My understanding of JavaScript is cursory, but my reading of that webpage is the UI is just smoke and mirrors, and it is just waiting for the whole thing to be processed in a single remote API call to some back-end system. If the back-end is down, it will always stop at 90%. The crawling progress bar is fake with canned messages updated with Math.Random() delays. Gives you something to look at, I guess, but seems a little misleading. Might be wrong ...
Indeed. I've always had trouble picturing how to efficiently "unmix the cake" too. CO2 is rare and throughout the whole atmospheric column. What kind of concentration gradient can you get going to meaningfully pull it out from everywhere in human timescales? (Sorry if this nerd-snipes someone stronger with calculus than me.)
Plants capture CO2 from photo synthesis at huge scale. That seems like a great way to capture it at a higher concentration. We’d need to handle the organic matter before natural decomposition, but quite doable.
It’s even less energy efficient gathering up plant matter at this scale and permanently sequestering it, than getting it from the atmosphere. At least with the current technology required to harvest, move and process it. It’s why biomass is still a relatively niche ‘carbon offset’ technique.
It is also highly space inefficient and time consuming to grow and store (sequester).
Even if we converted all US cropland (and the US is one of the largest and most fertile countries for growing crops!) to growing trees, for example, we’d need multiple years of growth for every year of fossil carbon we currently release. And we’d all starve.
There is also generally less carbon by weight than you might imagine - even hardwood is typically more water than carbon when harvested, which is a big part of the problem.
To make it time efficient and also stable to store (not just rot and release the carbon immediately as methane or the like), it needs to be converted to a more stable form like charcoal or coke. Which further decreases efficiency and adds costs.
Near as we can tell, it is much better to just not release it (electric cars + solar?), or geo sequester it (olivine minerals seem promising!) or capture and sequester it directly (inefficient, but hey, there are techniques that should scale like pumping back into the original fossil aquifers!).
The biggest issue is economic (and hence political) - fossil fuels are energetically the equivalent of free money. It’s pretty hard to convince people to stop getting free money and pay money instead!
Extraction of the resource is not free. But with advances in solar panels and battery technology, the economic arguments for much fossil fuel use is fast disappearing. We were never going to make difficult decisions for the sakes of our grandchildren - we're much too selfish for that - but as renewables put more money in our pockets, we might just make the right decisions. Even if it is for the wrong reasons.
Not quibbling at all, but I recall some discussion somewhere saying that the history of the Squeak impl itself (not the name) traces back via saved base images to the original Smalltalk implementations, including via customs at-rest transformation tools when backwards incompatible changed where made in the primordial days. Base images, at least back when I was toying with Squeak, where never rebuilt from scratch, just modified, transformed etc. In some sense, at least for the image, they were decades old.
This port of Fuzix to the Pico was done by David Given. In 2021 he also screen-recorded and narrated basically his entire effort porting Fuzix to similarly-sized ESP8266. Really very interesting if you are in to that sort of thing!
I have a colleague whom refers to the emails he sends as 'letters'. It was strange at first, but it also implies some effort being taken. I read the 'essays' terminology the same way. If it isn't some textual version of habitual food/travel/life logging, and has some cohesive topic, it's an essay.
If you replace JSON with XML in this model it is exactly what the "document store" databases from the 90s and 00s were doing -- parsing at insert and update time, then touching only indexes at query time. It is indeed cool that sqlite does this out of the box.
I can't comprehend how that's even an issue. Like it's the sort of thing you might read in an old bug report online and go "wow, that must have been an awkward few days for everyone" but to hear that it is "normal"? Wild. Utterly unacceptable.
I agree. Park the handle with a polite "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" note and a suggested list of other places for more fruitful discussion.
I still tidy my house using the Settlers resource movement algorithm, moving things closer towards where they need to be even if they don't go all the way to their final destination.
I'm like this too. It's an incremental system that given enough time converges on the tidy state. I can take something to the foot of the stairs that I know needs to go up there, and then when I later go upstairs I can deposit at the top of the stairs, then when I'm accessing the linen closet I'll glance over and be like oh yeah, some of those items belong in here, I'll put them away now and get the others later. In some ways it's a permission structure to do part of a task without feeling like you're now chained to completely finishing it before you can do anything else.
This all drove my ex nuts though; from her perspective the whole thing was an exercise in deck-chair rearrangement that only served to increase overall entropy while in the intermediate states.
Hilariously, I don't cook like that at all. Cooking for me is all about chasing the critical path— get the water boiling, get the stove on, get the yeast foaming, get the butter softening on a plate. I wouldn't have the patience to line up little dishes of measured-out ingredients on my countertop before beginning to combine things.
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