In fact, coming up with the CS-perfect solution immediately may be a bit of an anti-signal. I want the person who can think their way through to a solution to a problem that's new to them reasonably well. The fact that you happened to have memorized the best algorithm for this and can recite it on command doesn't tell me much useful, because nobody has the perfect algorithm for everything memorized.

You could iterate over the degrees 0 to 360, use trig functions to figure out where the point at that angle is, and plot the closest point. Might need to be a bit tricky about the step size, but I bet you could compute a decent guess from the radius using more trig functions. Of course that probably doesn't work if you don't have floating point and trig functions.

You could also split it into four quadrants. Plot each of the top, bottom, right, and left points by direct computation of adding/subtracting the radius, then for each quadrant, you start from the computed point, check 3 specific points in the appropriate direction for which way you're going in that quadrant, plot whichever one is closest to the radius away from the center, then repeat from that plotted point until you reach the computed point for the next quadrant. It would be tedious and repetitive, but should be doable. You could probably also avoid computing square roots by comparing the squares instead. So I guess you'd want something based on that idea to do it fast on 90s hardware.

They're already highly confident that if they have sufficient control over the booster trajectory they can execute the chopstick catch, so they don't particularly need to demonstrate that part more. Executing a pseudo-landing at sea lets them validate their booster flight controls perfectly fine without risking the launch tower and associated hardware. They can also do stuff like stretch the trajectory and control mechanisms to their limits to see how much they can handle, and not too big a deal if something goes wrong. Presumably any actual landings will be well within the known safe limits on all parameters.

I bet this first booster also has a lot of minor weird things associated with shaking out the manufacturing process, and they don't entirely mind testing to destruction the first one to get rid of it permanently and use the ones coming from a more proven manufacturing process for important work.

The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it like a SQL database with JOINs and GROUP BYs etc. Or similarly write code against it absent-mindedly with about as much understanding as a 2-year-old free AI tool.

Where it really shines is use-cases like I need like 1 or 2 simple relatively small tables of persistent storage and don't want to deal with a full RDBMS. Or I need 1 ridiculously huge table to be queried in a relatively simple way, and don't want to deal with fitting that data into a RDBMS.

If you're not sure if you want to go Linux yet, it's probably best to try a live USB stick of a few distros on your existing hardware. Get a feel for what the interface is like, how things work, how it works on your hardware, etc, without actually changing anything. Seems like a better bet to me than buying all-new hardware.

That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!

It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.

I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.

Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.

If you're used to the clunkier workflow of copy-pasting from a separate app, then it's much easier to absent-mindedly repeat it for a not-quite-right url.

Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.

I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.

In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.

It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.

Have you tried that lately? It was probably true for Windows 10, but not 11. There is no supported path to install 11 if you don't have the Microsoft-approved hardware with TPM etc, which would certainly include Raspberry Pis. Installing Windows 11 on non-Microsoft-approved hardware seems to require levels of jank at least as bad as anything I've seen in Linux. Advice is all over the place, usually involving full reinstalls, setting random registry keys, running Powershell scripts downloaded from a random Github repo as Admin, or something along those lines. And no telling which if any work at any particular time, since Microsoft is constantly fighting them apparently.