brownbat

78 ms·

691.
by brownbat 9y ago
I think I subconsciously fell in love with Python because of something a bit silly... the bias towards keywords over symbols. I think there's some pattern recognition routine in my head that convinces itself we're reading prose, b
692.
by brownbat 9y ago
It's coming from Google Fit on Android Wear. I assume using accelerometer and possibly heartrate data, so should be available on most devices. Fair warning though... It's brilliant in some ways and alpha in others. I can't se
693.
by brownbat 9y ago
Oh true, I shouldn't have been so universal. I want every app to start thinking about voice ux, but that's probably down to the individual apps, and you're right that some do. I can play some things on Stitcher, say, though I
694.
by brownbat 9y ago
I found it annoying to strap a weight to one of my legs, or have it pound against me when sprinting. So cuffs and straps come into play, and the fun of choking off circulation, all while making it difficult to access any controls. And again
695.
by brownbat 9y ago
Wikipedia is going to have to lock a lot of pages.
696.
by brownbat 9y ago
Interesting points, it made me stumble on an article about how much USG regulations generally spend per life saved. Spoiler: it varies wildly. Writeup: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/blog/id/93/how-much-are
697.
by brownbat 9y ago
> Sounds complicated. Most gym rats I know just use pen and paper clipboards. I've done it both ways. Keeping track of paper and pen and taking notes is more complicated than just having something strapped to your wrist that does it
698.
by brownbat 9y ago
I've run a few miles with a phone and a shuffle before. I don't think it's the same experience as running with just a smartwatch. There's less dread that you're going to drop and destroy an expensive heavy device if
699.
by brownbat 9y ago
I felt the same way, outside of one particular situation. I tried running with a smartphone for a while. I was constantly afraid I would drop it. I tried armbands, pockets, sometimes I just carried a stopwatch and logged all my data in a sp
700.
by brownbat 9y ago
I use it for these things, they're ok. I occasionally try to get it to control an app, it usually fails, but that's my dream state: I'd like to be able to say, "Hey Google, open app X and do Y task." But I don'
701.
by brownbat 9y ago
It's not wholly unique to Japan. In retellings of the Trojan War, Ajax's bow is used to make him look less honorable than the swordsmen he kills. It's basically technophobia. Usually a dangerous bias, but if we can harness it
702.
by brownbat 9y ago
I wish more ISPs found ways to offer temporary unthrottled pipes. Maybe off-peak speed increases, or a button where you can give them an extra dollar for a faster hour.
703.
by brownbat 9y ago
Streaming 4k basically. It's definitely optional. But if you look at what most bandwidth goes to, it's streaming video. For games, latency now matters more. Bandwidth has just outstripped most use cases. Streaming HD music is triv
704.
by brownbat 9y ago
Sealabs pose novel engineering challenges, could provide experiments in sustainable enclosed habitats, wouldn't risk microgravity or radiation, but would risk high pressures. They'd also help species survivability in the event of
705.
by brownbat 9y ago
I'd be on board with you if we were talking about cars falling apart or actual maintenance. UX in radio receivers drive me crazy every day. Slightly non-symmetrical gaps in hardware I don't look at? Not really ever. And you'd
706.
by brownbat 9y ago
Immediately made me think of a question on the state of handwriting to LaTeX from a few years ago, and all the massive challenges involved: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/what-is-the-sta... Under API
707.
by brownbat 9y ago
Suppose you and I have an agreement to generate power for our neighboring households. We each have solar which works most the time, but if it's too cloudy and we're both using a little more, we'll each fire up some temporary
708.
by brownbat 9y ago
Trying to find more details on the specific political issue (ie, not the regional baseline, but the power issue in particular). Best I've got is an offhand sentence that Kosovo is using more power than it produces and Serbia refuses to
709.
by brownbat 9y ago
Hans Rosling tackles that question better than anyone in What Stops Population Growth: https://youtu.be/ZnexjTCBksw His first TED talk on the best data you've ever seen is also worth watching. It's an important qu
710.
by brownbat 9y ago
It depends what you value. Measured by capacity for processing information? Much better. Measured by incidence of cholera and dysentery? Much better. Measured by the net increase in sublime human experiences minus human suffering? Much bett
711.
by brownbat 9y ago
Agree adoptive parents are doing something great for a child in need, but I don't accept the Malthusian corollary you often see taken as granted, that having kids is a net cost on the planet. People in the '80s were certain we&#x2
712.
by brownbat 9y ago
It seems like we should see a bunch of people "voting with their feet." Trouble is that on net people are mostly moving out of California and New York and into places like South Carolina, Idaho, and Tennessee. http://ww
713.
by brownbat 9y ago
Most local air pollution, counterintuitively, doesn't even come from exhaust. Wear on tires, brakes, and the road each contribute more individually. There's another process called resuspension that dwarfs even these. Cars grind do
714.
by brownbat 9y ago
Can driverless taxi and quadcopter technology have a risky love child already and let us hurtle towards a future where roads are rare, landing pads are ubiquitous, and the swarm of rush hour commuters blots out the sun? C'mon Elon, get
715.
by brownbat 9y ago
> Households spiders eat all manner of pests! Fair, but that's a very different rubric than contemplated by the article. If your take is strongly influenced by utility, you might not necessarily object to eating lobsters in the firs
716.
by brownbat 9y ago
Those are great questions. Especially provocative point about how mobile devices would most likely be leeches in a p2p world. The world wants easy to use mobiles. A system like this may need to constrain leeches. There will be some tension
717.
by brownbat 9y ago
Almost like health insurance is some kind of Giffen good, or like some other economic sink, gobbling up alternative destinations for resources. Here's some random critical analysis on the topic: https://randomcriticalanalysi
718.
by brownbat 9y ago
Great reference. I will note that he seems to shrug, especially in footnote 19, as if to confess that whether lobsters feel pain or merely express reflexes is basically unknowable, not for any lack of humans trying to figure it out. He seem
719.
by brownbat 9y ago
> "switch the voice UI into editing mode or something" It still really bugs me how bad UI systems are at error correction. We have a series of conventions to do this efficiently in spoken English, inflections, quick utterances
720.
by brownbat 9y ago
I wish they would consider GiveWell, which has applied. GW is in the business of evaluating the effectiveness of charitable giving to maximize impact. If you have a bunch of money to give away, it's probably tempting to think you can o

More ›