Open sourced a fun lil half baked repo and wrote a (slightly) monstrous blog post about simulation of the kinematics of open wheel suspension systems. Might pique the interest of anyone into solvers and the nerdiest aspects of building things with wheels.

I still do basically all numerical/scientific type programming in light mode, irrelevant of IDE and language... because of how much of that stuff I did in now ancient versions of MATLAB. Feels wrong. Maths is light mode. CRUD slop is dark mode.

I am once again asking that the entire world roll out quantile based grading. An A is meaningless if everyone gets an A. I want to know where you landed relative to the group; are you in the 99th percentile or the 60th?

Data centers in orbit? Of course that’s your contention. Of course it is. You just finished watching a Scott Manley video on radiative heat transfer and now you think you’re gonna disrupt AWS with a few solar panels and a rideshare slot. You’re gonna believe that right up until next month when you crack open DeWitt and Incropera and start throwing around σT⁴ like you just invented radiation physics, quoting emissivity tables for polished aluminum like they’re forbidden knowledge. Then you’ll finally open SMAD and realize your radiator isn’t some static plate glowing into the void. It’s a dynamic structure with a wicked case of thermal flutter reminiscent of Hubble’s arrays. You’ll be quoting beta angles and Earth albedo coefficients and wondering why your deployable array grenaded in vibe when the first bending mode clocked in at 38 Hz instead of the 50 Hz you promised in CDR. After that you’ll get real ambitious, quoting Johnson and Fabisinski on inflatable polyimide PV structures, pretending you actually understand what happens when your 25-micron Kapton sail is tensioned off a Toray T1100G Cycom 5250-4 boom that has been sun-baked at 120 °C for six months in LEO. You’ll cite “areal density optimization” like gospel while your resin creeps, your modulus drops, and your perfectly flat film turns into a potato chip. "Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because launch costs are about to fall another order of magnitude once Starship hits cadence. The cost per kilo will—" Drop by tenfold and the economics flip. Yeah, I’ve heard that one. The Wired 2012 quote, “You wouldn’t build a Boeing 747 and throw it away after one flight.” I remember. I even asked him about that over lunch once, whether the market was actually elastic enough to handle the supply increase from reusability. Turns out it wasn’t. Non-Starlink launch mass in the United States grew at 13.7 percent CAGR from 2015 to 2023. Payload demand didn’t scale with flight cadence, so prices didn’t collapse, margins just swelled. That’s why they had to invent Starlink. When the market can’t absorb your rockets, you start building your own payloads. Is that your thing? You read some Marc Andreessen “American Dynamism” manifesto and suddenly start ignoring the engineering realities? You start throwing around a few buzzwords to impress the Twitter anons and earn some street cred for having a contrarian opinion? One, don’t do that. Two, you dropped a 500-thousand-dollar seed check on a concept that could have been debunked by a dollar-fifty worth of tokens from Grok. "Well, at least I’m a capital allocator. We’ll be skiing in Hokkaido while you’re doing bolt preload calculations for some bridge somewhere." Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal or anonymous. I’m out here asking why the hell we’d melt the brains of a thousand aerospace engineers just to save four cents per kilowatt-hour on solar electricity. First principles isn’t about getting nerd-sniped by a shiny-object problem. It’s about asking whether we should be solving that problem at all. But hey, if you’ve got an issue with that, we can always take it up with E.

"<acronym> is a blazing fast <thing that already exists> for <terrible complexity merchant web slop ecosystem> written in Rust!" Wow, we need like 80 more of these. Ideally we should make them all be configured in subtly different ways so you spend all your time on that.

This guy has clearly wanted to be a detective since he was a child, inspired by classic detective fiction. Makes me sad that his dream has been realised. We'll never know what he could achieve by delivering shareholder value through alignment of key stakeholders.

Genuinely impressive how many of these this guy has been able to trot out now

What a time to be alive

Blog: nickmccleery.com/posts/11-su… GitHub: github.com/nickmccleery/open…

We need a renaissance.

The proprietors of this joint would be tech darlings if they'd just packaged the purchase of chips on strap into a nice fintech startup with a trendy logo

Generally a believer in writing code in American English instead of actual English, but currently pedalling a side project where I have just typed TireConfig and... not sure I'll be able to sleep if I commit that.

I hate dogmatic, received dev wisdom bullshit just as much as the next guy, but correctness actually matters. It's sort of the whole point. All software is easy if you don't care how wrong it is.

Insane how common this experience is.

The bottleneck in modern, computer centric 'knowledge work' is never the typing. A different layout would make sense for a typist or something, but I literally do not care. I know how to operate one layout faster than I can think and that's more than adequate.

(I wouldn't actually make anyone sign an NDA because I think they're insidious, but I also wouldn't willingly violate contracts I have previously signed.)

I too enjoy hiring people who are willing to violate the terms of agreements they have previously signed. They would never do that to me.

Almost unimaginable how much easier this must have been in the past. Picture an equivalent transaction in 1985: "Hi, I'd like to ship this parcel please." "Sure, paying cash or billing to account?" "Bill to account #<NUMBER>, please." "OK, all done." "Thank you, goodbye."

Trying (remarkably unsuccessfully) to ship something with FedEx, with a FedEx account, and suddenly have an incredibly strong urge to start a shipping business. We can disrupt this market with a revolutionary idea: letting customers pay us to ship things, then shipping things.