There’s a series of photos from a wildlife photographer that are essentially selfies of him with a litter of cheetah cubs that the mother cheetah literally dropped in his lap while she went to go hunt. It’s been theorized that the only reason cheetahs have never been domesticated is that that they’re very difficult to breed in captivity.

Microscopes, too!

It’s a niche specialization within architecture, and while I enjoy it it’s not quite as cool as it sounds. Labs tend to be designed to a common template around the standard lab bench depth (30") and accepted safe aisle width between 66" and 72". Most of the fun is in equipment planning, and that’s only exciting for a certain sort of Excel jockey 😅

Lab planning is a small enough niche that you really only find us in firms with a national or international reach, and so I’m more often working on projects several states away from me than anything in my own backyard. Travel varies, but other than initial meetings it tends to be hands-off job, so much so that I’m actually a 100% remote worker apart from when I’m on-site for a project kickoff or a site survey.

As for unusual or surprising parts of the job, I have really enjoyed working with some of the PI’s I’ve fitted labs out for. The best has to be a chemist operating a biofuels testing lab, who regaled us with tales of all the times he’d blown up some glassware or singed off his eyebrows in the lab! I was a bit worried for his safety practices, though…

It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service

Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it’s probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.

Pyrite disease! The pyrite oxidizes in humid air, converting to a mineral that takes up much more volume. If the pyrite is incorporated into the fossil matrix, that expansion causes the fossil to crumble.

Important to note that it appears that the drone struck the north side of the New Safe Confinement structure. Russian claims that this was a false flag attack can be safely ignored, but there was always the possibility that a Ukrainian drone went off course, or simply hit a tall structure on its flight path. That’s not likely with a drone headed south only a few kilometers from the Belarusian border. Sure seems like a deliberate strike on the NSC by Russian forces, on that basis.

Maybe he has an Internet or social media presence with persuasive and/or humanizing postings, and they want to deny him the PR bump he’d get from them becoming public.

Keep in mind that when 10nm was in planning, EUV light sources looked very exotic relative to current tech, and even though we can see in hindsight that the tech works it is still expensive to operate – TSMC’s wafer costs increased 2x-3x for EUV nodes. If I was running Intel and my engineers told me that they thought they could extend the runway for DUV lithography for a node or two without sacrificing performance or yields, I’d take that bet in a heartbeat. Continuing to commit resources to 10nm DUV for years after it didn’t pan out and competitors moved on to smaller nodes just reeks of sunk-cost fallacy, though.

Intel’s problems, IMO, have not been an issue of strategy but of engineering. Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error, but refusing to change course when the node failed over and over and over to generate acceptable yield was not, and that willful ceding of process leadership has put them in a hole relative to their competition, and arguably lost them a lucrative sole-source relationship with Apple.

If Intel wants to chart a course that lets them meaningfully outcompete AMD (and everyone else fighting for capacity at TSMC) they need to get their process technology back on track. 18A looks good according to rumors, but it only takes one short-sighted bean counter of a CEO to spin off fabs in favor of outsourcing to TSMC, and once that’s out of house it’s gone forever. Intel had an engineer-CEO in Gelsinger; they desperately need another, but my fear is that the board will choose to “go another direction” and pick some Welchian MBA ghoul who’ll progressively gut the enterprise to show quarterly gains.

Nah, fuck no. Sure, he’d been self-radicalizing for a while but Musk declared his change of allegiance literally hours after the story broke about him propositioning a SpaceX employee to join the Mile High club with him in exchange for a horse. He saw the #metoo train coming for him and decided to throw in with the guys who see that shit as a badge of honor, simple as.

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part

My employer is in the process of decommissioning all their on-premises storage and shifting all data into the many-headed hydra that is OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams/Azure. It’s going… not great. Automatic file locking for non-Office applications doesn’t exist in the context of SharePoint and people are losing hours of work when two people had the same file open all day without knowing. Projects that had large, complicated folder structures have whole swathes of files that cannot be edited because of path length restrictions rearing their ugly head ("C:\Users\Username\OneDrive\VerboseHumanReadableProjectNameAndNumber ends up being quite a bit longer than P:\ProjectNumber, whodathunkit?!). Nobody’s sure of they should be syncing or linking their project directories locally. Some options for file management appear in SharePoint views of shared folders, but not Teams.

As a tool for portable user profiles or casual filesharing or syncing, it’s fine, though I’d prefer if MS didn’t force it into Windows and Office apps by default. As the core of a complex international business operation? Fuck this I hate it desperately, and I cannot imagine any way in which it’s going to save the business money over keeping storage in house.

rimshot

Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that

Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all

I’ve got two big sycamores in my front yard, and they both are currently dropping leaves the size of dinner plates in enough quantity to completely cover large portions of the yard. If I don’t rake or mulch them, they will smother whatever ground cover that’s underneath them. I know this because I tried leaving them one year and it took the next three years to get all the mud pits left behind in the spring to fill back in.

GenZ is the generation raised by helicopter parents, whose late-Boomer-to-early-GenX parents went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they never faced any challenges. Of course they’d have some odd ideas about how the world ought to work, after spending their entire childhood and early adulthood with Mom and Dad working strenuously to shield them from personal struggles, emotional distress, and the consequences of their actions. What remains to be seen is how those attitudes shift as the rubber hits the road and their parents lose the ability to protect them from the increasingly dire state of the world. I suspect it’ll be an even three-way split between blithe entitlement, despair and withdrawal, and an impulse to step up and do something about it.

Sorry. Not casting aspersions on you, just despairing at the situation.

Working on it, but for the overwhelming majority of people emigrating is a hell of a lot harder than just showing up in another country and saying “my place sucks, can I come in?”