bloak

8 ms·

61.
by bloak 9mo ago
> Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. I have several times seen the claim that the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture lead to a lower quality of life. But do we really know how
62.
by bloak 9mo ago
But why does Costco pay more than Walmart rather than the other way around? (I don't know much about either company.)
63.
by bloak 9mo ago
Yes, but according to US punctuation law it is permitted to falsely attribute commas. I mean, they put the comma on the wrong side of the closing quotation mark where logically it does not belong.
64.
by bloak 9mo ago
But how does the "snail farm" scheme compare with the "place of worship" scheme? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/23/ye-of-littl...
65.
by bloak 9mo ago
Thank you for pointing that out. Also, according to Wiktionary, the first part, "hima", is cognate with English "hibernate" (snow and winter are close enough), and the second part, "alaya", is cognate with Engl
66.
by bloak 9mo ago
> the world's most popular OS Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way. (Of course it's hard to know how
67.
by bloak 9mo ago
This reference to Enid Blyton in that article seems somewhat misleading: "A month later, it was announced Enid Blyton's works would be expurgated as well." It's my understanding that the books released under the Enid Bly
68.
by bloak 10mo ago
I first saw that feature on a cheap Chromebook and was a bit surprised. But I suppose the more expensive machines have great battery life (for the first year or so) and the people who own them are too cool to use a cable.
69.
by bloak 10mo ago
That's my experience, too. Also the dented tin and the miniature mango. And, if the order is arriving at 10pm, the salad best before midnight.
70.
by bloak 10mo ago
I'm not sure about that. Maybe? But... Firstly, there are surprisingly many people who are insanely patriotic so would volunteer anyway (perhaps fewer than in the past but perhaps still enough; see point three). Secondly, there are sur
71.
by bloak 10mo ago
In British English en-dashes with spaces is more common than em-dashes without spaces, I think, but I don't have any data for that, just a general impression.
72.
by bloak 10mo ago
Never mind why you might want to rename the streets in this case, I would like a better understanding of why it is so difficult. A lot of the major users have access to the same postcode database. Is it possible for a street to have several
73.
'The admin': why it's not easy to rename streets called after Prince Andrew(theguardian.com)
4 points by bloak 10mo ago|2 comments
74.
by bloak 11mo ago
Apparently there are several, significantly different versions of "The picture of Dorian Gray". I'm not sure which one I've read, or which one I should read. Any suggestions?
75.
by bloak 11mo ago
Stone age ... or earlier? You mean from before the discovery of stone?!
76.
by bloak 11mo ago
A "defend or lose it" rule would have bad consequences, I suspect, except for certain types of lawyer who might benefit enormously. I think it might be better if the recipient of such vague threats were able to themselves initiate
77.
by bloak 11mo ago
But perhaps all languages have a countably infinite number of words, in which case that proof doesn't work. (In English we have: legless, leglessness, leglessnessless, leglessnesslessness, ... It's not a great example, but it&#x27
78.
by bloak 11mo ago
Same in Britain (except that the rejection of US coins is ... less curious). The funny thing is that sometimes they have these strange machines nearby that I have never seen anyone using[1] but which claim to be able to convert coins for yo
79.
by bloak 11mo ago
I don't know the history of it but I noticed that the currency of the Netherlands, before they switched to the euro, consistently used quarters: Coins: 0.05, 0.10, 0.25, 1, 2.5, 5 Bank notes: 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 OK, there seems to be
80.
by bloak 11mo ago
Talking about memorising numbers, one should definitely mention this well-known system which maps consonants to digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system With a system derived from that you can quite
81.
by bloak 1y ago
I'm a bit suspicious of that sort of claim. You can go through a list of people who got Nobel prizes and investigate their ancestry and argue that lots of those people were "Jewish" but nobody does that sort of investigation
82.
by bloak 1y ago
Then I am a victim of the Mandela Effect because I can clearly remember (time_t)1e9 happening earlier than that. I've checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... and I can't see
83.
by bloak 1y ago
Do you know why the British authorities wanted a birth certificate? Did his ZA passport show date and place of birth? Did the ZA birth certificate have some other information that the British authorities specifically wanted, like the names
84.
by bloak 1y ago
Germans definitely do have a sense of humour. They're not much different from the English in that respect. I'm not sure about Mercedes drivers, though.
85.
by bloak 1y ago
Fishermen may keep quiet about good fishing grounds for commercial reasons. Apparently Basque fishermen visited Greenland and Newfoundland shortly after 1492 and kept fairly quiet about it and it has been suggested that they went there befo
86.
by bloak 1y ago
I don't know about Russia but there seem to be loads of cases of people being arrested (or detained or harrassed by police) for holding up a blank piece of paper, including one case in Cornwall: https://netpol.org/2023&
87.
by bloak 1y ago
Nice, but I did one of the obvious things and looked for Geneva. Near the bottom left it says "Genève-Aéroport". Is that labelling the small portrait-format grey rectangle to the left of the larger landscape-format rectangle that
88.
by bloak 1y ago
> So another win for being able to read arm assembly. Yes, though that weird stuff with dollars in it is not normal AArch64 assembly! The article could have mentioned the "stack moves once" rule.
89.
by bloak 1y ago
Long-lasting transferable exclusive rights that will inevitably end up being owned by corporations could also be a problem, though, particularly when the lawyers are motivated to interpret them as broadly as possible so that it becomes dang
90.
by bloak 1y ago
> UK libel law routinely covers up all sorts of things which the public would benefit from having revealed, simply by the threat of an expensive lawsuit. It makes investigative journalism really uneconomic. But the worst horror stories d

More ›