We have a sample of meteor rocks on earth which we can’t get into
Some of the screws broke so now Nasa are making new screwdrivers to open the container.
Smidgeons
Inspired by Maggie Appleton's smidgeons
Sat, 16 Dec 2023
The concept of 'steelmanning' is the opposite of 'strawmanning'
When you are arguing, building a 'straw man' is a cheap way of attacking an opponent by misconstruing their argument and destroying the 'straw man' rather than the real argument. For example, if the opposing view is something like 'I am against animal testing', the straw man argument might see a response like 'so you would prefer us to use untested drugs on people?'
The concept of 'steelmanning' is the opposite. Instead of trying to construct a weak version of your opponent's position to tear apart, build the strongest possible version of their point and then consider it based on its merits. For example, you might choose to interpret 'I am against animal testing' as 'I believe that we can avoid using animals to test cosmetics'. You can then review this with your opponent and see if this point can be supported or refuted.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in this article.
A sequence of individually minor mistakes led to an engine exploding in a Qantas A380.
This was an interesting read but very long and dry. The key take away for me on this I think is that given how thorough this review was and how many minor issues it found in a process as subject to scrutiny as aviation safety, it seems as though similar problems must be hiding everywhere.
Cosmic rays ruin photos in space, so Nikon built custom firmware for space cameras which increases noise reduction at low ISO/shutter speed settings
Sat, 9 Dec 2023The SVG spec allows you to use “foreignObject” to insert arbitrary HTML, which will display properly if your SVG is being rendered by a browser
Fri, 8 Dec 2023The brain may have a self-defence mechanism against epilepsy which impacts cognitive performance
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain-epileptic.html
This observation suggests that the cognitive difficulties—in particularly, memory deficits—experienced by individuals with epilepsy may be attributed, in part, to the brief impairments induced by these slow waves.
If you want to write a video web app, you cannot avoid transcoding video if you want it to work on all browsers
Safari uses video/mp4, which other browsers can't record to.
Facebook spends about 6 billion USD per month and has about 3 billion monthly active users (meaning Facebook’s monthly cost per user is around $2)
Wed, 29 Nov 2023There are already people calling collections of AI models “zoos”
Like here, where machine learning models are being gathered together like animals in a zoo. I’ve actually started a novel about AI, this idea of “model zoos” will for sure make an appearance.
If you could 'see' all of Andromeda with the naked eye, it'd be bigger than the moon
It's the biggest and most distant thing you can see with the naked eye. It's 152 000 light years across, and about 2.5 million light years away from Earth. That's a bit surprising because it means it's only 16 times further away from us than its own diameter.
You can get drafts coming in through your electrical sockets
Sun, 26 Nov 2023Coffee might be making my brain less plastic (and therefore less able to learn new things)
Based on this article. Maybe I’ll go caffeine-free too in Fun Free February?
PocketBase saves authentication details in localStorage
It can also get the details itself when you initialise the SDK and will take care of validating your auth. Nice!
There’s no ‘aside’ in markdown
Fri, 24 Nov 2023You can hide the default arrow dropdown marker in a details/summary accordion
This'll do it:
details summary::-webkit-details-marker {
display: none;
}
The PowerPoint morph transition will tween objects from one place to another
Fri, 24 Nov 2023Select elements can emit ‘invalid’ events
If there are constraints on the select (e.g. required) which are not fulfilled, the select will emit an invalid event if its reportValidity() function is called.
We go through approximately one Jura filter every 20 days (2-3L per day)
A three pack costs 20K, so that’s around 10K/month on filters. Add on the cost of the cleaning tablets both for the system overall and for the milk, we're paying 500 HUF/day for coffee... before we've even bought any coffee!