Age eleven and had access to a chemistry set that a relative gifted. It had sulfur, but the saltpeter, and charcoal came from elsewhere. The 1960s encyclopedia had the instructions.

Let the kids play.

This is actually a fun one, and kinda has some parallels to building a nuclear weapon.

I tried this as a grownup because I finally managed to get my hands on saltpeter (could only dream of it when kid). Followed the instructions, mixed everything in correct ratios, lit it with great care and fanfare and... hiss fizzle. I was so disappointed! I think it came down to purity of ingredients and not enough surface area.

Point is, there are certain details of the process required to make it truly work, that are not readily known; in a similar way with nuclear energy, the theory is pretty well known but some nitty gritty details like the implosion or detonator design are not.

As a kid I found saltpeter at an old-fashioned pharmacy and made gunpowder, and it also barely fizzled. I think you have to grind the ingredients much finer than a kid has patience for.

South africa was able to make a minimum viable weapon on a shoestring budget. They had access to nuclear reactors though.

> Let the kids play.

To a point. Plenty of people from previous generations with missing digits and hands thanks to play with commonly available fireworks of the area (Australia based, so no idea how common that remains in the US).

My own experiments from my youth also one time resulted in some shrapnel punching through a 5 inch thick concrete tile very close to someone’s head (thought we were safe behind said tiles).

Get involved with the kids blowing stuff up so the danger is within reasonable bounds.

When I was in college, I drove my carless chemistry geek friend to an agriculture store. Apparently they had a reasonably chemically pure fertilizer.

No. Excel is a general purpose tool that can be used for calculating tasks that are good, neutral, or evil things. It's a fancy calculator.

Looks good for light-duty uses. Scared for my fingers for anything heavy.

Trillionaire

If Ghengis Khan was raping & pillaging in 2026 his Wikipedia article might have a more modern slant.

They become hyperstition engines.

"hyperstition," TIL.

Thanks, stranger!

When we do these it's a fine-tuned classifier, generally a BERT class model. Works quite well when you sanitize input and output with low latency/cost.

Even if you spend a crazy amount of money with them for advertising they will try to gaslight you if they make a mistake.

Finnish if you want to go hard mode.

I’ve worked with their consultants and they were lovely. They hate Azure too.

I imagine that no one likes Azure.

The only good thing Microsoft azure ever did for me was provide a very easy way to exploit their free trial program in the early 2010s to crypto mine for free. It couldn’t do much, but it was straight up free real estate for CPU mining. $200 or 2 weeks per credit/debit card.

Ah, I did the same, but wasn't the experience/UI back then pretty nice too?

I haven't used azure since then, but I remember the web interface was way more polished than aws and things worked ok (spinning up a VM was fast etc).

So I'm confused by how everyone seems to hate it now.

I did it all in the command line so can’t say

I used it for MMO goldfarming - circa 2012/2013

Damn that’s impressive. Wasn’t it all command line at the time?

We use Azure for desktops and we pay $600/month for 4 cores, getting performance comparable to a $60 Intel N100 chip.

We tried this (and M$ sold it hard) and never went to production with it (except for a couple of niche use cases). It was obviously not going to meet expectations before we were half way through the PoC.

Azure container apps are a great (idea) and work mostly fine as long as you don’t need to touch them. But they’re just like GCR or what fargate should be - container + resources and off you go.

We ran many internal workloads on ACA, but we had _so may issues_ with everything else around ACA…

Only C level likes Azure

Yeah no shade on the consultants. I’ve worked with some good ones too.