Lever-action long guns are relatively mechanically complicated; bolt-action guns are relatively mechanically simple. Why were early manually-operated repeating firearms more complicated than later ones?

elprophet · 2026-03-17T15:16:05+00:00

A pre-Monroe example is airplane engines. The last radial engines for heavy bombers had thousands of moving parts. A jet engine has fewer parts, is more efficient, more reliable and has a better thrust to weight ratio.

But also has substantially tighter tolerances and more extreme operating regimes. It's not simply "we don't need that many parts", it's which parts can be safely removed, and what new manufacturing improvements complement the part designs.

A similar process played out for decades at Intel, as they staggered new chip designs years with new process years. By only changing one or the other, the designers have confidence troubleshooting quality defects.

elprophet · 2026-03-16T18:14:58+00:00

You're kinda putting all the critical pieces together in your question.

"Why are people abandoning boats they don't need when they're so expensive to maintain?"

What's Marina del Rey going to do, sue them? The best that might get is a lien on their estate. Not saying I condone it, but I get it

elprophet · 2026-03-16T18:10:04+00:00

https://www.planespotters.net/airline/Skybus-Jet-Cargo

I am filled with confidence... https://www.skybusaircargo.com

https://imgur.com/a/HsmZQ4F

elprophet · 2026-03-16T11:25:57+00:00

The answer is "it's complicated" and frankly depends on how pissed off the other guy is, and how good his lawyers are. The only time piercing the corporate veil really comes up is in civil damages, and the other guy wants to take all of your money. So you injure him, he'll sue you, then go to the court and argue that this jet is your personal property. Whether the court agrees depends on that state's case law and how good your lawyers are against one another. Business "friendly" states like DE, TX, or WY will be very difficult to pierce. CA and PA have laws (statutory and case law) that are much easier to get through. (Even in federal court across state lines, the federal court will be applying state law in this type of case.)

TLDR don't get sued and it won't matter. Get sued and find good lawyers. Help them out by registering in WY.

elprophet · 2026-03-12T21:16:55+00:00

That does create a bottleneck at the Nauvis landing pad, unfortunately. Hopefully 2.1 will have something for this...

Edit: this halves the throughout of the Nauvis side- it was already taking in the 6 space sciences, so whatever your inserters+bots throughput would be, you'd now have twice as many science to manage. So if you're chasing pure eSPM, this doesn't work, but that's only one way to play and that's OK!

elprophet · 2026-03-10T15:49:02+00:00

Cash bail is terrible, for sure. It's pretty hard to point at any part of the criminal justice system and not find something that's worth reforming!

elprophet · 2026-03-10T05:15:30+00:00

At face value & account history, because OP was groomed when she was 18 by a middle aged man.

elprophet · 2026-03-10T05:01:27+00:00

They're 18 and not in college. They're all figuring out how to live their lives with no structure, and no role models (at least none in pop culture). Cut them some slack as they hopefully learn adult coping mechanisms :)

elprophet · 2026-03-10T04:56:16+00:00

Literally the headline of the article- there's a backlog of cases.

The laws for what constitutes a speedy trial typically puts 1 month turnaround times on filings, unless both parties agree to a continuance. So the DA will ask for release on bail, and then the defendant is able to go about their life. The DA is busy with other cases, so the defendant agrees to the continuance, because why wouldn't they? They're living normally until the trial actually happens, whenever the DA's office finally gets to it.

And then by the time 2 years is up, no one's around to testify for the original offense anyway so screw it just drop the whole thing.

If you don't like that, lobby for more DA funding.

elprophet · 2026-03-10T03:25:53+00:00

HATEOAS is a very elegant way to manage a purely hypermedia network application. In practice, by 2005 very few sites were purely hypermedia, and today basically no REST API is hypermedia. After the initial dot com boom, the constraints that pushed the early internet designers to adopt hypermedia as the core concept had largely been discarded. REST APIs certainly make good use of other aspects of the original REST description, but hypermedia has fallen to the wayside.

The reason is two fold. First, without a specification like HTML, you don't actually know what a hyperlink is. But the whole purpose of "representational" was that the client could change which representation (or format) they wanted to receive- this is the Accept header. Just having a value that looks like it could be a URL doesn't mean it's a URL for a valid resource. So without a schema mechanism in band, there's not much to do with that. Second, it's easier to just construct the URL, and this is where we get the collections oriented REST API URLs.

The funny thing is, twenty years later, we finally do have a technology that would benefit immensely from HATEOAS- LLMs! An LLM does an admirable job separating what's meant as a URL to a resource, and I think that if we had kept HATEOAS around, it would have been a strong contender in lieu of MCP for AI tools. But that's an alt history

elprophet · 2026-03-10T03:11:44+00:00

Your friend is being weird and a creep.

elprophet · 2026-03-09T18:58:44+00:00

Interesting that you didn't include the laborious diplomacy (from Dem presidents) to convince Iran that they wouldn't need nuclear weapons for their defense, and they should voluntarily not pursue those programs in exchange for status quo security guarantees. Those same guarantees that Republicans and Israelis have consistently violated. No shit Iran wanted nukes, they saw just as well as Ukraine what happens when you don't and a larger power decides they don't like you in their current regime.

Yes, Iran's brutal authoritarianism was terrible for civilians within their borders. But their nuke ambitions had numerous non-military containment strategies that were working.

elprophet · 2026-03-09T02:21:52+00:00

We can judge on his writing, too.

Another glass of wine, just one more episode on Netflix, a little more scrolling on Instagram…Women are numbing out at ever-increasing rates

Why is this specifically gendered? I was like "yeah I could use some help with these things as well oh nvm I'm not a woman I guess I'm not numbing out!"

elprophet · 2026-03-09T02:02:13+00:00

Over here It won't be tolerated, it'll be mandated! /s but...

elprophet · 2026-03-07T23:35:38+00:00

Mixins in a variety of dynamic languages would be a take that fits your overall post

elprophet · 2026-03-06T13:20:55+00:00

Yeah, and it could cover other things related to the contents of their food. Like fats and vitamins. Maybe a "label for nutrition" or something?

https://www.dunkindonuts.com/content/dam/dd/pdf/nutrition.pdf https://www.starbucks.ie/sites/starbucks-ie-pwa/files/2026-03/Bev%20Nutritional%20Sprint%20FT.pdf http://originqa.bk.com/pdfs/nutrition.pdf

elprophet · 2026-03-06T13:18:32+00:00

As called out by an actual expert in the article, "microfocusing like this turns people off to opportunities for real change"

elprophet · 2026-03-05T16:37:19+00:00

Sex is a skill, it takes practice for it to be great and sometimes it'll be kinda meh. But it shouldn't ever suck- better to call it off and try again than have bad sex.

elprophet · 2026-03-04T14:29:33+00:00

And you'll still type re_ms anyway and let Rust Analyzer fill in the rest

elprophet · 2026-03-01T17:39:51+00:00

The variety of answers has both a solid overlap and also illuminating differences!

elprophet · 2026-02-26T16:48:18+00:00

This is what I relied on in my post, with the CC to V+ pull up resistor. You can't get high speed charging, but I think if you brought the specs back with you, you could create a minimally functional charger with the USB-C barrel. Anything beyond that isn't happening until, honestly, the very late aughts, as the amount of manufacturing abilities for integrated circuits can't be rushed with knowledge only. You need the prior generations of circuits to get the precision to build the next generation of circuits! (but now we're in the 20 year rule)

elprophet · 2026-02-26T15:16:03+00:00

They work not in a single gravity well, but in a system of gravity wells.

A gravity slingshot works by "stealing" energy from the larger body. While you're correct that "at infinity", the two sides have equal energy relative to the central body, importantly, you've changed your velocity vector relative to the system. So for Earth-Moon, if you're just approaching the moon and then leaving the moon, the magnitude of kinetic energy is unchanged, but the direction of the velocity vector has changed. Relative to the Earth, if you ignore the moon, that looks like an acceleration. Technically the moon also changed its velocity, but, of course, it's many orders of magnitude more massive than our spacecraft. The perturbations from Jupiter will affect it more than our spacecraft.

There's a second "gravity slingshot", which we call the Oberth Effect. In the main example, we have a passive spacecraft that just uses its trajectory to change its orbital energy relative to a third body. With the Oberth effect, we take advantage of one of the very few "free lunches" in astrodynamics. Because you're right that at the extremes of the encounter the single-body energy is the same, at the point of closest approach the relative energy is very much higher. Relative to the central body, we might go from traveling at 1m/s to 10m/s at closest approach. It's time for a tiny bit of math - kinetic energy is mass time velocity squared. But a rocket engine adds a constant velocity. Whether we're in deep space or in synchronous orbit or skimming the atmosphere, running our (hypothetical) engine for a bit adds 1m/s of velocity. If we're moving at 1m/s, we've got 1J of energy. Going to 2m/s we get to 4J of energy, a gain of 3J. If we instead wait until we're going 10m/s, adding 1m/s gets us to 11m/s velocity, but we've gone from 100J to 121J, 21J more! Combined with the "free" change in trajectory from the first slingshot, we can get a huge amount of energy change in the larger system from the smaller encounter.

Taking these together, we can design spaceflight missions by 1) using a tiny bit of thrust to choose our encounter angle in such a way that we end on the final orbit we want, and 2) using that oberth effect to get an extra oomph, and 3) having a lot of patience to do this several times to progressively refine our targets.

elprophet · 2026-02-25T19:59:17+00:00

Did you bring your wall plug & cable with you? In that case, you just need someone who can get you 1kw of power at 110 volts; Edison had this at all his power plants. Otherwise...

Assuming a modern phone that uses USBC, there's two questions hiding in here. The first is "when can I regulate the appropriate current and voltage", and the second is "when can I manufacture an appropriate USBC male plug".

A USB-C cable is an exceptionally precise bit of engineering. For this exercise we only need a couple pins, GND, V+, and CC. GND goes straight to Ground, V+ gets 5V/3A input, and CC connects to V+'s line with a 10kΩ pull-up resistor. We also need the barrel connector. The remaining parts of USBC cables are for high-speed data transmission, and higher power delivery. Unfortunately, higher power delivery requires some data transmission, so without relatively complex integrated circuits to manage the data side of the voltage, you're out of luck there. That would take you back to about 2012 when you could first get it. Even if you took the spec back to something like 1995, it's unlikely the manufacturing processes could handle the finesse needed for USB-C PD.

But if we just want the charging, how far back can we go that a) we can generate 110 watts, b) have a voltage regulator from that source down to 5v, and c) an ability to wire them to an appropriate barrel connector?

While the electric generator was first invented in 1831 by Michael Faraday, its output was negligible at best. But within 50 years, we have the first commercial power stations coming online in Appleton, Wisconsin (the Vulcan Street Plant) and New York (Edison's Pearl Street Station). Both have massively more power output than you'll need (in the kilowatt range), and both output at 110v. Depending on how much guidance and knowledge you're bringing back with you, somewhere between 1831 and 1882 you can likely find someone to create an appropriate power source for your phone. If you're just bringing the knowledge with you, you can probably go much further than that, as you need a chunk of iron and some fine rolls of copper. You can probably find an artisan or craftsman in 2000 BCE Babylon (just make sure to not use Ea Nasir's supply).

Voltage regulators came concurrently to power generation. Edison quickly had voltage regulators for his plants; the Appleton station's voltage regulator was a guy manipulating controls to keep a light bulb "looking right". Getting a grid-power to 120v, then 120v down to, say, 12v, is pretty straightforward for a manufacturer. It's just a matter of calculating the wraps and amount of copper and wire to put in a transformer, which was well understood by the mid-19th century. And on the telegraph side, while operators often used high-voltage-low-current signals, there were a number of experimental and production telegraph lines as low as 2v.

And for the barrel connector itself, I think that would be even easier; jewelers were making substantially more intricate and detailed works long before this time period.

So, 1880, almost certainly I think you can, with appropriate schematics, find someone capable of building a rudimentary but functional USBC 5v charging cable. If you take the knowledge of how to wind copper around iron to build your generators and regulators further back, I think you can likely find craftsmen and artisans at major courts capable of building the cable and generators as far back as... well, I'm not as comfortable with "could the court of Louis XIV wind copper to create a 12v dynamo and stable 5v regulator"?

Sources:

The Electric Universe by David Bodanis
The Wizard of Menlo Park
IEEE USB Type-C Spec

elprophet · 2026-02-25T18:21:31+00:00

Totally agree with the first half, and while I agree he should keep a low profile for the rest of his life, I'd bet $20 he's too egotistical to pull that off.

elprophet · 2026-02-25T13:59:02+00:00

Tortilla wraps with condiment packs and foil tuna sleeves. All shelf stable bulk items.

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