• 3 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I’m in tech and It’s literally not falling.

    People are still hiring, just the bar is no longer absurdly low.

    During the pandemic, everyone was hiring like crazy, and people coming out of boot camps were instantly hired even when they didn’t understand algorithms, didn’t understand system design, and didn’t understand engineering principles.

    Now, you actually need to have a brain to be hired.

    Tech is also not a bubble, because tech is in every single industry now. You might get froth in certain segments of tech (crypto, AI, whatever is the current “hot thing”), the market fundamentals are absurdly good. Operating margins of mature software companies are consistently in the mid 20s to 30s.



  • I’m not convinced by any mass society that is altruistic, but it’s very simple to see that the natural state of human small groups is quite communal.

    What mother has a ledger for the child’s share of food?

    We have an entire feeling brain that’s dedicated to relationship building that’s very much the core of most small group relationships.

    I’m also very convinced that this model does not work past Dunbar’s Number (~100-150 individuals), and most attempts at building communal society outside of that without some cohersion and some better way of organizing incentives is not possible.










  • No, unless you are leveraging evaporative cooling, that amount of circulation isn’t going to get you much.

    Just get a real geothermal hvac system if you have the opportunity. Incredibly efficient.

    Back of the napkin conversion: 20btu/sqft recommended cooling capacity. 1btu = 252 calories (small)

    A 60k btu cooling needs

    15120000 gram degrees C of water. Assuming you have perfect heat exchanger on both ends, that’s 15120 liters-degrees circulated per hour.

    Pumping that much water alone is going to be quite a bit of energy.

    Then you have the problem of heat exchanger. There are lots of sizing mostly based on the deltaT temperature difference.

    Realistically, without some agent evaporating and recondensing, you’ll have a massive water to air heat exchanger that’s not practical at all.

    If you want to do more research yourself, heat exchanger sizing can be found in mechanical engineering and chemical engineering handbooks.





  • This was more or less a reflection of my personal experience.

    When I was in school, we were taught how to do research. It involves going to Libraries and looking for primary secondary and tertiary sources via the Dewey decimal system. We were taught how to use almanacs and even had an almanac competition on how fast someone can find information.

    Public institutions such as the Library system in the United States, were our “temple” of knowledge. Public support for Libraries was historically VERY high.

    However, since the popularization of search engines, it has radically reshaped our expectations of finding information. We expect to find it at our fingertip, in less than 200ms, at the cost of quality and gatekeeping institutions that filtered out a lot of junk knowledge.

    I was able to find a few articles talking about this: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279

    I especially love the quote, “Conflation of information retrieval with knowledge”