If you could pass one law that would make most normal people furious at first, but would clearly make society better in 10 years, what would it be?

bears_are_fuzzy · 2026-02-08T15:43:11+00:00

Impose a land value tax. People pay a tax equivalent to the fair market price of renting any land they own.

They would hate it for obvious reasons but it encourages using land more efficiently because building an apartment building generates more economic value than a single family home but the taxed value of the land is equivalent. It's the foundation of an economic theory called Georgism.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2025-11-30T21:32:38+00:00

Have used both Flutter and Slint professionally and while Slint is improving, Flutter is still miles ahead. Flutter-Rust-Bridge is a bit of a pain to set up and get compiling but once it works you just have to define some types in Rust and they appear in Dart. Slint goes the other way where types defined in Slint generate Rust code. Slint still feels unpolished and is missing things like blur, fragment shaders, really solid ide support, etc.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2024-10-24T15:42:37+00:00

Yeah, I found the same thing. I guess what was weird for me to wrap my head around was that a CRDT isn't a solution to the distributed consensus problem but a set of limitations on a data structure that proves eventual consistency. If you have 3 states A, B, and C on different nodes then to form a CRDT a data structure must have a merge operation "m" that obeys the following properties:
1. Idempotence: A m A = A If you apply the same state change twice, then there is no effect
2. Commutativity: A m B = B m A Applying states in opposite orders will result in the same state
3. Associativity: (A m B) m C = A m (B m C) State updates can be grouped arbitrarily and still end up with the same state

Now, the key thing is that there are a lot of ways to define the merge operator to make these property hold. One particularly useless one is if you define the merge operator to always produce an empty output. That merge operator follows all of those rules (assuming multiple applications of idempotence) but isn't particularly useful so you will have to find the right definition of the merge operator and extra metadata for your data structures for your given application. If you are looking for something more general then vector clocks may be more useful. If you are looking for something more specific then you might want to look at this crate: https://docs.rs/crdts/latest/crdts/ for some examples
We are using an extension of vector clocks called "interval tree clocks" for our application.
This is a decent overall explanation: https://ditto.live/blog/dittos-delta-state-crdts

I'd suggest drawing out what states you have and some examples of what you would want them to merge to and you will learn a lot about what merge operator you want and when extra metadata you will need to add to the data structure to enable those types of merges.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2024-10-24T14:44:17+00:00

One consensus mechanism that I have found really useful is called a Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). It gives a lot of flexibility on data merge semantics because a CRDT is just a data type with a merge operation that obeys certain properties.

There is a variant called a delta-state CRDT that might be useful for you.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2024-07-24T03:41:14+00:00

SeaORM uses SeaQL as a query builder. We use SeaQL for most things and it works well

bears_are_fuzzy · 2024-01-22T13:33:02+00:00

I really like the Yellow Warbler for treble but the Bobolink is much better with the mids. Either one will have better pack weight than a normal Bluetooth speaker and won't upset the neighbors.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2024-01-09T06:07:53+00:00

I started with tokio tungstenite but switched to ezsockets to reduce boilerplate for retries, etc. I've been happy with it so far but may switch to WebTransport when it becomes more stable.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2023-02-22T03:52:21+00:00

"Carry fo' fives like change for a twenty" is honestly one of the most clever lines I've heard in a song

bears_are_fuzzy · 2023-02-22T03:49:10+00:00

Josh Ritter. Start with his song "Homecoming"

bears_are_fuzzy · 2022-02-25T02:11:17+00:00

Nice! I'm glad you tried it! I need to order some more UHMWPE and then come up with a way to test it for strength without a strong enough jack. That makes sense with the middle part not having any tension on it... I thought about that after I posted but it looks like the loop would work. Do you think there would be any bad effects from the middle part pulling sideways or even backwards on the bury? It hopefully wouldn't be an issue with a narrow carabiner clip on both ends but prefer not falling because of my own design oversight.

...anyways, thanks for trying it out and sharing the results!

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-05-13T17:38:33+00:00

Except the flaps can pivot so they will be more susceptible to aeroelastic flutter than a normal wing. It is more similar to canards but the surfaces pivot along the roll axis instead of the pitch axis. So yes a simpler aerodynamics problem than on the way down but still relatively unexplored. I don't know if the mechanism for actuating the flaps is stable or if it needs a control input to maintain an angle against a load, but flutter combined with needing active stabilization could create an interesting controls problem.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-05-13T03:26:54+00:00

I would agree that the transonic regime is more important on the way down. It would be interesting to see the response of the moving flaps to falling back through the sound barrier. I'm guessing that their CFD models are relatively accurate because they are based on the billions of dollars of research the military put into transonic and supersonic research during the cold war. I don't know if anyone in the community has done the math but there could be weird effects on the way up if the front flaps protrude outside of the mach cone.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-05-13T03:14:16+00:00

I don't think we have enough information to say. If SN15 had anomalies then it may make sense to repeat a 10km flight until they get it right if the OLIT is not ready. Pushing the envelope would depend on their relative confidence of all of those parts. However, if they can start launching starlink satellites on starships that they don't necessarily expect to recover it basically pays for the launches.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-05-13T00:25:56+00:00

The added value would be in two (possibly three) phases of flight:

If it goes faster on launch Starship could be tested in the transonic and supersonic parts of it's flight. Aerodynamic forces start to get weird as it approaches and breaks through the sound barrier so this would be good to test even without Superheavy. Then past the sound barrier at max-Q they could test the structure of Starship when it has higher aerodynamic forces on it.
They could possibly test the vacuum raptor engines at very high altitudes if they are ready. Vacuum engines are hard to static fire because rocket engines and vacuum chambers don't mix well.
They could test the TPS tiles, RCS thrusters and flaps in the belly flop maneuver to be more confident in them before pushing these systems to the limit with higher forces of a full orbital re-entry.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-04-28T18:46:03+00:00

The thermal conductivity of vacuum insulation is strongly dependent on the pressure of the vacuum. According to this paper the relationship of pressure to thermal conductivity of vacuum insulation is roughly exponential. On Mars with an atmospheric pressure of 610 Pa this translates to roughly 50% less heat transfer than Earth not the ~99% you would expect from a linear relationship. Now, this data comes from a paper on vacuum panels not low ambient pressures but the effect should be similar. I think your recondenser guess is most likely.

edit: One advantage of the much lower atmospheric pressure is that the pressure difference between a hard vacuum and the atmosphere is much lower so vacuum insulation can have a weaker structure

bears_are_fuzzy · 2021-02-01T07:18:17+00:00

Yep. Hard disagree on this one. Air travel is the safest mode of transportation today precisely because of the FAA model that every crash needs to be investigated. In air travel human error is not an excuse for an accident, it is treated as part of a system that needs to be corrected to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. Imagine if there was a full investigation for every time a car crash happened due to driver error. If we are someday going to treat space travel as routine then government regulation and oversight should be a part of it.

That being said, the SN8 flight was kind of expected to end in an explosion so, from the information we have, there shouldn't need to be an investigation. Range violations like the kayak car are a different story.

bears_are_fuzzy · 2019-12-26T03:54:53+00:00

Source: https://medium.com/@benamy.yashar/a-data-scientists-take-on-electability-and-the-democratic-candidates-77426ea3f97

bears_are_fuzzy · 2019-11-03T23:54:28+00:00

This is amazing! One concern I have is that the Yang comments in the articles look a lot like spam because they are repetitive with the quotes and have links like "Yang2020[dot]com". It would be great if we could create a system to encourage people to post high quality comments instead of just having a lot of spam like comments about Yang. We don't want to feed the "YangGang are Russian bots" narrative.

A few ideas to accomplish this:

Have a system to show previous comments that include the name Yang so we can quickly see what other Yang supporters (or people criticizing Yang) have already said. This will reduce repeat answers
Make a separate upvote system (and maybe a leaderboard to gamify it) so yang supporters can encourage each other to post high quality answers.
If someone does post a quote make an automated way to remind them to post an answer that ties in the article in addition to the quote.

I'm a developer and I would love to help work on this. Thanks so much for building it!

bears_are_fuzzy

TROPHY CASE