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dkbrk commented on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat   isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechu... · Posted by u/rguiscard
notepad0x90 · 3 days ago
meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?

Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.

dkbrk · 3 days ago
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.

Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.

Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.

Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.

Deleted Comment

dkbrk commented on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing   spectrum.ieee.org/it-mana... · Posted by u/pseudolus
johnnyanmac · 19 days ago
That's my entire industry, so I can believe it. I'd love to learn large scale game architecture but it simply isn't public. At best you can dig into the source available 30 year legacy code of Unreal Engine as a base. But extracting architecture from the source is like looking at a building without a schematic.

Your best bet is a 500 dollar GDC vault that offers relative scraps of a schematic and making your own from those experiences.

dkbrk · 19 days ago
Have you seen the presentation from GDC 2017 on the architecture of Overwatch [0]? If you watch the video in detail -- stepping through frame-by-frame at some points -- it provides a nearly complete schematic of the game's architecture. That's probably why the video has since been made unlisted.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3aieHjyNvw

dkbrk commented on Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site   tomshardware.com/pc-compo... · Posted by u/WithinReason
Buttons840 · 2 months ago
If a hardened camera can survive, I'm surprised subs don't have a floating black box that can survive an implosion and then float to the surface and begin emitting a radio signal.

I guess the trick would be finding a way to securely attach the black box in a way that would ensure its release in a catastrophic disaster.

dkbrk · 2 months ago
I'm not aware of anything quite like that, but most submarines have something like a Rescue Buoy [0], Submarine Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (SEPIRB) or Submarine Emergency Communications Transmitter (SECT). I think those might differ based on whether they're attached by a cable and allow communicating to the submarine, or just broadcast a distress signal with the position. In any case, they're designed to be automatically deployed in the event of an emergency or catastrophic event, and based on this Quora answer [1] they're attached by an independent mechanism with a timer which has to be regularly reset to stop it deploying. I think it might be a clockwork mechanism, with an electronic alarm when it's about to go off to remind the crew to wind it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_buoy_(submarine)

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Don%E2%80%99t-submarines-have-communic...

dkbrk commented on Air Force unit suspends use of Sig Sauer pistol after shooting death of airman   nhpr.org/nh-news/2025-07-... · Posted by u/duxup
spacephysics · 5 months ago
A week or so ago the FBI report investigating an incident of unintentional discharge back in 2024 was released via FOIA. This particular case was a police officer who had the firearm in the holster, and by just normal movement it went off. Multiple layers of the striker fire system safety’s failed, and fired the chambered round.

What was particularly beneficial/unique is the P320 was kept in the holster when given to the FBI to investigate, and only removed after their forensic team X-rayed it, giving us pretty solid case study of how it happens

This guy does a great job going through the report: https://youtu.be/LfnhTYeVHHE

dkbrk · 5 months ago
Thanks for the link, but I'm not sure what the point of the 50 minute video is. Here's [0] the pdf of the report. It's really not that long.

[0]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L7RXrneHlzfjrewMFIeeyc-nel3...

dkbrk commented on The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake   computerenhance.com/p/the... · Posted by u/SerCe
cloogshicer · 5 months ago
Can someone point to a real life example or tutorial/guide of the ECS architecture he proposes?

I'd like to learn more about how to implement this.

dkbrk · 5 months ago
It's a bit of a long read, but I think the best introduction is still this [0] and the comments were here [1]. Yes, it's presented in the context of rust and gamedev, but ECS isn't actually specific to a particular programming language or problem domain.

[0]: https://kyren.github.io/2018/09/14/rustconf-talk.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994464

dkbrk commented on The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=wo84L... · Posted by u/doruk101
abetusk · 5 months ago
I found this talk to be great. It goes through the history of OOP and how some of the ideas for the more modern ECS were embedded in the culture at the formation of OOP in the 1960s to 1980s but somehow weren't adopted.

It was pretty clear, even 20 years ago, that OOP had major problems in terms of what Casey Muratori now calls "hierarchical encapsulation" of problems.

One thing that really jumped out at me was his quote [0]:

> I think when you're designing new things, you should focus on the hardest stuff. ... we can always then take that and scale it down ... but it's almost impossible to take something that solves simple problems and scale it up into something that solves hard [problems]

I understand the context but this, in general, is abysmally bad advice. I'm not sure about language design or system architecture but this is almost universally not true for any mathematical or algorithmic pursuit.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI&t=8284s

dkbrk · 5 months ago
> I'm not sure about language design or system architecture but this is almost universally not true for any mathematical or algorithmic pursuit.

I don't agree. While starting with the simplest case and expanding out is a valid problem-solving technique, it is also often the case in mathematics that we approach a problem by solving a more general problem and getting our solution as a special case. It's a bit paradoxical, but a problem that be completely intractable if attacked directly can be trivial if approached with a sufficiently powerful abstraction. And our problem-solving abilities grow with our toolbox of ever more powerful and general abstractions.

Also, it's a general principle in engineering that the initial design decisions, the underlying assumptions underlying everything, is in itself the least expensive part of the process but have an outsized influence on the entire rest of the project. The civil engineer who halfway through the construction of his bridge discovers there is a flaw in his design is having a very bad day (and likely year). With software things are more flexible, so we can build our solution incrementally from a simpler case and swap bits out as our understanding of the problem changes; but even there, if we discover there is something wrong with our fundamental architectural decisions, with how we model the problem domain, we can't fix it just by rewriting some modules. That's something that can only be fixed by a complete rewrite, possibly even in a different language.

So while I don't agree with your absolute statement in general, I think it is especially wrong given the context of language design and system architecture. Those are precisely the kind of areas where it's really important that you consider all the possible things you might want to do, and make sure you're not making some false assumption that will massively screw you over at some later date.

dkbrk commented on UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs   theregister.com/2025/06/1... · Posted by u/miles
Iwan-Zotow · 6 months ago
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle
dkbrk · 6 months ago
I actually think that it does a disservice to not go to Nazi allegory, because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there is some critical understanding that I have left on the table; there is an element of the story that you can't possibly understand.

In fact, as I have said before and I emphatically believe, if you had to explain the Nazis to somebody who had never heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, there's a very good chance that you actually explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.

So, it's like: "Really, wow, a whole country?"; "Yes, Larry Ellison has an entire country"; "Oh my god, the humanity! The License Audits!"; "Yeah, you should talk to Poland about it, it was bad. Bad, it was a blitzkrieg license audit."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=1459s

dkbrk commented on Accountability Sinks   250bpm.substack.com/p/acc... · Posted by u/msustrik
dkbrk · 7 months ago
The discussion near the end about how leadership taking responsibility can beneficially relieve accountability reminded me of the story of the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) [0].

[1]:

> When NTDS was eventually acclaimed not only a success, but also one of the most successful projects in the Navy; it amazed people. Especially because it had stayed within budget and schedule. A number of studies were commissioned to analyze the NTDS project to find why it had been so successful in spite of the odds against it. Sometimes it seems there was as much money spent on studying NTDS than was spent on NTDS development.

[2]:

> ...the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations authorized development of the Naval tactical Data System in April 1956, and assigned the Bureau of Ships as lead developing agency. The Bureau, in turn, assigned Commander Irvin McNally as NTDS project “coordinator” with Cdr. Edward Svendsen as his assistant. Over a period of two years the coordinating office would evolve to one of the Navy’s first true project offices having complete technical, management, and funds control over all life cycle aspects of the Naval Tactical Data System including research and development, production procurement, shipboard installation, lifetime maintenance and system improvement.

[1]:

The Freedom to Fail: McNally and Svendsen had an agreement with their seniors in the Bureau of Ships and in OPNAV that, if they wanted them to do in five years what normally took 14, they would have to forego the time consuming rounds of formal project reviews and just let them keep on working. This was reasonable because the two commanders were the ones who had defined the the new system and they knew better than any senior reviewing official whether they were on the right track or not. It was agreed, when the project officers needed help, they would ask for it, otherwise the seniors would stand clear and settle for informal progress briefings.

The key take-away is that the NTDS was set up as a siloed project office with Commanders McNally and Svendsen having responsibility for the ultimate success of the project, but other than that being completely unaccountable. There were many other things the NTDS project did well, but I believe that fundamental aspect of its organization was the critical necessary condition for its success. Lack of accountability can be bad, in other circumstances it can be useful, but diffusion of responsibility is always the enemy.

How many trillions of dollars are wasted on projects that go overbudget, get delayed and/or ultimately fail, and to what extent could that pernicious trend be remedied if such projects were led from inception to completion by one or two people with responsibility for its ultimate success who shield the project from accountability?

[0]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...

[1]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Legacy_of_NTDS_-_Chapter_9_of_th...

[2]: https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Building_the_U.S._Navy%27s_First...

dkbrk commented on Splash-free urinals: Design through physics and differential equations   academic.oup.com/pnasnexu... · Posted by u/yeknoda
neves · 8 months ago
Next paper from the authors: a form that maximizes splash to prevent public urination
dkbrk · 8 months ago
Did you not read the paper? That's in there.

u/dkbrk

KarmaCake day1720September 23, 2014View Original