My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.
Interesting. You have me thinking of Candide as an answer to Quixote.
In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.
Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.
> Giving it away for free puts that whole company out of business!
It really doesn’t.
The more toward “enterprise” a software buyer is, the more what they’re actually paying for is a reputation, reduced liability, a throat to choke, etc. Functionality is only one piece of the puzzle.
The clearest example I’ve seen of this effect is with dental hygienists in the U.S.. Big labor crunch as lots of industry veterans left the labor force during COVID, wage and career growth prospects are weak vs. alternative options for newcomers, very difficult to automate in practical terms, and the way they produce revenue is usually per-procedure, with a ceiling largely fixed by insurance reimbursement rates, so the offices that employ them see a profitability issue when contemplating a raise.
Sounds like some other places use capitation to break the tight coupling between hourly productivity and profitability. Sounds interesting but politically very challenging. Would be interested to hear some perspective from consumers in e.g. the Nordics with experience.
Fwiw sometimes I wear my APP2 inside my cheap passive 3M earmuffs haha. For an hour or two of use it’s been comfortable enough that I can listen and also attenuate loud tool noise e.g. a weed trimmer.
Of course you don’t get any speech boost to enable conversation with this setup. But no one else around me has passthrough either so I turn off my tools to talk the old fashioned way. :)
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly
“XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”,
“setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”,
“processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”
(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)
The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”
Its final verdict:
“very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
My lingering question is how do you service a leaky pipe surrounded by dirt that’s 600C? Do you just have to forfeit a good chunk of your energy savings for the year?
Or is there like a practical maintenance window each year at the end of the winter when you’d do this?
That's not a lingering question. It's the question.
This is a steam boiler. Those are well understood. They have well understood problems. Leaky boiler tubes. Crud in the tubes. Cleaning. The problem here is that you can't easily turn the heat source off.
It's possible to build a long-life boiler for a heat source you can't fully turn off. Every nuclear reactor has one. Heavy stainless steel tubes, precision welding, distilled water.
Works fine, but not cheap.
This paper is very hand-wavey about the details of getting the energy out. They're all about the side that puts the energy in, which is the easy part.
