I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this.
If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya
you can make a tiny battery with ancient-style materials. It’s essentially a vinegar (or lemon juice) galvanic cell using copper and iron inside a porous clay jar. People often call this the “Baghdad battery"
the problem with these hypotheses is the lack of wiring. a very simple battery is not difficult to make (but pay no attention to the energy density), but making a useful circuit that does anything is pretty hard. the simplest possible useful circuit is a lightbulb which requires ability to create tungston wire, a vacuum, and very thin, precise glass.
Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV.
Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)
The NES light gun works with the properties the CRT provides... Roughly what happens is ... When you pull the trigger, the next frame is all black, and then one frame per target with a white square for the targer. If you're on target, the photodetector (photodiode? photoresistor?) will make a step change when the beam hits the white square, and the game code is looping to detect that. If the light comes late, it won't count; if it's not a big enough change, it won't count. If the screen was too bright during the black frame (or you were pointing at a light the whole time), it won't count.
Most modern displays are going to show the square too late, some might not be bright enough.
If you have an LED matrix and the right driving circuitry, you could probably replicate the timing, and that might work too, but I've not seen it done.
Yes, light guns/light pens actually relied on vertical/horizontal sync of the CRT screen to identify the position you pointed at, so they won't work on a modern screen.
Scary stuff. But if we only use mass facial-recognition to catch “the bad guys” then that’s OK, right? It’s not totalitarian or authoritarian at all, right? When a majority of voters want it, that’s democracy, right?
The problem is that people in power decide who the "bad guys" are.
Authoritarian regimes come up with bogus charges to include political opponents in the "bad guys", painting them as criminals to the rest of the country, and legitimizing their arrests.
These surveillance technologies have two main problems: if you have more data, it's easier to dig dirt on people. And if you don't have data, you can always fake it.
The requirement for it to work though is that you need regular people to believe that political opponents are in fact criminals.
The scary shit is that the US is not too far from being there.
it would also be really cool to use excess power generation to drive atmospheric petroleum synthesis (pull carbon from
air to make hydrocarbons); then sell it or store it for later use.
I know the tech is not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer every year.
Here’s my empirical evidence based on several recent “coding session” interviews with a variety of software companies. Background: I have been developing software for over 30 years, I hold a few patents, I’ve had a handful of modestly successful exits. I kind of know a little bit about what I am doing. At this stage in my career, I am no longer interested in the super early stage startup lifestyle, I’m looking at IC/staff engineer type roles.
The mature, state-of-the-art software companies do not give me leetcode problems to solve. They give me interesting & challenging problems that force me to both a) apply best practices of varying kinds and yet b) be creative in some aspects of the solution. And these problems are very amenable to “talking through” what I’m doing, how I’m approaching the solution, etc. Overall, I feel like they are effective and give the company a good sense of how I develop software as an engineer. I have yet to “fail” one of these.
It is the smaller, less mature companies that give me stupid leetcode problems. These companies usually bluntly tell me their monolithic codebase (always in a not-statically-typed language), is a total mess and they are “working on domain boundaries”.
I fail about 50% of these leetcode things because I don’t know the one “trick” to yield the right answer. As a seasoned developer, I often push back on the framing and tell them how I would do a better solution by changing one of the constraints, where the change would actually better match the real world problem they’re modeling.
And they don’t seem to care at all. I wonder if they realize that their bullshit interviewing process has both a false positive and a false negative problem.
The false negatives exclude folks like myself who could actually help to improve their codebase with proper, incremental refactorings.
The false positives are the people who have memorized all the leetcode problems. They are hired and write more shitty monolithic hairball code.
Their interviewing process reinforces the shittiness of their codebase. It’s a spiral they might never get out of.
The next time I get one of these, I think I’m going to YOLO it, pull the ripcord early and politely tell them why they’re fucked.
Yes, it is a death spiral; if you are to lead them, you have to know what to fix when, to avoid making things worse.
The solution is typically not just to fix their code. They got in over their heads by charging ahead and building something they'll regret, but their culture (and likely the interviewer personal self-regard) depends on believing their (current) tech leaders.
So yes, the interviewer is most comfortable if you chase and find the ball they're hiding.
But the leadership question is whether you can relieve them of their ignorance without also stripping their dignity and future prospects.
I've found (mostly with luck) that they often have a sneaking suspicion that something isn't right, but didn't have the tools or pull to isolate and address it. As a leader if you can elicit that, and then show some strategies for doing so, you'll improve them and the code in a way that encourages them that what was hard to them is solvable with you, which helps them rely on you for other knotty problems.
It's not really that you only live once; it's that this opportunity is here now and should have your full attention, and to be a leader you have to address it directly but from everyone's perspective.
Even if you find you'd never want to work with them, you'd still want to leave them feeling clearer about their code and situation.
Clarifying my "YOLO" usage: I was being a little flippant, in the sense that when ending an interview early with direct critical feedback, the most likely outcome is a "burned bridge" with that company (you're never coming back).
Which reminds me one of my favorite twisted idioms: We'll burn that bridge when we get to it!
I guess I've finally found an acceptable real-world use case for this phrase :)
There is something to be said for being senior in a way where the people interviewing you are junior enough that they don't necessarily have the experience to necessarily "click" with the nuance that comes with said problems.
That being said, from a stoicism point of view, the interview ends up becoming a meta-challenge on how you approach a problem that is not necessarily appropriately framed, and how you'd go about doing and/or gently correcting things as well.
And if they're not able to appreciate it, then success! You have found that it is not the right organization for you. No need to burn the door down on the way out, just feel relief in that you dodged a bullet (hopefully).
I am curious what would happen if one of those people tried to pray while having a sign above their head that said “I’m praying for <favorite sports team> to win their next game”
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