Gas furnaces from 1987 when new could convert 75-80% of the chemical energy in gas into heat within your house. They lose some efficiency over time, but not that much - I would expect it’s still getting 70-75% of the chemical energy converted into heat within your house.

The maximum efficiency available today is around 96% on the same metric. If you need 100 units of heat today, you are burning 133-143 units of gas. With the best possible furnace efficiency today, you would only need to burn 104 units of gas, which is 22-28% less - certainly not “about half”.

There are multiple special requirements for the best possible efficiency, and they are more expensive, both to purchase and to install. You might be able to save money on bills, depending on gas rates in your area, and the total cost to purchase and install a high efficiency furnace. I can’t really answer that without a lot more information.

As for parts availability, there should be a model number and a manufacturer indicated on it somewhere. These days, most things service professionals have access to are also listed on the internet for sale. That one is easier to convincingly check.

In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.

Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.

Are you working with 20 bit integers? You’ll never get it down to a million lines like that…

There’s a million lines of If >4096, subtract 4096

Then a quick lookup case statement for whether the remaining number is even.

I selected the probability “95%”. It’s conscious, full AGI confirmed.

21 minus 13 is unfortunately not 7… Unless I’ve misunderstood what you mean?

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which planned, built, and owned the site. They also operated it from construction until July 2001.

The world trade center was required to be insured against terrorism by the banks in the leasing deal. That was an obvious requirement for the banks to include because of the recent (at the time…) 1993 world trade center bombing.

Larry Silverstein got the insurance so recently before the attack because he signed a lease that included the insurance provisions, and he signed that lease in July 2001 because negotiations for the deal took from January 2001 until July 2001. Prior to that, the Port Authority was having trouble keeping the occupancy of the building high, and they thought private management of the building would increase tax revenue, and give them money for other projects. The plan for privatization began in the 1990s, and coincided with other revitalization efforts in the area, some managed by the Port Authority, and others stemming from the city government.

I think in context there’s nothing surprising involved here, and the timeline of the attack was driven by different things than the timeline of the leasing deal. In other words, this is a coincidence.

I got 17/28… I do not use javascript. This is not the first time I have taken this quiz (but it has been a while).

It’s a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they’ve lost billions on this. Why haven’t they done anything?

Out of luck, and no refunds. Sorry, it’s just policy.

TFA was perfect, it had mystery, and mystery, and mystery, and even nostalgia too!

It was only when TLJ explained some of those mysteries that suddenly all the pieces that looked like they weren’t from the same puzzle, and some of them weren’t puzzle pieces at all, and a few of the pieces were obviously colored with crayons by a confused child… That’s when it suddenly fell apart through no fault of anyone other than Rian Johnson.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been satisfied by the reveal of a single JJ Abrahms mystery, ever. I don’t understand how he has such a career of failing upwards.

I was thinking of JLC3DP, PCBWay, Shapeways, and Slant3D. I’ve only bought from PCBWay and JLC3DP from among those.

I’m not in this business, but I have purchased prints from a print farm before. There are already at least 4 large, high quality printing companies that offer to print any model in any material. I think most of the competition is now on speed and price. There are also many smaller printers I have purchased from. Most offer ~10 products, have them already printed, and sell those items to fulfill a specific need. As far as I can tell, those smaller printers either design their own models, or paid for models that are not readily available. Once model files are available, the general purpose printing companies can deliver the same part.

Unless you have ideas for models no one has made before, and you want to try to profit as much as possible off those, I don’t see the upside to a small print farm.

If small numbers are much more frequent, it’s better to return early. Really, you should gather statistics about the numbers the function is called with, and put the most frequent ones at the top.

I’m really hoping it’s a slipup that you included the Earth revolving around the sun in the list of crazy, there’s quite good evidence for heliocentrism!

I presume you’re joking, but the air space is actually there to make the box satisfying to shake. That’s why staples (which no one wants to shake) are in tight fitting boxes.

When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.

When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.

Brain one way, but other brain other way. Chemical stuff is making brain stuff happen. Makes see different.

Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.