yes, perlite is the insulation of choice, as long as you keep it dry, very few things surpass it.

before silicon, rectification was often achieved with copper oxide

Have you tried just savimg the zero crossing times?

From distant memory you got quite a bit more compaction.

I saw someone interviewed who had set the criteria of being able to enjoy some ice cream with his children and grandchildren at the regular family dinner on Sunday late afternoons.

He said that alone made life worth living, for him and them, but once any deteriorating conditions rendered him permanently unable to participate in this weekly activity then he felt it was time to go.

Maybe having a pre-set condition like this is less arbitrary, and also allows everyone involved to understand as the time comes closer.

I think this is a fair measure of any life -- are there enough positives to offset the negatives? And that includes the cost (and the benefit) of your suicide on others. No one but you should be able to make that call. All that remains then, legally, is to ensure you are well informed about the de/merits of your choice and sane enough to make the call.

Of course, even if you lack legal permission, suicide doesn't strictly _require_ legal or medical assistance. An autonomous exit is always an option, though generally less painless than assisted.

If this eventuates, then maybe bitcoin is more useful, the scarcity and distributed nature of findable gold are a key aspect of it's utility/value.

I prefer the state table, with columns for states, this forces you to consider every possible transition of every state and this means the definition is unambiguous and exhaustive.

Additionally, you can easily define what output conditions are for every output in every state.

Where more than one possible to state transition exists, then you put multiple columns (one for each possible transition destination) and it is a matter of first solved wins, I usually go left to right, top to bottom.

I have developed a PyQt desktop application that allows building such tables, simulating them one scan at a time and generates code and documentation. Also, it allows for hierarchal state machines so you can build up very complex systems. I initially used it to develop Burner Management System compliant to IEC61511.

you will have abstractions - black boxing, interface overviews etc, humans can only hold so much detail in current context memory, some say 7 items on average.

Of course, but even those blackoxes are not empty, they've got a vague picture inside them based on prior experience. I have been doing this for a while so most things are just various flavours of the same stuff, especially in enterprise software.

The important thing in this context is that I know it's all there, I don't have to grep the codebase to fill up my context, and my understanding of the holistic project does not change each time I am booted up.

And LLMs can’t leverage these abstractions nearly as well as humans…so far.

For the who knows how many times, this is worth a repeat - the 3M electrostatic force field

http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html

what about things like the browser object in Qt/PyQt?

The skill of breaking down the system to smaller constituant parts was formerly the domain of the Systems Analyst - an occupation now almost extinct by formal title, as the coders reached up into this role.

Presumably this occured because the Systems Analyst was virtually archtecture agnostic, but a computer person could consider both the problem breakdown and the optimal architecture to fit, juggling each a little to optimise that interface between requirements and implementation. This personage then claimed the title of "Architect".

However, I am seeing, in certain areas, a deep lack of specification skills and wonder the Systems Analyst might not partially have a resurgence as a profession.