Commercial providers for space programs cost more money than if NASA just hired civil servants to do a lot of the work. Big corps just take longer, then don’t want to share development info that taxpayers funded, making integration into other elements a huge safety problem that can’t be fully resolved due to the protection of the provider’s intellectual property.

Then they get shit workers that put up with job instability caused by a fickle Congress. This has gotten progressively worse for decades, and now NASA is reduced to a corporate subsidy program for parasitic billionaires and huge companies that don’t deliver well. Nothing like someone asking me if a design will function properly with another, and me basically saying I have no fucking clue because everything is a goddamn secret.

NASA’s commercial provider obsession was bought by lobbyists, and it’s a fucking terrible idea. I’ll die on that hill.

Ebikes are motorbikes, not bycicles.

Not saying they aren’t fun or useful at times, but they shouldn’t be treated as a bicycles.

I don’t care if the motor engages using a button, twist grip, your feet or twitching your nose, it is a motor and exceeds your natural body power.

Don’t cost-optimize people’s homes. Just don’t.

The amount of times I’ve gone to a maintenance job with a description “people are cold”, only to see a plaque on the wall stating that this building has been optimized by Company X is actually infuriating.

And the worst thing is that they inject their proprietary, remote control system on top of the original automation. This means that I can’t change anything without literally reprogramming the entire site.

So I’m standing there, trying to figure out how to tell an 80yo lady “you’re cold because the building managers want to save some money” without going on an anti-capitalist rant. This has had a success rate of around 30%.

I do ameuter music production, one hill I will die on is there is no right way to mix a track of music it is entirely subjective and mixing a track of music is way more creative of a practice then some faceious salesman make it out online

give me a job or im dead how about that hill

Modern PLCs are indistinguishable from IPCs with an RTOS and there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to use a proper language for them - with a stdlib and external library support. But manufacturers defined the term and have the industry hostage so you have to buy semi functional libraries and can’t use git, unit testing or other automation.

Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your “data” are really just noise.

Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it “has always been that way”.

DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design…

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.

Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.

If people aren’t having fun/engaged they’re not learning much. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you’re supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you’ve experienced.

A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.

1. use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
2. Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
3. use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.

the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.

Dynamic typing sucks.

Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.

There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.

Okay, I’m pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three “Grundfarben” (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.

There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it’s actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.

Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.

Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn’t work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color…

In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.

Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.

Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it’s almost everywhere.

(Added tldr)