Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • This is my father. Like, I’m happy that he doesn’t hate me because I’m bi and poly. He’s pretty open about how he thinks the Republican party is cruel and shitty.

    His problem is that he associates fiscally progressive policies with California’s creaking and inefficient bureaucracy. In his career, he spent a lot of time interacting with various CA governmental departments and he grew to loathe them intensely. Whenever I discuss progressive policies with him, he always relates it back to his experiences living and working in California and then just shrugs and says “I hate both parties for different reasons.”

    It’s funny, because like, shit man, I kinda agree with him on a superficial level. California’s state and local governments sucks at their jobs in a lot of ways (see the notorious San Francisco public bathroom). I agree that unions (of which there are many in California) can sometimes impede quick and efficient work (although I don’t fucking care, I just chill out and am patient with folks and the shit gets done eventually. The process would be more efficient if the company tried to have a more harmonious relationship with the union).

    He just doesn’t seem to understand that as far as progressive polities go, California is a terrible example. There are plenty of places around the world that that have implemented progressive and socialist policies while still preserving the things he cares about (efficiency and relative frugality), but he’s never been to those places. He hasn’t engaged with those governments. All he can think of is the “progressive” state that caused him so much anger.

    So basically, I think most people like this are fundamentally nice and decent, but they’re ignorant and are blind to the underlying dissonance between their social and fiscal philosophies. My dad has never voted for Trump (he wrote in a friend’s name which was basically a vote for Trump, but fuck man, it’s at least a little better), but I don’t believe he’ll ever accept that voting according to his fiscal philosophy directly contradicts his social philosophy.

    EDIT: apologies if this is rambling or poorly written. I’m sleep deprived and distracted and very stressed, and I probably shouldn’t have commented at all.




  • I love rust and projects rewritten in Rust, but I’ve felt pretty mixed about this particular project. The strong copyleft on GNU coreutils is part of what keeps many Linux distros truly free. There’s stuff like BusyBox or BSD coreutils if you need something you can make non-free, but GNU coreutils are just so nice. I wish this reimplementation in rust had been licensed with GPL or a similar copyleft license. At least there’s no CLA with copyright transfer.



  • Nah, I love cursing. I love a good, rancid obscenity. I’m perfectly capable of expressing myself without swearing, but I think it makes life so much more fun.

    I do try to be aware of my audience. I live in Utah where the Mormons continuously find new and exciting ways to swear without angering sky-daddy. “Oh my heck” is a great example, because “gosh” is potentially a nono outer-darkness word.

    I don’t live to offend—I’m not an edge lord. I want to be inclusive of the people around me, so if I know that the person I’m speaking to doesn’t appreciate swearing then I’ll avoid it. Swears may slip out if the conversation is sufficiently casual, but I’ll just apologize and we’ll move on like adults.

    It’s not a binary. You can swear in some contexts and not in others, provided you’re able to maintain some degree of mindfulness. That may not be possible if being around your family is like being captured in the Trauma Nexus.

    Now that I’ve gone all this time without swearing, let me share my favorite obscenity. My partner once described a really horrible person (someone who committed physical and sexual abuse) as a shit-filled cunt, and god damn if that isn’t just breathtaking. Truly a beauty to behold, she’s such an artist with words.


  • I imagine it’s more complicated than that. For example, Pu-238 only emits alpha radiation. I doubt that reactor waste only emits alpha radiation, meaning you’d have to harden the electronics for a close and potentially extreme emitter of beta/gamma radiation. I also don’t know if random high grade reactor waste gets hot enough to provide meaningful amounts of energy via thermoelectric means. Alternatively, it may be that it gets too hot.

    I doubt they could have simply slapped something together. The cost of developing a new RTG capable of using reactor waste would likely be a significant fraction of the budget to develop the probe itself. It might have been worth it, but I feel that it’s not clear-cut.



  • There’s the magical term! God I fucking hate wage theft. OP, the company is trying to steal from you. Your time is money and if they’re not paying you for work then they’re, by definition, stealing from you.

    I’ve had conversations like this before, and usually you only have to hint that it’s wage theft for dumbfuck managers to realize and back down, especially if you’re assertive but polite with them. If you’re not getting anywhere with the manager, then you should go to HR. HR’s job is to protect the company and the obviously correct move for an HR person is to keep the DoL out of the situation. If you go to HR and then get fired, then that may be even better evidence against the shitheads.

    If you do go to HR, try to get your manager to admit to wage theft in a way that gives you evidence. If you can’t get the manager to admit to wage theft on paper or electronically (which you should immediately back up), you’re going to the DoL, and you live somewhere with one-party consent, then surreptitiously record your manager saying it. It may be against company policy to make this recording (and should be your last resort, don’t go to HR with audio recordings!), but it’s legal as long as your jurisdiction has one-party consent laws on the books.

    Don’t let them steal from you, OP. The other magic words that have already been mentioned in this thread are “fuck you, pay me.”






  • Huh, TIL about bone cement. I was curious so I looked it up, and for those who are also curious, it appears to typically be a mix of PMMA (i.e. plexiglass) and its monomer MMA (although some radically different materials have been developed). You mix the goo and it turns to dough and then eventually hardens into, well, plexiglass. The SDS for MMA doesn’t seem that bad, so there must be more to it than just that.

    Thanks for sharing this! I never knew plexiglass was biocompatible-ish and was used in this way.