cesarb

62 ms·

901.
by cesarb 3y ago
> Tangent: what does an airplane's autopilot do? I always assumed it was basically doing lane-keeping within virtual flight-path lanes we've drawn in the sky. It's even simpler than that: a basic autopilot can keep a set h
902.
by cesarb 3y ago
It's actually the same link, only that this one didn't go through some random translation service. But yeah, it means that both HN's duplicate detector and a quick search to see if the link has already been posted wouldn&#x27
903.
by cesarb 3y ago
In the same vein, I heard in a recent The Tim Traveller video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SQVIZxUrDg ) that a third of the power produced from the coal excavated from one mine was used to power the excavators from that
904.
by cesarb 3y ago
The only native controls on Windows are the classic Win16/Win32 controls, accept no substitutes (not even that new-fangled comctl32 thing).
905.
by cesarb 3y ago
> I can't believe that modern computers cost less than a car. A car weighs around a ton or more, while a modern computer weighs only a few kilograms; I'd expect the raw material costs alone to be enough to make the car much mor
906.
by cesarb 3y ago
> Smartphones have 8GB ram now. I took a quick look at the site of a major retailer here, and the first smartphone I clicked on (Moto E22) has 4GB of RAM; I then clicked on five other smartphone models, and of them, three also have 4GB o
907.
by cesarb 3y ago
> As do Windows and Linux Just to nitpick, on Linux it depends on your distribution (or yourself) having enabled zram; some modern distributions enable it by default on recent releases, but yours might not have.
908.
by cesarb 3y ago
> So, I can load a 12GB file into memory without swapping? It depends on the file. With memory compression (which the article says they have), as long as the file is compressible enough (for instance, a repetitive text-only log file), yo
909.
by cesarb 3y ago
> It’s strange because wind is supposedly overwhelmingly cheaper and better There's two kinds of wind power: onshore and offshore. Their costs are different, with onshore being cheaper. The ones in Brazil are all onshore, while the
910.
by cesarb 3y ago
It's the same crate, it just changed its name at some point in its history. I still refer to it through its former name by force of habit.
911.
by cesarb 3y ago
> whereas with solar you ain't generating any at night, no matter what. Nitpicking: that's only the case for photovoltaics. Solar thermal can store the heat for a while, and keep generating even after the sun goes down.
912.
by cesarb 3y ago
> The problem with this 90% solution is that the more renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is required to cover the capacity. That can be the case only if the demand also increases. If the demand stays the same, adding mor
913.
by cesarb 3y ago
The same for Java, since its ecosystem has an allergy to calling native (non-JVM) code, to the point of rewriting perfectly good libraries in Java. When they do call native code, it's often in horrible ways (like copying a native libra
914.
by cesarb 3y ago
> It works in Rust because the build.rs lets libraries do whatever they want during the build process, including invoking compilers for other languages. And also there's a helper library (the "gcc" crate) which does all th
915.
by cesarb 3y ago
Yes, and it's already done today; for instance, in Brazil these high power transmission lines transport wind power from the northeast region (which has lots of wind due to favorable geography) to the southeast region (where most of the
916.
by cesarb 3y ago
> I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly" requirement, because the simple answer is going to be "natural g
917.
by cesarb 3y ago
> i.e. LOCK XCHG with the Intel mnemonics. Didn't all XCHG with memory operands have an implicit LOCK prefix on Intel 8086?
918.
by cesarb 3y ago
> The latest Mockito works with Java 21 That was not the case a couple of days ago when I last looked; I see now that they released Mockito 5.7.0 two days ago, which probably fixes this issue. But that still shows my point: for every new
919.
by cesarb 3y ago
> This is a device driver. If it has to talk to memory-mapped hardware This is an IPC "device driver". It does not talk to any hardware, it's used to pass messages between processes.
920.
by cesarb 3y ago
> What do Rust enums do that C enums don't? In Rust, an enum can also carry data along with the tag, and the type of the data can be different for each value of the tag. A Rust enum is more like a "tagged union" (a struct
921.
by cesarb 3y ago
> The slow rate of change is arguably the biggest selling point for Java. Unfortunately, since Java 9 the rate of change seems to have increased a lot. > You don't need to waste time on language churn, can spend the entire time b
922.
by cesarb 3y ago
> What percentage of car drivers are fully qualified vehicle inspectors? AFAIK, all car drivers are required to go through specialized training, and pass through periodic skill examinations. You should not be (and are legally forbidden f
923.
by cesarb 3y ago
> > I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004 [...] > If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their min
924.
by cesarb 3y ago
> four characters in its file extension You are not looking close enough. While Java source code has four characters in its file extension (.java), the output of its bytecode compiler has five characters in its file extension (.class).
925.
by cesarb 3y ago
> origin/master is just a file on your system Unless it's a packed ref ( https://git-scm.com/docs/git-pack-refs ), in which case it's just a line in the packed-refs file.
926.
by cesarb 3y ago
> There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance. You only need one large lake (or a place which can be dammed to create one); the other one can be completely artificial, w
927.
by cesarb 3y ago
And even if you do have a Google account, you might not want to log into YouTube with it; for instance, I recall reading that logging into YouTube with your Google account required you to put your real name into it, and if for some reason G
928.
by cesarb 3y ago
There were also some motherboards with shitty UEFI implementations which got bricked when the efivars storage did not have enough free space to do the garbage collection. The kernel "fixed" this by not allowing more than half of t
929.
by cesarb 3y ago
> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off. It goes further than that, on many motherboards even a failed firmware update can be fixed through a random USB stick from the drawer, you just need the right BIOS
930.
by cesarb 3y ago
> Brick usually means unfixable without an EEPROM replacement or data loss. The definition of "bricked" is not set in stone; a lot of what a normal person would consider "bricked" (doesn't turn on, or turns on to

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