shatnersbassoon (u/shatnersbassoon)

shatnersbassoon commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025) · Posted by u/david927

scandox · 4 months ago

Forgive my ignorance but all the tree cutting I've observed has been based on climbing and cutting in segments from the top rather than letting the tree fall. Under what circumstances is it better or necessary to actually let the tree fall?

shatnersbassoon · 4 months ago

IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wield a chainsaw in an elevated position. Also, if you are interested in getting long planks out of the trunk, you would not want to cut it down progressively.

shatnersbassoon commented on London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage cnn.com/2025/03/20/travel... · Posted by u/dfine

jakozaur · 5 months ago

This is way worse due to London airports' lack of spare capacity. They should have built Thames Estuary Airport a long time ago.

shatnersbassoon · 5 months ago

I think one of the blockers to this is a very high risk of bird strikes.

shatnersbassoon commented on London's Heathrow Airport announces complete shutdown due to power outage cnn.com/2025/03/20/travel... · Posted by u/dfine

cmsj · 5 months ago

I can think of a very quick way to make those explosives safe!

shatnersbassoon · 5 months ago

It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.

shatnersbassoon commented on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video] twitter.com/SpaceX/status... · Posted by u/alecco

blackeyeblitzar · a year ago

When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?

shatnersbassoon · a year ago

2 related expressions: 1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated. 2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.

But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*

shatnersbassoon commented on Why is Chile so long? unchartedterritories.toma... · Posted by u/trevin

eatonphil · a year ago

The article mentions it, but I only learned recently that Bolivia did not used to be landlocked. Chile took Bolivia's coastline somewhat recently (late 1800s/early 1900s).

> The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the Antofagasta port city on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within four years Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 square miles of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a peace treaty with Chile in return for a promise of the “fullest and freest” commercial access to port.

https://time.com/5413887/bolivia-chile-pacific/

shatnersbassoon · a year ago

If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take back what is ours".

shatnersbassoon commented on Descent 3 Source Code github.com/kevinbentley/D... · Posted by u/kevin42

shatnersbassoon · a year ago

`TELETUBBIES = TeletubbiesCheat` Intriguing... what does this do?

shatnersbassoon commented on The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input simonwillison.net/2024/Fe... · Posted by u/simonw

superb-owl · 2 years ago

The “cocktail” thing is real. A while back I tried to get DALLE to imagine characters from Moby Dick [1], but it completely refused. You’d think an AI company could come up with a better obscenity filter!

[1] https://superb-owl.link/shapes-of-stories/#1513

shatnersbassoon · 2 years ago

It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again

shatnersbassoon commented on The US grid battery fleet is about to double – again canarymedia.com/articles/... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

mathgradthrow · 2 years ago

Gigawatts are not a unit of energy.... something something zalgo.

shatnersbassoon · 2 years ago

It's presented in Gigawatts here, but I expect the actual metric is probably something like "Gigawatts available for 99th centile of duration of demand peaks", as this would allow you to talk about capacity in the same units as grid supply and demand. The whole point of grid batteries is for near-instant availability, so total energy available is moot if you can't access it right away - therefore a metric of energy would be less useful. Anyway, that's my speculation.

shatnersbassoon commented on 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users techcrunch.com/2023/12/04... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

mrtksn · 2 years ago

Obviously I don't trust any assurances, but on the other hand I'm handing over my genetic data all the time because parts of me end up over in the hands of 3rd parties whenever I go outside but they just happen not to run test on those.

If I can have a test that is not connected to my persona, from their perspective the data would be as valuable as running a test on the hair in the barbershop or picking a random leftover of food and running test on the saliva left on the half consumed food.

shatnersbassoon · 2 years ago

There's quite a big difference between the DNA you leave in a forensic sense all around you (which would take a lot of effort and expense for someone to gather against your will) versus serving it up on a plate in a format that is trivially searchable for close matches against any relatives. The value is in the fact that millions of people's DNA is gathered in the same place in the same format, not the individual value of your DNA. It's a classic network effect.

shatnersbassoon commented on 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users techcrunch.com/2023/12/04... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

mrtksn · 2 years ago

If anyone who used the service, do you know if you can use it anonymously? I wanted to try it but I was afraid of exactly this.

How feasible it is to use a payment and an address that doesn't directly connect you to your samples?

shatnersbassoon · 2 years ago

Given the nature of the service, you should probably treat it as inherently pseudonymous. You're handing over irrevocable genetic data which will link you to relatives. Whatever their data protection assurances are, you have to imagine the worst case scenario - massive data leakage. And if this happens then you will in all likelihood be identifiable.