drooby (u/drooby) - Readit News

drooby commented on My car charger can boil water really fast [video] youtube.com/watch?v=INZyb... · Posted by u/zdw

jchw · 9 days ago

This begs the question, and I've genuinely thought this before, of why we don't just strap a battery to a kettle and end this silly debate. If it takes 5 minutes to boil a cup of water in a 1000 watt kettle, that's somewhere around 80Wh... I guess it would be kind of expensive, but couldn't you make a pretty fast kettle with some number of high discharge battery cells?

(Well honestly, I guess the real answer is outside of Internet debates most people probably just don't consider 5 minutes to boil a cup of water to be a problem.)

drooby · 9 days ago

Impulse Labs is doing exactly this..

I believe there master plan foresees a future where batteries are more integrated with a house for decentralized grid storage. But the additional consumer advantage is better hardware - i.e cooking time.

drooby commented on Happiness Is a Skill You Can Build domofutu.substack.com/p/h... · Posted by u/domofutu

drooby · 23 days ago

In my experience I have found this to be entirely true.

I find happiness to be "the art of expectation setting", and the "art of reframe".

Mindfulness meditation and introspection help a lot.

But, becoming "good" at this skill comes with a particular loss, of which I have some wistful feelings for.

Life no longer feels like it is happening to me. I do not experience large swings of emotion, great loss, unexpected turns, high highs, low lows. Music doesn't hit like it once did.

I have traded the turbulence of life for predictable, stable growth. It is less exciting, and I have mourned the loss of my previous way of seeing, but I am much happier now.

drooby commented on Being hunted by hounds is strangely exhilarating theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/paulpauper

drooby · a month ago

You can't legally hunt for mushrooms with dogs in England?

drooby commented on What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)? · Posted by u/gooob

drooby · a month ago

High quality ("beautiful") code is as simple AND legible as possible, while remaining logically correct. All must be present.

It is a balance. And legibility is a fuzzy attribute that depends on the intellectual capacity of the collective observer.

But, beauty is subjective.. some people think maximally terse code is beautiful so... shrug

drooby commented on FAA to cut flights by 10% at 40 major airports due to government shutdown cnbc.com/2025/11/05/faa-c... · Posted by u/mikhael

GiorgioG · a month ago

Congress is still supposed to do its job.

drooby · a month ago

By impeaching and removing him, yes

drooby commented on Facts about throwing good parties atvbt.com/21-facts-about-... · Posted by u/cjbarber

drooby · a month ago

Surprised no mention of space per person. The sweet spot is not yet fully known to me. But maybe about 8-10 square feet per person. You want that intoxicating social energy, but people need the space to bop from circle to circle

drooby commented on YouTube announces 'voluntary exit program' for US staff techcrunch.com/2025/10/29... · Posted by u/whoknowsidont

AbbeFaria · 2 months ago

The company says no roles are being eliminated as part of these changes.

What in god’s name is the “voluntary exit program” going to do then ? It will obviously eliminate some roles ?

Corporate doublespeak at its finest.

drooby · 2 months ago

It’s not doublespeak. Multiple people can share the same role. Downsizing reduces redundancy. The number of roles can remain the same even with a smaller headcount.

drooby commented on Some people can't see mental images newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/petalmind

karmakaze · 2 months ago

I'm also the same, but I do believe others can vividly see creations in their mind's eye. Nikola Tesla was one who could tinker in his imagination.

Of course I wish I could do the same. On the other hand, like a blind person with other heightened senses, I have strengths in thought that surpass what seeing concretely may obscure. Most of my thoughts and reasoning is more like following graphs of related bits of vaguely visual information, it's far more topologically structural than bound to 3D physicality.

drooby · 2 months ago

I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2 vividness.

But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.

What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.

So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.

drooby commented on Lack of 'economically-attractive' men to blame for decline in marriage rates the-independent.com/life-... · Posted by u/Teever

drooby · 2 months ago

There is a minimum threshold that a partner must make in order for it to be economically advantageous due to "doubling up" and sharing resources. Below this threshold, the partner is not pulling their weight relative to median living expenses.

That threshold is about 38-40k USD as of 2025.

About 40-55 percent of single men in the US meet that threshold.

So - there is probably not a serious shortage of "economically advantageous" men. Where marriage would make perfect sense.

But I don't doubt there is a shortage of "economically attractive men". Women seem to prefer a partner that makes the same or more than them. And the same goes with level of education... oh and they must be tall, oh and ideally a symmetrical face with a happy family ... this pool of men is diminishingly small.

drooby commented on The Accountability Problem jamesshore.com/v2/blog/20... · Posted by u/FrancoisBosun

alphazard · 2 months ago

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product management has become an imposter role, a side door into tech companies for people who can't contribute to the sales, financial, or technical parts of the business. They would just be bloat if that was where it stopped, but these imposter roles task themselves with making important decisions, at the company's expense.

Like the author, I've found some success in forcing accountability, to the point that imposters hand off decisions to someone who can legitimately navigate to a solution. A lingering problem is that business decision making isn't about one-time decisions, it's about decision making rate. As long as poor decision makers can retain their position in the critical loop, they will impede the ability of the business to function. The solution is building the organization around accountability and consequences for misallocating the company's resources: setting up a system where the organization tends towards competent decision makers gaining influence, and incompetent decision makers losing influence or leaving.

drooby · 2 months ago

I was spoiled at my first company out of college. My director cared deeply about product specs, acceptance criteria, and making sure engineers actually understood product and business decisions. It was so nice.

Oh, how sweet and naive I was to the world… hahah.

It still blows my mind that product isn’t treated like a soft engineering discipline in its own right. When product doesn’t do its own thinking, the cognitive load shifts to engineering. Suddenly, engineers are doing parts of product’s job. The result is predictable: engineering gets stretched thin, and both Product and Engineering fail to fully document or even understand what they’ve built.

The project falls apart because Product drops the ball, but Engineering is the team at the end of the funnel, so the blame naturally tends to land on them. Product’s output is often hidden, and it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we did our part. Engineering just didn’t deliver.”