I spent 25+ years in the precision optics industry, a large portion of which was building machines and instruments for fabricating and testing aspheric lenses and mirrors. Designing, performing, and validating null tests is technically terrifying. Not only is the clock ticking, but every operation on the artifact carries a risk of destroying it, or making it unusable.
It's not life-and-death, but it's pretty satisfying nerd work.
Twice bitten, three times shy.
After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited.
Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly machines.
There is a fair amount of open source literature on them, especially the "Godiva" series. Some of these machines have experienced criticality excursions that damaged the machine, but spared the biological organisms operating them by remote control.
Which reminds me, I can unfortunately not turn this up, but iirc at one of the national labs they've been working on dismantling a particular set of hot cells and iirc the whole thing has been stalled for a couple years trying to figure out how to do it. Sort of like a "demon hot cell".
Probably because EU/national governments have regulations with respect to the safety and privacy of the users, and the purveyors must evaluate the performance of their products against the regulatory standards.
I've wanted to play games since Atari Pong came out. But I've never owned a console, and haven't owned a computer with a discrete GPU since 2005. Twenty years ago, I satisfied my urge to game by playing Unreal Tournament, Quake, etc. demos. More recently, I'd spend an hour a week watching other people play games on YouTube, to see if I was missing anything.
This year, the snake has entered my garden in the form of an RTX 3060 that I bought for AI and media production applications.
My wife has bought me a flight stick for Christmas, so I can play DCS myself, instead of watching other people's videos.
I worked so hard avoiding escapist leisure in favor of physical exercise and 'maker' hobbies that it's difficult to switch off the discipline, and go have some escapist fun.
I'm retired and have all the resources needed to indulge in pure fun. I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity.
Dont forget VR might make it one day, and in the meantime you can always get a slight productivity satisfaction by making mods for your favorite games.
I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.
> I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in
I wonder if that actually works... It still tracks location, obviously Cookies (which you probably delete for this) and possibly a lot of other things. Maybe YouTube even maps your IP address to previous logins and uses that information "just slightly" in order to not throw you off...
It’s seems to work pretty well, based on some non-scientific testing most of the suggestions is content similar to what’s on their trending page, which is what I’d expect.
But I’m sure YouTube slowly but surely starts building a profile while in incognito to try and capture your eye balls.
I did just that, including signing up for discord. Despite never having used discord before, I was able to find the link to the beta AppImage in a pinned message and downloaded it. Made it executable with chmod +x LM...... Ran it. Searched for some of the models referenced in this discussion. Downloaded one and ran it. It just worked on Linux Mint 21.2.
Well we have the Canaveral National Seashore to enjoy today, which was constituted from the undeveloped portion of the space program reservation. Otherwise, that area today might be a wall of hirise condos instead of a pristine coastal barrier island.
Not really, because to actually be online the Wi-Fi driver should be compiled with a Kernel newer than 4.19 - so they can't really reach me to ask questions. /s
It's not life-and-death, but it's pretty satisfying nerd work.