AlisdairO

12 ms·

61.
by AlisdairO 6y ago
Yeah, I think a lot of that comes down to whether you enjoy his writing style. I would read what Stephenson writes even if it's devoid of ideas, just for the joy of the style. For myself, the scene where he describes Randy eating break
62.
by AlisdairO 6y ago
Yeah, to add to this: the best year of my working life, I got an average review. I just happened to be an expert in a bunch of tech that my team had forced on them, ramped them all up, and generally contributed a bunch. And I failed to comm
63.
by AlisdairO 6y ago
I'd been sort-of considering buying this for a while and the coupon made me pull the trigger. Thanks!
64.
by AlisdairO 6y ago
Diamond age was glorious (although I think possibly Stephenson's worst ratio of beginning:ending quality), but I adore Cryptonomicon.
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by AlisdairO 6y ago
I would never take that bet, obviously. I haven't known you for 16 years, and I can't read you like a book ;-)
66.
by AlisdairO 6y ago
Fwiw when playing my wife at rock paper scissors I once won over 20 times in a row. The odds against this happening randomly are pretty extreme - but I know her very well and can read her well enough that it was possible. I think it's
67.
by AlisdairO 7y ago
Have you tried higher quality butters? The difference is palpable, and can be easily picked out by uneducated palates under blind conditions. Whether this butter is that noticeably different to other super high grade butters I wouldn't
68.
by AlisdairO 7y ago
For anyone living in Canada (which has a serious lack of quality dairy products), I'd heartily recommend Emerald Grasslands butter. It's superb. Grass fed, Jersey cows, fantastic flavour.
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
Because not everyone who gets vaccinated gets immunity. So those who don't vaccinate also risk the health of those people.
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
> People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If A
71.
by AlisdairO 7y ago
Because most people didn't realise that an older battery would cause their phone to slow down with zero notification. They just see that they have an old device that's slow, and assume it's too old to perform well with modern
72.
by AlisdairO 7y ago
It was definitely satire. Adequacy.org as a whole was generally in that vein. It caught a lot of bait on the Lunix article though :-)
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
Yes, they do now. They didn't then.
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
The solution seems straightfoward to me. Slow down the phone, and output a message saying 'this iPhone is being slowed down due to an old battery. Replace the battery to restore performance'. Then have a warning sign on the batter
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
Whistleblowers in the US are almost universally abused by the system. If the US wants whistleblowers to stick around, it should consider treating them with the kind of respect they deserve. It's crazy to me that in all the talk of puni
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by AlisdairO 7y ago
Uk, which does this properly, has a vastly lower rate.
77.
by AlisdairO 8y ago
If they're algorithmically the same, that's true, otherwise not. Caching computations takes space, but can drastically speed up runtime performance.
78.
by AlisdairO 8y ago
(self plug) take a look at pgexercises.com . It's Postgres-focused but mostly cross-platform, and I think it covers most of the important stuff.
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by AlisdairO 8y ago
> What do you want them to do, make the device unusable? I want them to say (as you do mention) 'hey, your device has been slowed down because your battery is old. Get it replaced to restore full performance'. I'd absolute
80.
by AlisdairO 8y ago
no, but if my phone is going to massively slow down I want to know why so that I can correct it, rather than being left in the dark and ending up buying a new phone for no good reason.
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by AlisdairO 8y ago
(self plug) you might want to give pgexercises.com a go. It takes you from beginner up to somewhat advanced with exercises that you can run in the browser.
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by AlisdairO 8y ago
pleasure, glad you both found it useful :-)
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by AlisdairO 8y ago
(self plug) pgexercises.com provides something like this. The code is open source, anyone is welcome to fork and populate with new data like this.
84.
by AlisdairO 8y ago
This is a fantastic book - the name doesn't do it justice.
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by AlisdairO 8y ago
(self plug) try pgexercises.com. It's in a very similar vein to windowfunctions - I understand it was one of the original inspirations - but it covers a much wider range of material, with a gradual growth from very basic stuff up to sl
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by AlisdairO 9y ago
Thank you for using it - it's great to know they've been helpful :-)
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by AlisdairO 9y ago
Hope you find them useful!
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by AlisdairO 9y ago
Pleasure - glad you found it useful :-)
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by AlisdairO 9y ago
(self plug) I made https://pgexercises.com/ a while back to help people learn SQL in a learn-by-doing exercise format. You can run the queries in the browser, so it's easy to just to an exercise when you have a spare f
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by AlisdairO 9y ago
> They no longer actually produce anything This is not true. IBM produces a ton of software (spanning a range from terrible to excellent, quality-wise). This is where much of their profit comes from now. They still produce a bunch of ha

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