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Cake day: February 25th, 2024

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  • “What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said.  “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”

    He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.

    Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.

    Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.







  • You’re not necessarily wrong, but the company is at least invested enough in this candidate to make it worth spending a bunch of engineers’ time on it. That’s why they do the offsite screening interviews in advance. I’ve interviewed plenty of great candidates, but also plenty of mediocre ones and a few surprisingly poor ones. And in the end it’s still a bit of a gamble about how a strong candidate will perform in the job. Hiring the wrong person sucks all around, and the half day onsite interview is merely the least bad method used in the software industry.


  • You don’t have the job, you’ve just made it past the offsite screening. I expect you’ll be in 3-4 interviews each lasting about an hour with a different person, then they might take you to lunch with a group of people. Lunch is still an interview, it’s just informal. Be a reasonable human that they want to have as a coworker.

    Expect some of the interviews to involve whiteboard coding or technical problem solving, all of them to ask you social dynamics questions (e.g. “tell me about a time you had difficulty working with a teammate”), and hopefully all of them will also give you time to ask them questions. Be ready for that last part - presumably you don’t know very much about the company, and this is your time to find out more. You might be so desperate that you’ll take any job, but that’s a turn off for them. They want to see that you are as eager to find a good team fit as they are.

    Each interviewer will likely do a written summary with a hire/no hire recommendation, and there will likely be a hiring meeting with all of the interviewers, either one such meeting for each onsite candidate or one meeting at the end of a series of candidates so they can make overall decisions. You probably won’t hear a decision before 8/8, a week after the onsites finish.



  • I’ve noticed that anecdotally as well. There are a lot of good points already listed in other comments, and I have a couple merely additive points.

    On an individual passenger basis, direct flying has always been operationally cheaper if both options exist, because it’s a more efficient use of resources. In practice, financial efficiency also requires keeping all flights as full as possible, so it was maybe helpful for an airline to incentive a customer to keep hub flights full by pricing connections lower than a direct. The direct flight is arguably more valuable to a customer because it’s a better experience, so it can cost more. All three flights are going to fly anyway, so making the sale is most important to the airline.

    But equally or more important, the overall volume of air travel passengers has grown enormously over the past several decades. I’d bet that many direct routes didn’t used to have enough pairwise volume to run a regularly full profitable flight, let alone multiple competing direct options. Now I expect a ton more pairs of cities to make economic sense.

    Looking at it another way, that increased travel volume over decades also came with larger airports to support more total trips, and each of those new flights need to go somewhere. Airlines can add more options throughout the day to cities already served, and they can add new cities. They naturally choose both, therefore more direct routes are created. As more direct routes have supporting volume, the inefficiencies of the hub and spoke model dominate the bottom line.





  • Hard to tell from the video, but it doesn’t seem likely that the trucker is at fault here. The work crew seems to be trying to cheat and avoid lane closures, but they’re operating the bucket too low for that. There’s probably a middle manager somewhere who decided that lane closures were too expensive and unnecessary, standard procedure be damned. People forget safety rules are written in blood.


  • Gable-mounted still incurs direct vibration into the structure. I have a QuietCool whole house fan that is suspended in midair from the gables, to reduce that vibration and noise, while being ducted from a framed opening in the hallway ceiling.

    Whole house fans are pretty great during the right season, but you need to be aware of the humidity level outside or you can make things worse even if seems cooler at the moment. I also have central AC that gets run either when it’s too humid or too hot at night. But overall I’m very happy with the whole house fan and only having moderate insulation - the house resists heat incursion during the day and then we can quickly cool things down in the evening without using too much electricity.


  • Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.