jofer

6 ms·

1.
by jofer 1mo ago
Thankfully, it's a fairly deep (>100km) subduction zone earthquake. That means less immediate damage from ground acceleration than it could be from an earthquake of that size. However, a very large area may have seen significant
2.
by jofer 3mo ago
Yes. My point was that LLMs aren't currently good for everything. The original commenter literally said they were good at everything and I offered a counterpoint of something they're not good at: Most science. (And yes, a lot of s
3.
by jofer 3mo ago
Just for some context, the domain we're talking about is oil and gas and mineral exploration. E.g. At my previous job, I used to personally manage a >$400 million per year budget and that wasn't even considered significant. W
4.
by jofer 3mo ago
Try working in anything domain specific outside of common CRUD patterns. E.g. scientific software development where you describe a problem + give data. I have yet to see a single example of feeding in a problem in natural language involving
5.
by jofer 6mo ago
It's not microplastics coming from the gloves. It's particles of the powder used to coat the gloves and keep them from sticking. Different composition, but similar and easily mistaken.
6.
Salt of the Earth: Underground Salt Caverns Just Might Power Our Future(eos.org)
3 points by jofer 7mo ago|0 comments
7.
by jofer 8mo ago
Huh. I weirdly enough have worked with a lot of those sites from the remote sensing side, but never really know what the overall project was. Just "use the NEON sites for examples". I should have looked it up more at the time. T
8.
by jofer 8mo ago
I also have spent quite awhile as an exploration geophysicist. I miss it! I work purely with satellite data now, which is decidedly less tangible. I've done a fair bit in the field, but a huge part of my career has been mining old data
9.
by jofer 9mo ago
It may not be immediately obvious to folks outside of geoscience, but the main way something like this is useful is as a measure/metric to compare things. Looking at the number of faces of fractured pieces isn't normally somethin
10.
by jofer 9mo ago
It's still quite controversial whether or not they produce oxygen that way. It's been hypothesized, but I wouldn't consider it a consensus or settled. There are also microbes that can produce oxygen without light, so there a
11.
by jofer 9mo ago
That exactly. It's not that it's impossible. It's that it's heavy to efficiently transport heat to the radiators or requires a lot of tiny sats, which have their with problems.
12.
by jofer 9mo ago
What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. adve
13.
by jofer 11mo ago
Ah, fair enough! I think I misread some things around the library initially awhile back and have been making incorrect assumptions about it for awhile!
14.
by jofer 11mo ago
Good point, but I think we're talking past each other a bit. Typing in python within the scientific world isn't ever used to check types. It's _strictly_ only documentation. Yes, MyPy and whatnot exist, but not meaningfully.
15.
by jofer 11mo ago
Yes, python is not statically typed. It shouldn't be. Don't expect static typing behavior and typing in python is _not_ static typing in any way. It's documentation only, not static typing.
16.
by jofer 11mo ago
I'm aware of that. As explained in the original comment, not being able to denote dimensionality in those is a major limitation.
17.
by jofer 11mo ago
That one's new to me. Thanks! (With that said, I worry that 3rd party libs are a bad place for types for numpy.)
18.
by jofer 11mo ago
It actually doesn't, as far as I know :) It does get close, though. I should give it a deeper look than I have previously, though. "array-like" has real meaning in the python world and lots of things operate in that world.
19.
by jofer 11mo ago
Unless I'm missing something entirely, what would that add? You still can't express the core information you need in the type system.
20.
by jofer 11mo ago
One of my biggest gripes around typing in python actually revolves around things like numpy arrays and other scientific data structures. Typing in python is great if you're only using builtins or things that the typing system was desi
21.
by jofer 11mo ago
I'm trying to count the rounds of major layoffs in my career (e.g. 10% or more of the company let go at once). I _think_ it's 5, but it might be a bit more. I've been lucky each time, but that also means I wasn't one of
22.
by jofer 1y ago
Flock really does have a huge amount of potential for abuse. It's a fair point that private companies (e.g. Google, etc) have way more surveillance on us than the government does, but the US and local governments having this level of
23.
by jofer 1y ago
This depends a lot on what you do. Try working with a decision analyst sometime. The entire economic model with a decision tree and monte carlo analysis of cost overruns, etc for a multi-trillion dollar decision will literally be a arcanely
24.
by jofer 1y ago
It requires more input energy, but it's been really good to see electrolysis of H2O for hydrogen generation take off. There are honestly industrial/grid scale operations actually starting now (as opposed to being constructed). E.g
25.
by jofer 1y ago
Usually airplanes because the instruments are heavy. But yeah, that's the most common case. Hyperspectral sats are much rarer than aerial hyperspectral.
26.
by jofer 1y ago
A major limitation is that most different rock types look essentially identical in visual+NIR spectral ranges. Things separate once you get out to SWIR bands. Sentinel2 does have some SWIR bands and it may work reasonably well with embeddin
27.
by jofer 1y ago
^ This. Exactly. Low value comment on my part, but as the OP in this case, I feel the need to say that this is the exact issue. The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
28.
by jofer 1y ago
I have no idea, but yes, I suspect remote positions are heavily targeted and folks are looking for lazy hiring processes. But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every pa
29.
by jofer 1y ago
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly fake
30.
by jofer 1y ago
They're one of the largest and longest-lived satellite imagery providers, FWIW. It's a major wing of the company. They manufacture and operate very high end satellites and have for a long time.

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