Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?

I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.

(I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)

Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)

N=16 developers

There’s a kernel of something positive in decentralization, though. Me pointing this out feels a little bit like someone saying how good COVID lockdown was for the environment, but I still feel like it’s an important point.

An internet made of lots of small sites is better at resisting censorship and centralized control. People should remain accustomed to using a bunch of individual sites, not JUST the biggest sites on the internet, and amateur sysadmins should maintain their “host a public web server from an at-home business internet connection” chops.

There being lots of small porn sites makes it harder for anyone to apply pressure and make certain kinds of affirming content disappear.

That’s … just about everything positive I could say about this idea. Not a fan.

Market share. Basic permissions model.

The available food is mostly things they can pop into the fryer: Think fish and chips, except you can also choose “planks” of chicken breast, or breaded shrimp, or little balls of seasoned dough called “hush puppies”.

My wife hates them, and they’re an occasional guilty pleasure for me.

I, too, think humans become incapable of learning from their mistakes when they become wealthy. That’s what keeps them wealthy of course.

More seriously, it makes sense that this could become a good thing. If it’s true that Kevin failed the first time by lacking the confidence to stand up for his ideals, why are we judging what we haven’t seen yet? Give him a chance.

(Is that true? I’m open to being wrong.)

If they ran ads asking Reddit moderators to catalogue their frustrations, it feels reasonable that he could be bankrolling solutions to address those weaknesses and problems.

I’m excited to see what amazing new Fediverse features will be inspired by what he pays his teams to build for Digg.

(I need some hope for the future, damnit. Do NOT take this away from me.)

Dear God do I hate how true that is. Not sure if intentional or not, but either way I’m with you. And I think they’re working to a plan.

I had a call center job while finishing college, but I’m currently a professional software developer. The difference in coverage is crazy. Dental crowns went from 25% to 75% coverage. My annual maximum out of pocket for healthcare is so low I keep hitting it by accident and wondering why things are suddenly free.

Why? I think it’s a deliberate plan to make life pretty good for like 51% of us, so we won’t vote against the way they absolutely wreck the other 49% of us.

I hope it stops working soon.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.

Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.

Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.

Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

Friend Computer is best comrade!

Ok now I’m curious what I’m missing out on. Can anyone recommend a good PCIe token ring adapter and concentrator?

Think of a programming language as a crutch for the human brain. Processors don’t need it: they don’t have to think about the code, they just execute it. Our mushy human brains need a lot of help, however.

We need to think about things on our own terms. Different programming languages, different APIs that do the same thing, different object models, these all help people tackle new problems, or even just implement solutions in new ways.

Some new languages have a completely different model of execution you may not be familiar with. Imperative languages are what we traditionally think of, because they work most similarly to how processors execute code: the major pattern used to make progress, do work, is to create variables and assign values to them. C, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, C# (my personal favorite), Javascript, even Rust, are all imperative languages.

But there are also functional languages, like ML or F#. (The latter, I keep installing with Visual Studio but never ever use) The main pattern there is function application. Functions themselves are first order data, and not in a hacky implementation-specific way like you’re passing machine code around. (I’ve only ever used this for grad school homework, never professionally, sadly.)

And declarative languages like Prolog helped give IBM’s Watson its legendary open question answering ability on national TV. When you need a system to be really, actually smart, not just create smart-sounding text convincingly like a generative AI, why not use a language that lets you declare fact tables? (Again, only grad school homework use for me here)

Programming is all about solving problems, and there are so many kinds of problems and so many ways to think about them. I know my own personal pile of gray mush needs all the help it can get.