Viewing profile — OrwellianChild

Super cheap on GOG right now... https://www.gog.com/en/game/overload

Pure speculation on my part, but on a first flight when you're shaking out the fundamentals, it's safer to not retract landing gear in case there is a catastrophic failure in, say,…

One dynamic that may be at play: Designing a new engine is a gamble. For a company who already makes money with existing designs, there may be little upside on a small-volume new p…

HN title is wrong. From the article: "Sure, sales of EVs keep going up — a record 300,000 cars sold in the US in the third quarter of 2023 were electric..." Discussion is about a m…

"Natural Gas" is 97% methane, so it's probably most direct to just refer to it by it's primary component...

Rent control only fights against upward pressure for existing renters... When you describe rents continually going up, it's due to more people competing for limited rental units. C…

Worth getting a bit specific about terminology here... The article states that _insurance_ profits are capped, but that PBMs and other stages of care are not. That's why they're al…

I mean that the reason you'd need semaglutide is that you can't keep to a diet. If you could keep to keto IF, you wouldn't need the drug in the first place. It's not option A or op…

Not trying to single you out as this has been brought up in multiple comments in-thread, but I think this is apples-to-oranges. Diets work when followed. The problem is that the va…

3rd hand anecdote, but a friend who used Ozempic spoke to the psychological impact of seeing the cravings for food vanish that went beyond just the timeframe of the dose. A drug th…

It's hugely encouraging that we're starting to see frontline medical practice step out of the frame of mind that this is a "willpower" issue. If GLP-1 analogs work against both foo…

GLP-1 receptor agonists are game-changing for weight loss, but there is even broader applicability emerging for _addictions of all kinds_. [1] This is super hopeful both because of…

California likely has more stringent seismic regulations as well, while much of Texas is sitting on bedrock. Matt Risinger (TX builder with a YouTube channel) decries homes sheathe…

Is this a housing issue?

I sympathize with the desire for a utopian government-run housing arrangement like this, but I think it discards the practical for the ideal... With less restrictive zoning, more p…

If they can charge it, they can show it. Any concerns/issues with municipal fees, taxes, etc. is a completely tangential issue. Just as easily, Comcast could choose to simplify pri…

I didn't hate it, even though it played out more like a REAMDE type thriller than some of his earlier stuff (Anathem, Baroque, etc). I liked Seveneves, though.

In which idlewords basically cites the plot of "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson... :-)

I did not know this - thank you!

Really excellent context - thank you for sharing all this detail and citation!

We're assuming cost-plus contract terms, then, I assume? :-)

As much as I'd love more nuclear power on the grid, this project cost over double its initial bid and is actually raising rates for GA utility customers... I can't tell from the st…

Earnest question: Is your opinion that writing books and selling them is a bad form of advocacy? Is there a better one that doesn't require independent wealth? I'm pretty familiar …

Main takeaway here is: Unplug laptop from power before closing the lid. This (theoretically, per the video) will make the Windows sleep mode operate correctly without vampire drain…

What do you think you learned at the company thru the early project and junior work that you didn't get from Lambda?