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Space Force is writing a song
Every armed forces needs a song, and the Space Force is in the process of getting one made.
Finally to give you an idea of the bureaucracy involved, here is a larger email section:
“I’ve got some milestones from here to there. The next big one is NLT 10 June provide CSO with 3(ish) options for Official Version of the USSF Song. Fin working with some composer/arrangers for that task. (TLDR: The version he picked was only melody and words. The writer and I are putting together options that include accompaniment. harmonies, countemelodies… a marching band version that all other arrangements will be based upon. I already have 2 solid version that are approved by the composer of the melody and we are waiting for a 3rd.),” one official wrote in a May 2022 email. Their name is redacted in the emails so their role and rank are not clear.
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Get some KFC while you charge your BYD
BYD and Yum China Holdings — the conglomerate that owns the KFC brand in China — signed a strategic cooperation agreement earlier this week at BYD’s headquarters in Shenzhen, aiming to install flash charging equipment at KFC drive-thru locations across the country.
Central to the agreement is a concept the two companies are calling “9-minute one-stop human and vehicle refueling,” a nod to BYD’s second-generation Blade battery — introduced in March — which BYD says can bring a vehicle from 10% battery to 97% in nine minutes, a window that lines up neatly with a drive-thru pickup.
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Life and history lessons in a storage locker
He stopped at #3361 and unlocked the padlock. A musty odor emerged. He looked inside. The unit was crammed with birdcages, cedar chests, old paperbacks, barstools and Art Deco lamps.
“I think I’ll make good money off this locker, which isn’t bad, since I bought it for $140,” Michael said. “Copper is at $6 a pound right now, so I can sell the lamps to the scrap yard. It’s all about squeezing every dollar out of the locker.”
While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.
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The story of seafoam green
There’s a reason seafoam green is so commonplace in mid 20th century industrial design.
What caught my eye as a designer, as with most industrial plants and control rooms of that time, besides the knobs, levers, and buttons, was the use of a very specific seafoam green, seen here on the reactor’s walls and in the control panel room
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Hospital janitor becomes a doctor
Match day for doctors is always a big deal. When a doctor is placed at a hospital in which she was a janitor? Inspiring.
For about a decade, Shay Taylor-Allen walked the halls of Yale New Haven Hospital pushing a janitor’s cart. She mopped patient rooms, disinfected surfaces and emptied the trash.
Soon, she’ll walk the halls of the hospital again, this time wearing a white coat.
Taylor-Allen, 32, recently matched into an anesthesiology residency at Yale New Haven Hospital — where she spent most of her adult life working as part of the cleaning staff.
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Web design museum
The web is old enough to host a website dedicated to designs of major websites,
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Complexity and simplicity
Any experienced software engineer or architect understands the nature of trade-offs versus complexity and simplicity. The culture and software development often rewards the complex solution over a simple one because there is a narrative to something complex. Or as with something simple, it’s simply “this was done.”
Picture two engineers on the same team. Engineer A gets assigned a feature. She looks at the problem, considers a few options, and picks the simplest. A straightforward implementation, maybe 50 lines of code. Easy to read, easy to test, easy for the next person to pick up. It works. She ships it in a couple of days and moves on.
Engineer B gets a similar feature. He also looks at the problem, but he sees an opportunity to build something more “robust.” He introduces a new abstraction layer, creates a pub/sub system for communication between components, adds a configuration framework so the feature is “extensible” for future use cases. It takes three weeks. There are multiple PRs. Lots of excited emojis when he shares the document explaining all of this.
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The AI assault on the last of the open web
The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.
