There’s a series of photos from a wildlife photographer that are essentially selfies of him with a litter of cheetah cubs that the mother cheetah literally dropped in his lap while she went to go hunt. It’s been theorized that the only reason cheetahs have never been domesticated is that that they’re very difficult to breed in captivity.

Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.

Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…

In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.

A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can’t afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products… and that’s fine in the short term, but as you mention it’s going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.

In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.

Microscopes, too!

All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

It’s a niche specialization within architecture, and while I enjoy it it’s not quite as cool as it sounds. Labs tend to be designed to a common template around the standard lab bench depth (30") and accepted safe aisle width between 66" and 72". Most of the fun is in equipment planning, and that’s only exciting for a certain sort of Excel jockey 😅

Lab planning is a small enough niche that you really only find us in firms with a national or international reach, and so I’m more often working on projects several states away from me than anything in my own backyard. Travel varies, but other than initial meetings it tends to be hands-off job, so much so that I’m actually a 100% remote worker apart from when I’m on-site for a project kickoff or a site survey.

As for unusual or surprising parts of the job, I have really enjoyed working with some of the PI’s I’ve fitted labs out for. The best has to be a chemist operating a biofuels testing lab, who regaled us with tales of all the times he’d blown up some glassware or singed off his eyebrows in the lab! I was a bit worried for his safety practices, though…

It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service

Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it’s probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.

Pyrite disease! The pyrite oxidizes in humid air, converting to a mineral that takes up much more volume. If the pyrite is incorporated into the fossil matrix, that expansion causes the fossil to crumble.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

Point me towards systems that don’t have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I’ll agree. Scary as the former are, there’s a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I’ve low-key started to think the only reason we haven’t seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody’s willing to break the seal, and I’m scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.