A few eagle-eyed readers have noticed that it’s been 4 weeks since my last entry in what I have been thinking of as my “niblet series” — one small piece per week, 1000 words or less, for the next three months.

This is true. However, I did leave myself some wiggle room in my original goal, when I said “weeks when I am not traveling”, knowing I was traveling 6 of the next 7 weeks. I was going to TRY to write something on the weeks I was traveling, but as you can see, I mostly did not succeed. Oh well!

Honestly, I don’t feel bad about it. I’ve written well over 1k words on bsky over the past two weeks in the neverending thread on the costs and tradeoffs of remote work. (A longform piece on the topic is coming soon.) I also wrote a couple of lengthy internal pieces.

This whole experiment was designed to help me unblock my writing process and try out new habits, and I think I’m making progress. I will share what I’m learning at a later date, but for now: onward!

How long does it take to form an impression of a new job?

This week’s niblet was inspired by a conversation I had yesterday with an internet friend. To paraphrase (and lightly anonymize) their question:

“I took a senior management role at this company six months ago. My search for this role was all about values alignment, from company mission to leadership philosophy, and the people here said all the right things in the process. But it’s just not clicking.

It’s only been six months, but it’s starting to feel like it might not work out. How much longer should I give it?”

Zero. You should give it 0 time. You already know, and you’ve known for a long time; it’s not gonna change. I’m sorry.

I’m not saying you should quit tomorrow, a person needs a paycheck, but you should probably start thinking in terms of how to manage the problem and extricate yourself from it, not like you’re waiting to see if it will be a good fit.

Every job I’ve ever had has made a strong first impression

I’ve had…let’s see…about six different employers, over the course of my (post-university) career.

Every job I’ve ever taken, I knew within the first week whether it was right for me or not. That might be overstating things a bit (memory can be like that). But I definitely had a strong visceral reaction to the company within days after starting, and the rest of my tenure played out more or less congruent with that reaction.

The first week at EVERY job is a hot mess of anxiety and nerves and second-guessing yourself and those around you. It’s never warm fuzzies. But at the jobs I ended up loving and staying at long term, the anxiety was like “omg these people are so cool and so great and so fucking competent, I hope I can measure up to their expectations.”

And then there were the jobs where the anxiety I felt was more like a sinking sensation of dread, of “oooohhh god I hope this is a one-off and not the kind of thing I will encounter every day.”

There was the job where they had an incident on my very first day, and by 7 pm I was like “why isn’t someone telling me I should go home?” There was literally nothing I could do to help, I was still setting up my accounts, yet I had the distinct impression I was expected to stay.

This job turned out to be stereotypically Silicon Valley in the worst ways, hiring young, cheap engineers and glorifying coding all night and sleeping under your desks.

There was the job where they were walking me through a 50-page Microsoft Word doc on how to manage replication between DB nodes, and I laughed a little, and looked for some rueful shared acknowledgement of how shoddy this was…but I was the only one laughing.

That job turned out to be shoddy, ancient, flaky tech all the way down, with comfortable, long-tenured staff who didn’t know (and did NOT want to hear) how out of date their tech had become.

Over time, I learned to trust that intuition

Around the time I became a solidly senior engineer, I began to reflect on how indelible my early impressions of each job had been, and how reliable those impressions had turned out to be.

To be clear, I don’t regret these jobs. I got to work with some wonderful people, and I got to experience a range of different organizational structures and types. I learned a lot from every single one of my jobs.

Perhaps most of all, I learned how to sniff out particular environments that really do not work for me, and I never made the same mistake twice.

Companies can and do change dramatically. But absent dramatic action, which can be quite painful, they tend to drift along their current trajectory.

This matters even more for managers

This is one of those ways that I think the work of management is different from the work of engineering. As an experienced IC, it’s possible to phone it in and still do a good job. As long as you’re shipping at an acceptable rate, you can check out mentally and emotionally, even work for people or companies you basically despise.

Lots of people do in fact do this. Hell, I’ve done it. You aren’t likely to do the best work of your life under these circumstances, but people have done far worse to put food on the table.

An IC can wall themselves off emotionally and still do acceptable work, but I’m not sure a manager can do the same.

Alignment *is* the job of management

As a manager, you literally represent the company to your team and those around you. You don’t have to agree with every single decision the company makes, but if you find yourself constantly having to explain and justify things the company has done that deeply violate your personal beliefs or ethics, it does you harm.

Some managers respond to a shitty corporate situation by hunkering down and behaving like a shit umbrella; doing whatever they can to protect their people, at the cost of undermining the company itself. I don’t recommend this, either. It’s not healthy to know you walk around every day fucking over one of your primary stakeholders, whether it’s the company OR  your teammates.

There are also companies that aren’t actually that bad, but you just aren’t aligned with them. That’s fine. Alignment matters a lot more for managers than for ICs, because alignment is the job.

Management is about crafting and tending to complex sociotechnical systems. No manager can do this alone. Having a healthy, happy team of direct reports is only a fraction of the job description. It’s not enough. You can and should expect more.

What can you learn from the experience?

I asked my friend to think back to the interview process. What were the tells? What do they wish they had known to watch out for?

They thought for a moment, then said:

“Maybe the fact that the entire leadership team had been grown or promoted from within. SOME amount of that is terrific, but ALL of it might be a yellow flag. The result seems to be that everyone else thinks and feels the same way…and I think differently.”

This is SO insightful.

It reminds me of all the conversations Emily and I have had over the years, on how to balance developing talent from within vs bringing in fresh perspectives, people who have already seen what good looks like at the next stage of growth, people who can see around corners and challenge us in different ways.

This is a tough thing to suss out from the outside, especially when the employer is saying all the right things. But having an experience like this can inoculate you from an entire family of related mistakes. My friend will pick up on this kind of insularity from miles away, from now on.

Bad jobs happen. Interviews can only predict so much. A person who has never had a job they disliked is a profoundly lucky person. In the end, sometimes all you can take is the lessons you learned and won’t repeat.

The pig is committed

Have you ever heard the metaphor of the chicken vs the pig? The chicken contributes an egg to breakfast, the pig contributes bacon. The punch line goes something like, “the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!”

It’s vivid and a bit over the top, but I kept thinking about it while writing this piece. The engineer contributes their labor and output to move the company forward, but the manager contributes their emotional and relational selves — their humanity — to serve the cause.

You only get one career. Who are you going to give your bacon to?

The original Pac-Man is unquestionably a video game classic, well deserving of its position in the inaugural class of the Strong Museum of Play's World Video Game Hall of Fame. But playing the unmodified 1980 release these days can feel a little slow-paced and repetitive, given advancements in game design and taste in the intervening decades.

So when I noticed a game called Pac-Man Superfast sitting under a "YouTube Playables" heading on Google's popular video site the other day, my first thought was "Wait, how fast is 'superfast' exactly?" My second thought was, "Wait, what the heck is YouTube Playables?"

Looks familiar, except for that speed gauge in the corner.... Credit: Youtube Playables

You'd be forgiven for not knowing about YouTube Playables. Few seemed to note its official announcement last year as a collection of free-to-play web games built for the web using standard rendering APIs. The seeming competitor to Netflix's mobile gaming offerings is still described in an official FAQ as "an experimental feature rolled out to select users in eligible countries/regions," which doesn't make this post-Stadia gaming effort seem like a huge priority for Google.

Perusing the list of nearly 200 YouTube Playable titles shows a handful of dated but venerable mobile gaming brands (Cut the Rope, Crossy Road) amid the kind of lowest common denominator knockoffs you'd expect to see cluttering the "free" section of a smartphone app store (3D Bowling, 2048 Fusion). But then there's Pac-Man Superfast, an officially licensed version of one of the best games of all time that seemingly launched last October to extremely little fanfare. Fandom suggests the spinoff was designed by RedFox Games, but the game doesn't even get a passing mention on the developer's website.

Going for speed

Weird origins aside, Pac-Man Superfast pretty much delivers what its name promises. While gameplay starts at an "Easy" speed that roughly matches the arcade original, the speed of both Pac-Man and the ghosts is slightly increased every few seconds (dying temporarily reduces the speed to a lower level). After a few minutes, you're advancing past the titular "Super Fast" speed to extreme reflex-testing speeds like Crazy, Insane, Maniac, and a final test that's ominously named "Doom."

Those who've played the excellent Pac-Man Championship Edition series will be familiar with the high-speed vibe here, but Pac-Man Superfast remains focused on the game's original maze and selection of just four ghosts. That means old-school strategies for grouping ghosts together and running successful patterns through the narrow corridors work in similar ways here. Successfully executing those patterns becomes a tense battle of nerves here, though, requiring multiple direction changes every second at the highest speeds. While the game will technically work with swipe controls on a smartphone or tablet, high-level play really requires the precision of a keyboard via a desktop/laptop web browser (we couldn't get the game to recognize a USB controller, unfortunately).

Collecting those high-value items at the bottom is your ticket to a lot of extra lives. Credit: Youtube Playables

As exciting as the high-speed maze gameplay gets, though, Pac-Man Superfast is hampered by a few odd design decisions. The game ends abruptly after just 13 levels, for instance, making it impossible to even attempt the high-endurance 256-level runs that Pac-Man is known for. The game also throws an extra life at you every 5,000 points, making it relatively easy to brute force your way to the end as long as you focus on the three increasingly high-point-value items that appear periodically on each stage.

Despite this, the game doesn't give any point reward for unused extra lives or long-term survival at high speeds, limiting the rewards for high-level play. And the lack of a built-in leaderboard makes it hard to directly compare your performance to friends and/or strangers anyway.

A large part of the reason I wrote about this game was to see if someone could beat my high score. Credit: Youtube Playables

Those issues aside, I've had a blast coming back to Pac-Man Supefast over and over again in the past few days, slowly raising my high score above the 162,000 point mark during coffee breaks (consider the gauntlet thrown, Ars readers). If you're a fan of classic arcade games, Pac-Man Superfast is worth a try before the "YouTube Playables" initiative inevitably joins the growing graveyard of discontinued Google products.

Read full article

Comments

Scientists at several federal agencies are losing access to scientific literature published by Springer Nature, which produces the prestigious journal Nature among many other high-profile titles.

That's according to a report Monday by Nature's news team, which is also published by Springer Nature, but is editorially independent.

According to the news outlet, spokespeople for NASA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that agency scientists would no longer have access to Springer Nature journals. A USDA spokesperson said that it "has cancelled all contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature. The journal [sic] is exorbitantly expensive and is not a good use of taxpayer funds." A government spending database also shows the Department of Energy (DOE) has dropped contracts with the publisher.

When Nature news first reached out to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which is the top funding agency for biomedical research in the world—it appeared that its access to Nature journals was not on the chopping block. But, hours later, Andrew Nixon, the top spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, said: "All contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active. Precious taxpayer dollars should be [sic] not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science."

The move comes after HHS Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on a May 27 podcast that prestigious medical journals are "corrupt."

"We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt," he said. He accused the journals collectively of being a "vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda." He went on to say that "unless these journals change dramatically," the federal government would "stop NIH scientists from publishing there" and create "in-house" journals instead.

Kennedy's criticism largely stems from his belief that modern medicine and mainstream science are part of a global conspiracy to generate pharmaceutical profits. Kennedy is a germ-theory denier who believes people can maintain their health not by relying on evidence-based medicine, such as vaccines, but by clean living and eating—a loose concept called "terrain theory."

Access to top scientific and medical journals is essential for federal scientists to keep up to date with their fields and publicize high-impact results. One NIH employee added to Nature news that it "suppresses our scientific freedom, to pursue information where it is present."

Read full article

Comments

The Senate Republicans' version of President Trump's tax bill would slash federal spending on health provisions—Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act—by $1.1 trillion by 2034. And in that time, an estimated 11.8 million people would lose their health insurance.

That’s according to an analysis released over the weekend by the Congressional Budget Office. The massive piece of legislation is likely to change as senators are currently running a "vote-a-rama" for rapid-fire amendment proposals.

The bulk of the estimated reductions in health spending come from Medicaid, which will lose more than $1 trillion. Of the 11.8 million people who could lose health insurance, 1.4 million are people without "verified citizenship" or "satisfactory immigration status," the CBO noted.

The overall number of people estimated to lose health insurance is an increase over what was estimated from the House's version of the bill, which was about 10.9 million.

The substantial cuts to Medicaid, a program jointly funded by states and the federal government, largely stem from two features in the bill, The New York Times notes. One is a strict nationwide work requirement, despite the fact that the vast majority of working-aged adults on Medicaid are already working. The new requirements are estimated to cut Medicaid spending by $325 billion over a decade, while a 2023 CBO analysis found that a strict work requirement would not increase employment.

The second Medicaid-gutting feature is restrictions on how states tax medical providers to get more federal contributions for Medicaid—aka provider taxes. In this maneuver, states can add taxes on medical providers, then turn around and use the funds to provide medical providers with higher Medicaid payments. This ostensibly increases a state's spending on Medicaid, allowing it to increase the matching funding from the federal government. The Senate bill would force many states to lower their current tax rates, which would contribute to cutting federal spending by an estimated $375 billion.

The legislation has detractors within the Republican ranks and is also deeply unpopular among Americans. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who this weekend announced he will not seek re-election, harshly criticized the bill after opposing it in a procedural vote. "What do I tell 663,000 people in two years, three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore," he asked Sunday night on the Senate floor.

Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this month found that 64 percent of Americans opposed the House version of the bill. But, the bill's unfavorability jumped to 74 percent when people were asked: "What if you heard that if passed, the tax and budget bill being discussed by Congress would increase the number of people without health insurance by about 10 million?"

Read full article

Comments

The wind power industry has long faced a bit of a frustrating problem. Gigantic blades are more efficient, but they’re also hard to ship. A single blade can be more than a few hundred feet long, and they’re a logistical nightmare to haul down roads and load onto barges to get to their destination turbines. Startup company Radia thinks it has the answer. For the past decade, it has been developing an aircraft of mammoth proportions that would dwarf even the iconic Antonov An-225 Mriya. The WindRunner is huge, goofy, and I hope it becomes a reality.

The world of super-large aircraft has been a much sadder one since 2022. Early that year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in the destruction of the sole operational Antonov An-225 in the world. The distinctive Antonov and its sextet of engines had wowed the public for decades and carried the biggest loads that no other plane could haul. Antonov has vowed to rebuild the world’s largest plane, but when it does, the An-225 may no longer hold the crown.

Since then, other planes have been wrangling for the coveted position of “biggest flying object on the planet.” The dual fuselage Scaled Composites 351 Stratolaunch is shorter than a Boeing 747-800 at 238 feet, but its 385-foot wings make it the largest plane in the world by wingspan. Of course, there are also legends like the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft, and the Boeing 747, the Queen of big passenger jets until the A380 arrived at the terminal.

Here’s the Antonov if you’ve forgotten what that beauty looks like:

If the folks at Radia succeed in the construction of the WindRunner, they’ll take the record of the world’s largest aircraft. This beast would be about 100 feet longer than a Boeing 747-800 and still 81 feet longer than the late Antonov An-225. Supposedly, the absolute unit of a plane will also have 12 times the cargo volume of a 747 and the ability to operate at unpaved airstrips.

So, is this thing the real deal? The New York Times recently covered the plane, and that’s how it got my attention. Seemingly, everyone’s been talking about the WindRunner, regardless of whether their publication has a transportation angle or not.

Aviation For Wind Energy

Radia is the brainchild of aerospace engineer and serial entrepreneur Mark Lundstrom. He founded Radia in Colorado in 2016 to explore the intersection of aerospace and energy to find a profitable way to reduce carbon emissions. Here’s the story of Radia from Lundstrom:

Shortly after Radia was founded, a press release came out from two wind turbine manufacturers that compete for every deal globally. They were frustrated that the energy industry knows how to make offshore-sized turbines and deploy them in places like the North Sea but can’t take that knowledge to deploy them onshore where the market is an order of magnitude larger. Their release asked if an aerospace company, engineer, or entrepreneur could help them figure out how to airlift an object that weighs 45 tons and is over 100 meters in length, and land it on a piece of dirt in the middle of a wind farm. I showed up within a week and started working with them. Our massive cargo aircraft WindRunner is our solution to the problem as it can deliver offshore-sized blades onshore and enable what we call GigaWind.

Lundstrom is joined by a large team of aircraft engineers and other engineers from the energy sector.

Radia has a pretty huge marketing push behind its business. The United States Department of Energy projects that by 2050, wind power will have a capacity of 404.25 GW across 48 states. This is compared to a capacity of 113.43 GW in 36 states in 2020. Wind turbine production is only expected to grow.

Generally speaking, larger wind turbines with longer blades are more efficient turbines. In short, this is because longer blades have larger swept areas and can capture more wind. So companies are constructing absolute monsters of turbines with blades over 200 feet long. As of 2024, the world’s largest onshore turbine blade, for the SANY SY1310A, is 430 feet long.

Radia claims that infrastructure is limiting the size of most other turbine blades for onshore applications. The company claims that most road infrastructure struggles with blades stretching 230 feet long. Further, the company says, super large blades have quite a huge diameter, which means that shipping a blade by road would require some clever navigation to avoid obstacles like overpasses. This is why some of the biggest wind turbines that you’ll find will be offshore.

As NewScientist reports, the general idea is that the larger you can make a turbine, the fewer of them you’ll need to reach a given capacity. However, as the publication reports, there are tradeoffs. Consider that, when it’s running, the SANY SY1310A’s blades cover an area of over 800 feet. Of course, then you have to figure out what to do with the structure after its service life ends. All of that aside, NewScientist notes, you still have to figure out how the heck you’re getting those giant blades to a wind farm in the first place.

So, to repeat myself here, Radia’s logic is that land transportation limits the size of onshore turbines, so what if the company took the hassle out of shipping turbine blades? Instead of navigating a blade through tight streets, you just load it onto a plane and fly it directly to a farm. Radia’s plane would permit the shipping of larger blades for onshore developments and thus pave the way for the creation of the biggest turbines and wind farms. This concept is what Radia calls GigaWind.

To be clear, Radia will not build turbines or even blades. The whole idea is that the plane will allow other companies to install the biggest wind farms. The GigaWind thing, which is included in the marketing of the WindRunner, is somewhat confusing since it’s not a product or service that will be offered by Radia.

The WindRunner

Radia’s project is the WindRunner plane. In 2024, here’s what Radia said about the aircraft:

Radia’s WindRunner aircraft, capable of landing on short, semi-prepared runways including those made of packed dirt, will be purpose-built to deliver these large blades and other components directly to onshore wind farm sites – greatly expanding the number of locations available for large turbines and enabling onshore wind to scale. Opportunities include reducing transmission costs and increasing reliability by building wind energy sites closer to demand, creating hybrid wind/solar sites to produce clean power around the clock and throughout the year, and generating the large amounts of clean electricity needed to produce green hydrogen.

The innovative design of WindRunner only requires a 6,000-foot semi-prepared dirt or gravel landing strip at a wind farm to deliver its payload. This also enables it to land at almost any commercial airport around the world. WindRunner will be 356 feet long and its volume is 12 times that of a 747, and an overall length of 356 feet to carry the largest payloads ever moved by air.

Radia plans to produce a fleet of certified aircraft at Radia’s U.S. assembly site. WindRunner is more than halfway through the time required to design, build and certify an aircraft.

Radia says that the WindRunner will have a range of 1,200 miles and cruise at 41,000 feet at Mach 0.6. Further, Radia says that the fuselage, which is designed like a Boeing 747 where the flight deck sits in a pod above the main deck, will have 272,000 cubic feet of cargo volume and a payload capacity of 160,000 pounds. The cargo inside could be as long as 344 long, 24 feet tall, and 24 feet wide. Those wings look sort of stubby because they sort of are compared to the fuselage length. The fuselage is 356 feet, and the wingspan is 261 feet.

The WindRunner is projected to be a big bird for sure, but what about that claim of having 12 times the cargo volume of a Boeing 747? Well, cargo airline Cargolux says that its 747-800F aircraft, the final edition of the 747 Freighter, has a main deck with 24,462 cubic feet of space. Times that by 12 and you get 293,544 cubic feet, or more space than the 272,000 cubic feet claimed by Radia.

Cargolux also runs the older and smaller 747-400F, which has a main hold carrying 21,645 cubic feet of cargo. Times that by 12 and you get 259,740 cubic feet, or less than what Radia claims.

In case you’re curious, the Boeing 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter, also known as the Dreamlifter, has a hold carrying 65,000 cubic feet of Dreamliner parts. Cargo volume goes up significantly as you make a fuselage taller, wider, and longer.

Another massive aircraft is the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, and the Radia would dwarf its 31,000 cubic foot capacity:

Regardless of whatever Radia used as a base unit for the 12 times claim, Radia’s claim of getting 272,000 cubic feet out of a giant 344-foot hold seems to be achievable. What’s interesting is the specification that the gigantic WindRunner will carry only 160,000 pounds. A Boeing 747-400F can carry around 249,000 pounds, and the bigger -800F hauls 295,000 pounds. The Antonov An-225 carried a whopping 550,000 pounds when it was still in one piece.

However, the low carrying capacity of the WindRunner is probably because of its specific mission to carry wind turbine blades. Still, one of Radia’s goals is to make a ton of money, so it seems like a missed opportunity that the WindRunner won’t be able to carry cargo as heavy as existing freighters can haul. The U.S. military is looking into the feasibility of using WindRunners to carry fighter jets, so maybe that whole money thing won’t be a problem.

At the same time, the projected lighter weight of the aircraft may help it with its other statistic: The takeoff roll. A fully loaded Boeing 747-800F may take 10,465 feet or so to take off. The Radia, which will be significantly longer than the 747-800, is said to be able to lift off the ground from an unpaved airstrip in only 6,000 feet. I would pay money to see something the length of this thing manage to leave terra firma in just over a mile.

Presumably, this also means that the Radia will have some sort of hot rod engines under its high wings. Unfortunately, Radia hasn’t said anything about installed power. As you’ve probably already noticed by now, Radia has also issued only renders of the aircraft. That being said, Radia said that it’s not trying to reinvent the wheel here. It’s said that the plane will be built with conventional methods and technologies. The “innovation” is just that the plane will be extraordinarily huge.

Maybe You’ll See One Someday?

Radia sees a market for a whole fleet of WindRunners. These won’t be flying regular cargo, but the expectation is that the wind turbine industry will become so huge that just one aircraft won’t do.

Radia says that it’ll officially unveil the WindRunner at the Paris Air Show next week. Then, the company hopes to have at least one of these birds in the sky by the end of the decade.

It seems like what Radia is proposing here is theoretically possible. It sounds like something this huge has no business getting off the ground, but that’s also what some people said about greats like the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747. I’m skeptical, but maybe I’ll be proven wrong. Will Radia go into the history books as a record-breaker? It’s too early to tell, but you bet I’m going to be watching.

The post A Company Wants To Build A Humongous Plane 100 Feet Longer Than A Boeing 747 With 12 Times The Cargo Space, And For A Very Specific Reason appeared first on The Autopian.