FYI it’s a liberal arts college.

Albeit, a uniquely STEM focused liberal arts college.

It’s legit and their grads are wicked smart.

Hear hear!

> When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.

This really irritates me. I’ve had the same experience with teammates’ pull requests they ask me to review. They can’t be bothered to understand the thing, but then expect you to do it for them. Really disrespectful.

Yeah, but then you have to use onedrive…

I see a lot of people complaining about this, what exactly is wrong with onedrive as opposed to Google drive or Dropbox? Haven't used Dropbox in many years. They all just sync files which is what I need them for.

I’m just one person. So take my opinion for what it is: just my opinion.

I started using Dropbox in high school and it has always “just worked”. I use the native app on Windows, iOS, and OSX. It’s essentially a virtual drive on all my devices and it backs up all my phone’s pictures and videos automatically. I can probably count on one hand the number of times Dropbox has annoyed me in the last 15 years. Maybe it’s overpriced, but at least it’s reliable. That’s worth a lot to me.

I experimented with Google drive as an alternative in college. It worked pretty well on android devices, but there was just enough friction on other OS’s that I abandoned it as a general file system. My g drive is basically just a graveyard of Google docs that I will never care to organize and random gmail attachments that ended up there for whatever reason.

Onedrive is by far the last choice I would make. My only experiences with it are (1) when Microsoft tries to force it on me/upsell me when I’m using office on my personal desktop or (2) when an employer uses it as their approved file sharing system. In my experience, it is consistently the least reliable of the three solutions. While Dropbox “just works”, I fully expect Onedrive to “just make me restart my computer, sign out and back in again, give up and just share the thing through slack.”

Again, just my experience.

I used Dropbox until it stopped just working, added 3 device limit and gated the cloud drive feature under much more expensive teams plan. And switched to OneDrive. Google drive app always was wonky and used filenames to store internal state (breaking for example Calibre database)

OneDrive works perfectly on my Mac and iOS devices.

I took 6 months at 29 and it felt like a lot.

At 34, it still feels like a lot, but I also wouldn’t consider anything less than that a “break.”

Maybe this is a semantic distinction, but I’d say “your ability to convince people (period)” is what becomes more and more important.

Levels really shouldn’t factor into a problem discussion beyond determining who is involved in the discussion to begin with.

> Levels really shouldn’t factor into a problem discussion beyond determining who is involved in the discussion to begin with.

Titles shouldn't matter but they very often do. Question: "How should we integrate our product X with product Y?" Answer: "VIP David mandated that all integrations use technology Z, so it's already decided."

I find that hard to believe...

"Cast" is a pretty ubiquitous term and, anecdotally, Chromecast is almost always the device I find when traveling.

Probably selection bias on my part, but I'd expect most people to be aware of Chromecast unless they're over the age of ~70 and fully Apple-oriented.

Seems like throwing away a perfectly well known brand.

I travel quite a bit and I've never encountered one. Never even seen one at all. I've heard of Chromecast because I go on tech sites, but they're suspiciously absent in my bubble of reality. I'm an Android and Linux user too.

It's interesting you mention upfront that you travel. Is that travel for work where you might be staying in corporate hotels?

I ask because when I have travelled for work, it's the corporate hotels that have often baked a Chromecast into their TV experience, even to the point of sorting out their wifi network so you're only able to cast to the screen in your room. Their splash screen offers "live TV" or the option to "stream from your phone".

They often don't shout about the fact that it's a chromecast doing the work, but the telltale standby screen that shows up when you're not casting something normally confirms it.

The protocol is baked into almost every TV sold now. Have you seriously never even tried it? Never wondered what that rectangle icon was in youtube videos on your phone, etc...?

At least Samsung and LG don't include them, and these seem to be the most popular brands in Europe as far as I can tell.

They both support AirPlay these days, I've never been able to use Google Cast natively with a TV here, which is a shame for my use cases (Netflix doesn't support it, and I generally don't like to have my phone connected to the TV via Wi-Fi for the entire duration of a movie).

Edit: Turns out LG is currently in the process of adding it, and Samsung seems to have support in some models as well, but it's definitely not ubiquitous.

Right, because no one buys them anymore as the feature is baked into their televisions already. They were popular originally but don't have a home. If it's just the hardware device you're talking about, sure. It's obscure now, which is why it's being cancelled.

What's frustrating in this thread is how many people are conflating the weird dongle product with the extremely successful streaming control protocol. Only the weird thing is being cancelled!

The whole thread is about Google discontinuing a physical product, not a feature baked into TV's. I've never seen the product they're discontinuing IRL.

I believe this varies widely by region. In Europe, I've never seen a TV with built-in Google Cast support, but many do support Airplay.

Part of it is how often do people buy TVs? I doubt if I've bought one in over 15 years.

A quick Google says that 40M televisions are sold in the US every year, into a market with 130M households. So... a whole lot more often than once every decade and half.

My Vizio TV calls it SmartCast. I just Airplay to it. I didn't realize until I just googled it that Chromecast is basically Airplay for Android.

Other way around; Chromecast beat Airplay to market by like four years I think. But yes, they're very comparable technologies.

One important difference is that Airplay is much more of a screen or video mirroring protocol, while Google Cast is focused on the receiver driving presentation, with your mobile device only acting as a navigation source.

Practically, this means that you can take phone calls, hibernate your computer, kill a source app on your phone, leave the house entirely etc. with Chromecast without interrupting whatever's playing on a TV or stereo, while with Airplay, playback usually stops in these scenarios. Airplay is also a bigger battery drain as a result, in my experience.

I had an AirPort Express back in 2004 timeframe that was precursor to Airplay that did beat Chromecast by close to 10 years with AirTunes. AirPlay came out in 2010. Then, in 2017, Apple released AirPlay 2.

Chromecast first gen was in 2013.

Apple actually beat Google on this one in terms of time.

How is a wireless audio technology comparable to chromecast? If it is, bluetooth audio streaming started in 1998, beating airport express by 6 years. And don't get me started on radio...

By your logic, AirPlay and Chromecast are just smaller versions of broadcast television.

Come on man

According to Wikipedia, AirPlay was 2010 (and preceded by AirTunes in 2004); Chromecast 2013.

"cast" is a ubiquitous term because of chromecast

I think the other commenter’s point is you can use 2 fields to distinguish between the first field being specified as empty vs absent (or whatever terms you prefer).

E.g.

- type.specified => “”

- type.unspecified => empty

The same technique can be used to disambiguate between 0 and empty.

Worth noting that it’s not quite equivalent due to allowing for a malformed message that includes foo = value and hasFoo = false, opening the door to varied client interpretation.

But why would you do that over using the built-in StringValue, that just works and does everything you need?

This seems like a great way to accidentally cause another global extinction event.

I’m probably overestimating the size of the anchor.

The anchor would need to be beyond geostationary orbit to keep the center of mass geostationary, so a broken tether would result in the anchor departing "outward". The reason to use an anchor is to avoid creating a tether that's twice as long as it needs to be.

Depends where the tether breaks. If it's somewhere along the middle, then the Earth-side section would fall to Earth. KSR's Mars trilogy examines the impacts (pun intended) of this.

Even an optimal space elevator needs to support a sizable portion of its own tether weight with the tether itself.

For a solid non-magnetic tether to be at all realistic, the tether material would likely be so light relative to it's length/volume, it'll never be at all dangerous regardless of how high you drop it from - its terminal velocity would be tiny.

I can drop some yarn, fishing line, whatever, from whichever height I want and it will never be dangerous to anything on the ground. Same principle.

I dont know about magnets, but I suppose the same applies here: If your tether isn't light, its own weight will add a stupid amount of stresses that would likely deform any load-bearing metal. Probably the magnets themselves in this case.

But I thought the whole point of an elevator is you elevate things. Which means the line falling wouldn't be the biggest problem- that would be the payload falling to earth surely?

The falling line would be a problem still - using fishing line as an example ignores scaling. The seed cable for example in some designs is 20 tons by itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_construction

So possible 100s to thousands of tons falling for 5+ days…

Spread out over some drop area that's still just a nuisance. Even falling on one area chances of loss of life are minimal, since due to the gradient of gravity accelerating the top end of the wire the least. It should experience way too much drag to have some sort of whip effect on the ground rather than entering a stable configuration before arrival. You'll see it more-or-less neatly arriving in the right order. The first few grams of material landing on your house is maybe a good warning to get out of the way before the remaining 20 tons are done arriving in a few days.

If you have some thin wire design you could also consider just spooling it up as it drops, either at the base or with portable infrastructure you'll have plenty of time to deploy. If you do that you're just dealing with grams of material/second that you can deal with piecewise. Do this faster than terminal velocity and it'll land exactly where you want it to.

That part is not exactly an engineering challenge if you consider what other other stuff humanity likes to get up to with kilometers of much heavier cables and chains.

There shouldn't be much of an issue with designing the the payload as an entry vehicle. Give it the ability to destructively remove itself from the tether, then parachute down. Or just build your tether next to a body of water and have the payload steer into that.

That is if your payload wasn't so high up, it's now on its way to an orbit around earth. I think physically the place of departure should be the periapsis of its orbit, so even with orbital decay through atmospheric drag you'll have long enough to figure where to steer it.

If you use an asteroid as an anchor, then you are doing it wrong. You made your space elevator half as long as it could be!

A longer elevator can fling you into the outer solar system. Just climb to the correct height, wait until the right phase angle, and let go.

But if you break the tether halfway down the bottom half falls at 16,000 mph right? And then it’s burning and then it cracks like a whip. I don’t know about extinction, but not a fun time for anyone.

Aren’t they talking about a mess up on the asteroid trajectory? There is no way a space elevator cable snapping wipes out all life on earth, although I’m sure any populated areas it hits would be quite devastated.

A falling elevator would not wipe anyone out. They would place a protective balloon containing approximately 5 quadrillion tons of gas beneath it. The elevator would be paper thin and a couple of meters wide in the middle where it needs to be strongest. The parts that don’t burn will flutter and slowly fall to the ground.

Not 16,000 mph. A very lightweight tether (thing tie down straps) will drift down and land softly.

might be a good idea to have it (explosively?) disconnect it's segments if it's found to be broken. You'll spread the impact but avoid something like a whip crack.

Yep, this is the same as people who tell you not to mark yourself “open to work” because it “makes you look desperate.”

If that’s what some company cares about, then I’m glad they won’t message me.

This looks super neat.

I didn’t see anything on the page about running the tool locally (remote code analysis is a deal breaker).

Anyone know if that’s an option?

Given it's a paid service – probably not.

There are local code <-> LLM interfaces though (CLI tools, editor extensions), and if you can figure out a suitable prompt you can get pretty similar experience. (Of course, you'll also want to run an LLM locally as well)