astrobe_

78 ms·

871.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Every time I hear about doomsday bunkers I think of Megadeth's Polaris lyrics (1990) [1], in particular: Bomb shelters filled to the brim Survival such a silly whim [1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/megadet
872.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
A bit late, but bytes are very often the smallest addressable unit. That's why they are "special". Which answers your second question: "bitstreams" would be terrible because they are not well connected with a hard
873.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
> Because of the monopoly created by the insurmountable task of building a competitive alternative And if you go for a competitive alternative based on a more sane stack than HTML/CSS/JS/..., then you cannot compete with t
874.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
In the end, integers, floating point numbers, "text\n", emojis etc. are just sequences of bytes. You choose to acknowledge it and take advantage of it, or you don't.
875.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
> All clients look terrible And that's the most useful statement in the document.
876.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Not even one year, if it is about niche knowledge that require accuracy. Schools don't teach formulas. That's the misunderstanding of a student that only sees the next exam. Schools teach you where to look when you don't have
877.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
I think what defines a generation is what people saw and remember, not directly years. From a European perspective, Boomers saw the first step on the Moon and May 68 events, their children ("Gen X") saw Chernobyl, the end of the C
878.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
How does this work? Is the application required to call realloc() on its object in order to let the defragmentation happen (and the the application has to update all of its references manually)?
879.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
That's a bit unfair, because this comment was obviously not addressed to the mere mortal. For you family member, a "how to" with a lot of screenshots and red arrows is probably more appropriate.
880.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Just because it is not the answer you were expecting doesn't mean it is useless. People that give you what you ask for are not always your best friends.
881.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
> But the default answer to the question "how do I have seamless transition between my desktop and my phone" The "modern" answer is "don't do that". There is a time to play social games, there is a time
882.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
I have a Razor Nostromo too, and I remember at some point I discovered it was Belkin hardware (perhaps in the name of some driver). I believe Belkin licensed it to Razor. I was gifted one because I asked for a separate keypad for gaming. Pr
883.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Transitivity is not an issue: "obéir à ses instincts" and "suivre ces instincts". So "s'incrire à" is not incorrect per se , e.g. "s'inscrire à des cours de danse". Even, you must say &quot
884.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
A synonym for "open source".
885.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
It is a "scaling" problem. At small scales, yes, human time can be more valuable than computer time. At large scales, humans will sacrifice their own time to make computers work faster. The problem is with intermediate scale, wher
886.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
My ambivalence exactly. The user in likes plain text for its accessibility and flexibility, but the programmer in me dislike it for its gross inefficiency. Does some sort of general data compiler/decompiler exist? Please don't say
887.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
I think being interested in programming or not is pretty much like sexual preferences: there's nothing you can do about it, and it is not their fault ;-).
888.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
It looks like a case of analysis paralysis. Customize on use, not upfront. When I write personal tools (throw-away scripts, more long-lived utilities etc.), it is not rare that I change my mind about how they should work after using them
889.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
That's because for FAT, erasing a file just means flagging the file allocation table entry as deleted, which normally makes the filesystem software put the linked list of sectors pointed by this entry back to the free sectors list (I&#
890.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
I don't think the fact that the author does recyclable (re-editable) code on top of reusable code is relevant. What matters is what you choose to keep under your control. If you use a black-box library you lose control over the semanti
891.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Neither. I recall that the first thing that jumped out at me was that Chuck's code didn't have all those layers that my code had. There was the abstracted code on top and the hardware drivers on the bottom and very little in betw
892.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
"Paradigm" is a conveniently abstract word. I would say that RPN is part of a paradigm - and if you pardon my bias I would say the Forth paradigm, really. The stack is part of a strategy of complexity reduction that start at the c
893.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Not exactly roguelikes, but MUDs [1] are multiplayer games with a roguelike feel, but they are more like the ancestors of MMORPGs, TBH. A telnet program should basically be enough to start playing. There are some "MUD client" prog
894.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
> dragging each handle in different directions affected the shape’s position and size in a different way The cause of the duplication itself is probably wrong: why would you do it in different ways? Treating ovals and rectangles the same
895.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
I don't disagree, but I think it sort of illustrates the fact that using the term "bug" for documentation mistakes is a bit too non-standard, even though I used it myself.
896.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Except that an MMO with millions of players could become a good weapon in the case of a cyber-warfare. This has been done before with AVs.
897.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Most likely, but manuals have bugs too like typos and missing information.
898.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
Since I'm no historian, psychologist, etc. I have always believed that great migrations were caused by local population pressure - id est too few resources for too many people. Even Columbus stumbled upon Americas because he was look
899.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
> Why would they stop at thousands of colonies Why would we stop at a hundred of colonies? A couple of observations: - in rich countries, the trend is that the birth rate is declining, the population gets "older". There seems
900.
by astrobe_ 7y ago
It is also a bit less easy to throw hardware at a problem when your software is actually embedded firmware. Upgrading or adding hardware reduces your profit per unit. But TBH in this particular field Moore's law still rules. Sometimes

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