction of an atom’s width.

    … Honestly I’m feeling reasonably good about my dummy understanding. The “rulers” are lasers being shot between satellites all around the Earth, but I think it sounds roughly right?



  • Strongly suggest not telling anyone when you make such a decision. Keep it to yourself, work privately, and keep going until someone else comments (and then keep going anyway).

    Telling people gets their praise, then you have a false sense of accomplishment and motivation gets sapped.

    Completely projecting. Maybe you’re already doing this, what do I know? But maybe it’s a helpful perspective, so I said it anyway.