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Fascinating, and what about the discarded hardware? Is it recyclable in any way?

Anything made of steel or aluminum is recyclable because they can just melt it down and easily separate the metals, but the carbon lining and anything nonmetal is basically slag afterwards. Aluminum, electrolyte, and random atoms seep in everywhere and destroy it.

The smelting process I described above is actually the more expensive process to used to produce aluminum from raw bauxite. Recycling aluminum is cheaper and a significant fraction of the world’s aluminum produced every year is from recycled feedstock (over two thirds in the US, last I checked). Same goes for steel and most other metals.


I'm sure, like any metal at an industrial scale, it is profitably recyclable. But that is beside the point. This is akin to asking: "My car's engine just threw a rod and is seized. Is it recyclable?" Hopefully you see in this analogy that the car (engine) costs way, way more than the sum of its parts (the constituent metals).

I live with a feeling of nonaccomplishment, never having taken a project to completion thanks to my shitty executive function. The AI craze has robbed me of any hope that I might still meaningfully* achieve this in my career.

Couldn't an AI help you take a project to completion, at least until you run out of money?

I didn't mention the crucial point which is that I what I signed up for was writing my own software.

I grew up witnessing Carmack going from Keen to Quake in 5 or 6 years.

That standard gets you attached to the idea that you should be able at some level to individually reach a fraction of the depth and breadth. Sadly, I have neither the energy nor the focus.

But what's the point of getting an LLM to, say, write a raycaster if your point is to learn how to do that yourself? If your mission in life is to learn to build things?

(I hope I'm getting my idea across)


You have conflated the joy of learning with the joy of building. I have been writing code since I was 6 years old and was left to my own devices with the vic-20, the manual, and BASIC instructions.

I have worked as a developer, security engineer, program manager and engineering manager through my career. Writing stuff to understand algorithms or hardware requires engaging with the math, science, and engineering of the software and hardware. Optimizing it or developing a novel algorithm requires deep comprehension.

Writing a service that shuffles a few things around between stuff on my home network so that I can build an automation to turn down the lights when I start playing a movie? Yeah, I could spend a day or two writing and testing it. Having done it a few times, the work of it is a bit of a chore, I'm not learning, just doing something. Using an Claude or some other agent to do that makes it go from 'do I want to spend my time off doing a chore?' to 'I can design this and have it built in an hour'.

Making the jump to using the tools in my day job has been a bitore challenging because as a security engineer I have seen some hairy stuff over the last two years as AI generated stuff wends it's way into production, but the tools and capabilities have expanded massively, and heck, my peers from Mozilla just published some awesome successes working with Anthropic to find new vulns :)

Don't let using tools take away the love of learning, use them to solve a problem and take care of the drudgery of building stuff.


OMG that manual. VIC-20 was my first code experience. I look back and cannot understand how 7 year-old me was patient enough to make a jumping jack guy appear on screen. Joy of Coding? Hell, no. I wanted to see if I could make it work. (I did, and I had no clue how to save to tape)

Sounds like you had one at home? If so, I'm a bit jealous. But also, hello, brother/sister!


Yep, my origin story is more fun, I actually got left at my dad's boss' office and was bored so I found a computer book and started reading it and rebooted the computer and followed the instructions. When they came back I had a very simple program going and after getting into a bit of trouble my dad's boss' laughed it off and told my dad to get me a computer. He did (the vic-20). Several days later my parents turned it off and deleted my program and it took me a while to explain that I needed more gear to save my programs. Been stuck on the hardware acquisition loop since :P

Love the color that a real life story adds, and yours definitely is colorful. Thanks for sharing.

I moved recently. My hardware acquisition loop still has me in tangles. Where exactly am I going to put this retired enterprise-grade Dell server? Why am doing this to myself? But, wow, it's a thing of beauty.


I appreciate your thoughtful response, you might be right, maybe there's an element of getting over myself to stay in the race...

Reading you, I was debating on loving kick in the rear. Can't really do that these days and some people react negatively to it. Sounds like you are reasonably self-aware though, so...

Nobody can teach you to own and control you. But you had better. Use tricks, treats, magic, whatever, but get to the damned end or make for damned sure you know why you walked away (and live with that).

Your life matters. Your ideas matter. Birth them. It hurts. Push through. Don't look back at your life and wonder what it would have been like if you had stuck with it. It hurts. But do it.

Or do whatever you want, but this random stranger votes "getting over".


Hanging out in the streets on a Saturday is America's conception of a protest, you think people with this sort of consciousness understand unionizing?


You made me curious, but there are like 5 different films with that title - which one are you referring to?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Down. It was the #1 movie in the U.S. for a couple weeks after release, made for $25M and grossed $96M.


Pretty sure he was asking about "Passengers".


The Michael Douglas one I’m assuming where Duvall was the cop

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/


Voyager spoils the TNG experience by rehashing so many stories - definitely watch TNG first.


When there's time, you review, when there isn't you trust...


That's the issue here.

Even if I trust you, I still need to review your work before merging it.

Good people still make mistakes.


What is the definition of trust if you still have to verify? How does "trust" differ from "untrust" in that scenario?


trust resudes the verification I suppose. Getting a PR from a trusted contributor would probably have me do a quick scan for obvious mistakes. And they'd know to keep the PR's small and on the right branch to help facilitate a scan.

a new person with a big idea on the slightly wrong (but reasonable) channel would have more work in verification.


What's the rush? Building good things takes time.


deadlines, money, attention. The usual things in industry.


Blackshirt elegy over here folks.


They will never experience xenophobia in any meaningful way, unlike the millions surveilled by the technology they're developing.


That's the problem with the "it just works" philosophy. When it doesn't... you have no idea what's wrong and no way to fix it. A bolted hood over the engine.


Also have 2 8020D's but I skimped on the subwoofer. Probably a bad idea, since they deemphasize the lows so much, but surprisingly I can crank up them up on my mixer's EQ to make up for it without losing clarity.


Yeah, they are really impressive for 4" drivers.


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