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emptybits
6,420karma·1,004submissions·November 20, 2012
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Darren Stone, Vancouver, BC, Canada
"Once men turned their thinking over to
machines in the hope that this would
set them free. But that only permitted
other men with machines to enslave
them." - Frank P. Herbert, Jr., 1965
"The programmer, like the poet, works
only slightly removed from pure
thought-stuff. He builds his castles
in the air, from air, creating by
exertion of the imagination."
- Fred P. Brooks, Jr., 1975recent activity (1,004 total)
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I had to look that up. Here's research[1][2] from 2019 about "why ice is so slippery", including some of the apparent surprises. I dunno. I'm not a physicist so some of the surpris…
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Replying to self ... phosphor rabbit hole ... so I apparently thought P3 was "the" amber phosphor but it may not be so simple. Old Wyse specs claim their amber is P134. And a handful of othe…
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Love the amber. They were comfortable on the eyes. Nothing remotely blue about them, so maybe "night mode" before it was cool. In the mid/late 90s, I could find surplus Wyse serial term…
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Jane Street is responsible for the Signals and Threads podcast[1], which I always enjoy. They also contribute a lot to the OCaml language, standard libraries, and do a great job of explaining why OCam…
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"And there’s the nagging question of why the Chinese government didn’t classify this research" Would like to hear informed thoughts on any state's pros and cons of sharing such obviousl…
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s/a good cup/many cups/
As the article itself points out, unlike computing at scale, nothing about enormous warming urns of coffee ensures a good cup. Reliable and constant.…
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> But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, ... Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agr…
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I didn't know what a "mimic panel" was. Twenty minutes later, I just emerged from a "mimic panel" image search rabbit warren. Satisfying. Thank you!
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Kevin Wang, competitive coder: "I also try to minimize the amount of code I write: each line of code is just another chance for a typo." Peter Norvig: This is why AlphaCode learned to write …
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And please collect my fine from my automaker. Their selfdriving AI parked my car where it shouldn't have.
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A composite without compensation for at least 1) direction of light sources, 2) colour temperature of light sources, and 3) perspective matching will just look "off". Uncanny valleyish. Mayb…
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> One minor correction - no one 'wants' ads. Yes, in 2022. I have ad fatigue. PTSD, even, from the onslaught and effort to avoid them. But I recall a time when I enjoyed ads and actuall…
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I hear you. That's part of the joy I seek with AoC. Most years I choose a language I've never worked with commercially (e.g. Fennel in 2022) and rather than reach for prebuilt libs for times…
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Cooking food over fire. Vegetables or meat. Traditional everywhere and all kinds of delicious! :-)
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I'm neither Jewish nor Asian, but I do always have a large tin of this delicious Chinese vegetarian barbecue sauce in the fridge with a prominent 卍 on it.[1] It's a fantastic marinade, among…
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I can't think of examples of positive activities in a workplace being best labelled office politics . Help me out? I understand politics , outside of government, to suggest deception or manipul…
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Sure, but in the spirit of these games I guess there needs to be a balance between simplicity and realism. A single roll and table lookup is simple and fun but not finely grained so not realistic if l…
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Loved reading this. I was unaware these boxed editions existed but I do recall using my AD&D dice as a kid to make a "baseball" game. I was obsessed with the probability of singles vs do…
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No kidding. Actually, considering how mindblowingly huge but untouched the volume and area of our seas and seafloors are, "oceanically unlikely" is also a superlative I can get behind! 1.3 b…
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Exactly; car lengths vary by model, not by velocity. I get it. You'd prefer to use the phrase "car length" to not literally mean "length of a car" in this context. Apologies i…
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> One car length is way more than 15 feet to my mind, probably 40 feet or more depending on speed. A car length is, literally, the length of a car. It does not vary with speed. Exception: https:&#…
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So many strange and beautiful rabbit holes. Wikipedia claims Prince wrote the song Nothing Compares 2 U (famously covered by Sinéad O'Connor) about the author, Susannah Melvoin.