Nah not anymore, now you spend a day or so building some convoluted excel calculator once so that you never need to do the calcs again.

Then, 3 years later when you go to add or change something in that calculator, you have absolutely no idea how it works and decide the change wasn’t that important anyway.

Engineer: 2, but 3 to be safe.

Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.

I would think most of those applications should be able to use an alumino-silicate based refractory ceramic fiber. Kaowool is one brand, but there are many like it.

It has its own problems in regard to silicosis but that’s only after it’s been exposed to higher temperatures and are easily mitigated with most particulate respirators. Also, if I remember correctly, the silicosis threat requires very long term exposure. I do know of at least one company developing a silca-free version too, which would eliminate the silicosis threat.

I use it in glass manufacturing with temperatures 2000°F+ so I’m quite confident it’ll hold up to any application where asbestos is being used.

EDIT: It will hold up in any application unless there’s a problem with certain chemical reactivity I should say*. I don’t expect that would be a common problem, but I’m sure it could happen. I’m admittedly not well versed on asbestos since I’ve never tried speccing it out for anything, haha.

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema’s incompetence.

It’s actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it’s that you can’t criticize them because “Hey, we’re human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings”. And when I say you can’t, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an “us vs them” attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU’RE WRONG WE’RE RIGHT.

It’s a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it’s long since entered its death spiral.

I often have multiple tabs with different inboxes open in Firefox. No extra features required AFAIK it just works.

Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven’t got around playing it yet.

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you’ll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you’d never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I’ll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren’t generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn’t enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren’t new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin’s Creed 1. I couldn’t make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn’t actually seem to matter…I just hated the game lol. I do think it’s another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.

Politicians can put “you’re against education!” in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn’t worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.

Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of “you’re against education!”

It’s a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.

It’s truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn’t have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.

Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.

Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.

Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user’s benefit.

If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don’t see that with what Wrapped shows.

Plus it’s fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.

It’s just a fun and cute thing imo.

I feel people are way too quick to jump down Biden’s throat for the rail union.

First off, it’s worth noting he continued to work with the railroad to get the employees the sick pay they wanted on the back end.

But in the midst of the situation… I’m not going to pretend this hypothetical is completely correct. But I don’t think it’s crazy.

Imagine you’re Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production. On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.

Imagine you’re that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don’t care, the strike continues.

I’m super pro labor and anti corporation and even I would struggle to make that call. Especially if someone proposes the idea that on the backside of forcing the railroad workers to work we could pressure the railroad to give into the demands.

I’m not saying he’s perfect and I’m not saying there wasn’t a better way. But I think that hypothetical is plausible. And I think people are too quick to forget that often times these decisions are which tragic situation would you rather allow to happen, and it’s not as clear cut as it sounds.

Edit: Oh yeah, the comparison. This time, cars don’t get built and these corporations will see problems to their bottom line. The impact to human life isn’t there. The economic impact still may be, but it’s not as devastating across the board like shutting down the railroad would be. Much easier decision to make.

Mr. Happy if you like anything Final Fantasy! Excellent stuff and he goes deep into all lore.

Josh Strife Hayes also does a good job just in general.

If you enjoyed FFXVI, it’s worth considering FFXIV.

It’s currently free to play through its first expansion and the second expansion will be free next year. So it’s a safe game to try from that perspective.

The producer of FFXIV is the same as FFXVI. His mentality has been that he’s wanted players who don’t want to play an MMO to be able to play through FFXIV’s story as if it were a mainline FF game. I’d say 95% of story content can be soloed at this point.

The two caveats are these: This is like playing through five full length JRPGs. To finish FFXIV’s story takes months. It’s easily 400+ hours of playtime imo.

The initial base game story, called A Realm Reborn or ARR is mediocre. It’s not bad, but the story quality spikes up in a big way at the first expansion and then never backs down. Even the end of ARR is really good, but it’s only decent up until then. However, after ARR is some of the best story writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to play. Shadowbringers and Endwalker in particular still bring tears to my eyes when I hear certain songs or rewatch some cutscenes. Truly a beautifully told story.

I agree with the NDA comment, it’s difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.

I feel pretty safe in saying that I’m working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we’re able to use. That’s a pretty fun one for me.

I’m sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I’m with you. It wasn’t enough for me.

I just could not get motivated over my projects being “Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building” or “Let’s replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity”. Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?

Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee’s day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.

Like…I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we’re trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.

I just couldn’t. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it’s that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.

Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it’s making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.