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2025-04-01

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  • How Silica Gel Took Over the World

    After a round of mostly fruitless phone calls, I finally spoke to John Perona, a sales rep at a company that sells, among other things, silica gel desiccant packets. He started by pointedly questioning my intention of writing anything about silica gel at all, then told me that I was “getting into the weeds. Just look at how things ship around the world, and you can understand the problems that silica gel packets are trying to address.”

    The reasons behind the increase in silica gel imports, he went on somewhat reluctantly, were simple: “No one wants a silica gel factory in their backyard.” Only specialty silica gel products are manufactured in the US today; the packets that I find in my snacks and pharmaceuticals are either made overseas or, in some cases, assembled in the US from imported silica gel beads.

    The farther you ship a product—the longer it takes to go from the factory to the customer’s hands, and the more temperature and pressure cycles it experiences during that time—the more you need to control humidity inside of its airtight packaging. Silica gel is a cheap, easy, and reliable way to do so. In this sense silica gel sits alongside containerized shipping, and stretch wrap, and bills of lading: It is a technology without which we’d have a much harder time maintaining global supply chains. Desiccant packets haven’t actually taken over the world — globalization has.

  • Static Electricity Is Critical to the Formation of Planets

Horseshit

celebrity gossip

  • On Chomsky: a "Study in Total Depravity"

    The point is that, while Russell was phenomenally brilliant (perhaps a genius, though that word is so abused as to perhaps be meaningless), he was not some isolated peak. I cannot think of a time since the early 1600s, at the latest, when the West could not boast intellectuals of Russell's caliber; and that Chomsky is not of that caliber. Surely then this cannot be the best our time has to offer? Surely there are other thinkers of greater distinction?

Bluesky

Musk

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • An AlphaStation's SROM

  • Is BIND9 suitable as a recursive resolver in 2025?

    The customer ultimately decided to take the advice and employ Unbound as a recursive resolver within a dual-stacked eDMZ network segment. In this setup, BIND9 was relegated to serving internal authoritative zones while also functioning as a forwarder directing traffic towards a cluster of Unbound servers. The deployment of Unbound adhered strictly to RFC 8806 guidelines and additionally, incorporated QNAME minimisation, proving to be success with no need for subsequent adjustments or regrets. Personally, I found it funny that BIND9 yet again demonstrated its questionable reliability and resilience, living up to its poor reputation, after 25 years of development. The additional two days of investigation of a simple job that should take 2 hours at most, yielded additional revenue, which we capitalised upon to document this experience thoroughly.

    • TLDR: IPv6 is still br0ked and the intersection of IPv4 and IPv6 even more so. Which BIND still exposes instead of working around.

  • Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry

    The Pentium has a large number of bits in its micro-instruction, 90 bits compared to 21 bits in the 8086. Presumably, the Pentium has a "horizontal" microcode architecture, where the microcode bits correspond to low-level control signals, as opposed to "vertical" microcode, where the bits are encoded into denser micro-instructions. I don't have any information on the Pentium's encoding of microcode; unlike the 8086, the Pentium's patents don't provide any clues. The 8086's microcode ROM holds 512 micro-instructions, much less than the Pentium's 4608 micro-instructions. This makes sense, given the much greater complexity of the Pentium's instruction set, including the floating-point unit on the chip.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

  • Sell Floyd Bennett Field!

    The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map (PDF) for more [N.B. the vast majority of this land is NOT parks, AT 2011]. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation. ut it’s not just federal lands in the West. Floyd Bennett Field is an old military airport in Brooklyn that hasn’t been used much since the 1970s. Today, it’s literally used as a training ground for sanitation drivers and to occasionally host radio-controlled airplane hobbyists.

Trump

Democrats

  • Sources: Milwaukee Officials Handle Ballots In Back Rooms

  • The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024 - The New York Times

    Last year’s election was close, despite President Trump’s hyperbolic claims about his margin of victory. Still, the Democratic Party clearly lost — and not only the presidential race. It also lost control of the Senate and failed to recapture the House of Representatives. Of the 11 governor’s races held last year, Democrats won three. In state legislature races, they won fewer than 45 percent of the seats. In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat, many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight. That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.” A key part of this argument involves voter turnout. Party leaders claim that most Americans still prefer Democrats but that voter apathy allowed Mr. Trump to win. Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties. It especially needs a healthy Democratic Party, given Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and his draconian behavior. Restraining him — and any successors who continue his policies — depends on Democrats taking an honest look at their problems.

    The part of that Democratic story that contains the least truth is voter turnout. Nonvoters appear to have favored Mr. Trump by an even wider margin than voters, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has reported. David Shor, the bracingly honest Democratic data scientist, put it well: “We’re now at a point where the more people vote, the better Republicans do.”

Left Angst

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

China

Health / Medicine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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