So with that last part, I get that in theory, but practically, you can only really absorb IR temporarily, right? Because it all gets released again as heat eventually. Like, say you have a mostly inert object, that isn’t creating any meaningful amount of heat. If you hit that object with 10 joules of thermal IR, over time, wouldn’t nearly all of that energy be either reflected or emitted off it as IR radiation?

You just need “Chemical X”

https://youtu.be/PlpUABjD_p0

Yeah, this has actually been a known thing for a while. The government has been sneakily getting their hand into NIST standards and trying to ensure they have back doors in the commonly used “best practices”.

So as a result for instance, encryption based on pseudo random numbers generated with hashing algorithms are actually safer that these theoretically “actually random” numbers generated in dedicated security modules in hardware.

Holy shit, I see Lemmy make jokes about guillotines all the time, but it turns out, that may actually be the answer!

I’ve been wrong before, this wouldn’t be the first time. But what part of it was wrong? Genuinely, can you clear it up?

As far as absorbing IR light, I’m not even sure how that would work, wouldn’t it just be emitted again as heat?

Truly, it sounds goofier than the sum of its parts.

“The devil himself is aboard the ship!”

“Quick, block off the airlock and the corridor to the bridge with this 64 tons of cobblestone I have in my pocket!”

“It’s too late… we’re all dead”

“What… I’m alive again. Wait, where’s all my stuff?”

Structurally blonde?

Well I just finished binging a season of Ted Lasso and the last game I played was Balatro.

I don’t believe it! After an abysmal first half, Richmond will be walking away with a win today, scoring 1,780,560 points in the final minute of the game! That secures their position and they’ll be going on to play Man City in the next blind, where goalies will be debuffed!

Absolutely right! And to be fair, sometimes you can get that tangible satisfaction in tech hobbies. You know, I’ve hacked some consoles, installed custom router firmware, built a crypto miner. Stuff like that can absolutely be personally satisfying.

But I think you hit the nail on the head, however you get it, I think we really do need some kind of tangible product of our efforts sometimes. You need to be able to say “yeah, I did that”.

I worked in IT for years, I’m good at it, I like problem solving, I like fixing things, I like building things.

But as time went by, I found myself in a more managerial role and truth be told, that’s not really my jam. And when I wasn’t doing that I was the specialist who could support some of our organizations’ worst and most troublesome systems. I was also put in charge of training people to use the company’s new web app (which was supposed to make people’s jobs easier, but really didn’t). Let me tell you, I do not like supporting shitty software or hardware, and I really do not like encouraging users to embrace useless web apps that don’t work well and serve no real purpose. I hated my job and it was time for a change.

So at that point I decided to completely shift my career and learn to code. I figured, if I hate supporting shitty software, why not just build good software. So I took some free classes through MIT’s open course ware, and learned to code. I spent a couple of years coding, picking up skills, learning languages, working with different compilers, taking additional math classes. And by the end of it all, one of my major takeaways was that I do like building things. But… as a professional software developer, I probably wasn’t going to be doing a lot of that. At the end of the day I might be able to say, “I squashed some bugs in some code that I didn’t write and don’t really know the greater purpose of”. Or if I’m lucky, “I wrote some functions that took in some inputs and produced some outputs”. But that doesn’t really feel like building something, that just feels like being a cog in a machine.

Over that same period when I was learning to code I was also picking up a second set of skills. We inherited the home my wife grew up in (which to be sure, is a pretty great deal). But it’s a fixer upper, it needed a bunch of attention. And since I was basically home schooling myself I thought I’d earn my keep by doing a lot of that maintenance myself rather than hiring a pro. I collected power tools, I learned to use hand tools, I made a lot of trips to Home Depot. I went through the basement full of rusty tools and restored many of them, replaced handles, sharpened blades, greased gears. I learned how to replace drywall, how to install an electrical outlet, how to repair a dryer. I replaced thermal fuses in kitchen appliances to bring them back to life, I mixed cement and rebuilt a crumbling retaining wall in the backyard.

Over time I got good enough at this that I started helping some of our friends with their homes. I could strengthen a rickety front step, or repaint a room, or replace a toilet. I had skills that people needed and actually, I generally liked doing it.

TLDR: In the time it took me to discover that being a programmer might somehow still not allow me to build things, I also learned that being a handyman would allow me to build things.

So yeah, career changes are scary, and it rarely looks like a good choice, but it is an option. And honestly, I’ve been a computer guy my whole life, but seriously, working with wood and screws and PVC has been super rewarding. So yeah, I guess I’m saying keep an open mind, and consider trying something different, you never know what might work for you.

Smarter every day did a video on this topic recently. As I watched this video I felt like I saw the moment Destin started to become a socialist.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6HEes8daw&pp=iggUQAFKEGpXMkZUWTlLQkxpcFZaSUM%3D

Have they tried painting a fire hydrant a truck and and a bicycle on the back? Let’s test if these cameras are a robot or not.

To me, this looks a lot like taking one dose of a prescribed antibiotic. All it really succeeds in doing is training dazzle resistant strains of cameras.

Trying to trick the cameras is playing into an expensive game of cat and mouse. And sure, fine, that may work for a little while, but it’s not a solution.

Not really. We don’t have materials that absorb or reflect infrared light. It’s one of the reasons it’s hard to beat inferred-guided (heat seeking) missiles, the only real solution is to drop something hotter than your plane, aka a flare.

So… get ready for a new era of commercial automotive flares I guess?

That’s a great (and cheap) solution!

I mean, comparatively.

but at least they had some cool heads there that on more than one occasion avoided WWIII

It’s worth noting here that those cool heads existed mostly in the military, not in the leadership. Officers who received orders to fire, and then delayed because they suspected a mistake had been made. Had they followed their orders as written, we would have had a different outcome.

And after preventing WWIII, they were generally censured for disobeying orders.

Honestly, that’s too risky to stage. I don’t buy that for one second. Long shots like that are fucking hard, wind will make or break a shot at that distance. Even someone as dumb, irresponsible, and delusional as Mr Trump wouldn’t go forward with a plan that had a very real chance of killing him instantly. Planning to have someone shoot you in the ear with a high powered rifle just for the publicity/sympathy? No.

My 9 year old woke me up before 6 on a weekend saying “Dad, dad, there’s an emergency!”

I got up to find the bathroom covered in sand and water and a toilet full of sand and shattered glass after a jar had been dropped in it.

Honestly, I had no idea what was going on, and yet complete certainly that someone was doing things they were not supposed to be doing and that the fact that I had to be awake right now means that this was going to be a bad day.

Don’t worry though, there’s a happy ending. We sold the child to a gang of poachers and regained all the free time and peace of mind we’ve been missing out on. And with the profits I plan to buy a Miata.