Incidents like this show that “nuclear safety” is as much cultural as technical. Even the best systems fail when people and organizations stop treating the environment with the respect it demands.
Readit NewsByteDrifter commented on A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co... · Posted by u/nvahalik
ByteDrifter commented on Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) prog21.dadgum.com/210.htm... · Posted by u/wonger_
Many computer science programs today have basically turned into coding trade schools.
Students can use frameworks, but they don’t understand why languages are designed the way they are, or how systems evolved over time.
It’s important to remember that computing is also a field of ideas and thought, not just implementation.
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Letting the browser handle cookie consent makes it feel like part of a privacy operating system.
ByteDrifter commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
This reminds me of the Space Shuttle era. Back then, relying too much on a single vendor and working under tight timelines led to repeated delays and safety risks. SpaceX is incredibly capable, but past experience shows it's always safer to have alternatives.
ByteDrifter commented on Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs guru3d.com/story/synology... · Posted by u/baobun
I used to recommend Synology everywhere, but ever since the hard drive lock issue, I'm now trying to dissuade people from buying it. The policy reversal is a good thing, but trust isn't something you can restore simply by "reversing" it.
I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it sounding like this is the future, I just feel discouraged because it sounds like so much work and I've tried using coding agents and they help a bit, but I find it way less fun to be waiting around for agents to do stuff and it's way harder to get into flow state managing multiple of these things. It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales
This line really hit me. I used to think that mastering one advanced skill would be enough to rely on for life, but it seems that’s no longer the case.
If you pause your subscription, Claude.ai breaks. I paused my subscription, and my account immediately transitioned to free. It has removed my invoice history, and attempts to upgrade again fail with an internal error. Their chatbot is telling me to navigate to UI elements that don't exist, and free users do not have the option of human support.
So I'm stuck; my sub is paused, and I cannot either cancel, or unpause and cannot speak to a human to solve this because the pause process took away all possibility of human interaction.
This is the future we live in.
I feel like we're just renting our digital lives.
Dead Comment
> Do you want to sit next to my three-year-old?
Not particularly, no. What I want is for you to purchase the seats your family needs ahead of time, not ask me for them for free.
I know that travelling with kids is really tough. I sincerely sympathize! But it’s not a surprise that a kid needs a seat next to his parents. They know when they bought the ticket that he’ll be coming along, because they’re buying the ticket. They should select the necessary seats then.
Sure, if the airline had to move flights around then 1) they should attempt to preserve group cohesion 2) in extremis folks should negotiate. But for awhile I was getting requests from late-boarders every single time I flew. That’s not an accident: they are flying on cheap tickets and trying to get extra value. I sympathize with that too! But I pay for the value I get, and I don’t appreciate social pressure to give it away.
I believe every airline should offer a basic service: when minors are traveling with an adult, they should automatically be seated together. Ideally, airlines should provide a designated family seating area to avoid situations where a child ends up sitting next to a stranger.