American ingredients in domestic made stuff is the next target.

It’s actually just an odometer wheel that drags behind the unit. You need the antennas to be in contact with the ground for best data. So the instrument isn’t exactly balanced on the wheel. But close enough to a wheel barrow for illustrative effect :)

Tl:Dr; small business; pictures of shipment components from the lease pool.

I run a very small scientific equipment company where our primary income stream is the lease pool. A lot of the equipment is modular, so before sending the equipment to the customer, we have to assemble and test in whatever configuration is appropriate for their study. We take photos and send them notes on how to use the device as configured. Then we disassemble and take a picture of all the components we’re sending, then finally package for safe shipping. This picture is one of the steps in the process of making sure that we get all the components back when we get the equipment back.

Because of the modulatity, it would take a lot of time to individually itemize each shipment, so the picture saves a lot of work. But only if the picture is actually useful and you can see and recognize every component. So there is an art to laying it all out. It feels like laying out Lego components, trying to optimize the view.

I just set a subset of the photo above as my LinkedIn banner because it looks cool (to me). Thus, “art”.

We are very small. Aside from myself, I’ve got a business manager and an electronics technician. As we grow, more will be needed. But I suspect ~10 people is the max we can grow to before our market is saturated and we will always be a small business.

Yes. ;)

If interior decorators are artists, then so is posing things like parts for photos. Like real world exploded views of things. It’s just part of my job to catalogue these things, but might as well make each one pleasing (to myself at least).

Probably mostly AI written.

That’s paraphrasing a bit. Chekov’s rule is about conservation of narrative real estate, no about the gun itself. It wasn’t even consistently true of his own works. The real world is not a stage play and armies created for deterrence don’t need to be used.

Long article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.

That’s a crazy amount of people under any circumstances. World, take note - this is how you protest.

Ticketmaster is cancer

Did they even watch it?

The free speech absolutists are going to cause something far far worse than what is portrayed. But maybe that is the goal.

Steam sale. $0.12. sold!

Serious answer to an unserious question: adopting an adult is legally possible in about half the jurisdictions in Canada, and then most of those jurisdictions require the adoptee to be a citizen or permanent resident. https://adoptingback.com/adopting-back/canada-adult-adoption-law/

Oh geez, those registry rules. We used to make jokes about the Soviet Union: “papers please!” US Xenophobia will end up removing all their freedoms. It’ll be about “catching illegal aliens” but the effect will be total internal travel restrictions and tracking for US citizens. I really hope they wake up before it’s too late.

I have an upcoming trip with a US transfer. We booked it before Trump won and started these shenanigans. We worry that the declining traffic will cancel our direct flight and we’ll be left scrambling to find an alternative route. We also worry about US Customs now more than we used to. It would cost us ~$1300 for the two of us to reroute, and we’re seriously thinking about it just to reduce our risk.

In unrelated news, most of the lettuce in the store in grown in the USA. We went shopping yesterday and all the Canadian produce was sold out while the US stuff was sort of rotting. Well, we found romaine hearts grown in Mexico, so we bought that. Thanks Mexico-bros.

You’re applying logic when logic doesn’t apply. Why would he tarriff Canada?

There have been attempts. With WebASM. There’s even an interesting compiler for it. Not super fast, but potentially useful. Good luck with gaining traction though. https://wasmer.io/posts/py2wasm-a-python-to-wasm-compiler

Yes

Long lazy meandering answer.

My degree is in geophysics, so I’m somewhat professionally connected to the world of resources. So that’s where I get that angle.

Physics, as a degree, is somewhat of the universal bullshit detector, since you learn to take what people say and run back-of-napkin math to figure out what is or isn’t realistic. “Now hang on, that doesn’t sound right… let me check…”

Aside from that, I’m also a fan of historical fiction, geopolitical games (EU4, etc.), and my spare time pursuits tend to send me down research rabbit holes, disentangling the fiction from reality. Largely for my own amusement. But it comes in handy on trivia night if the topic is the Teutonic Knights or something.

In grad school I’d hang out with the philosophers, geographers, and others that were asking large questions with beer in hand. “I’ll buy you a beer if you can convince me the electron is real.” was not a pickup line, but the start to several hours of liquored debate.

I’ve been known to be mildly politically active, and sort of on top of the pulse. But never an activist or anything. Observing and predicting is fun.

Today I was in Google Earth just looking at the continent of North America, looking at it as though I were the US playing a strategy game. The major areas of contention right now for the US are: Greenland, Panama, Mexico, and Canada. It’s like he is establishing future boundaries at the edges of the continent – like it is an affront that borders exist on it. Upon further contemplation, Canada is fucked if this is what they’re doing. So I created [email protected] to start organizing – maybe the space will grow organically.

But, no, I don’t subscribe to higher end geopolitical info sources. That doesn’t mean I eschew them either (ISW was particularly interesting at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). I just integrate or search for info when questions are interesting.

You’re not wrong. I just like to point out the actual logical folly now and again so that people in the middle (if any are left) can see the folly.