dmitrybrant

7 ms·

31.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
> without an action-reaction process. Just an energy source, and no propellant. Unfortunately, in our universe, momentum is conserved.
32.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Totally agree! I remember raising my eyebrow at ambiguities in math notation as early as high school, before I could articulate them as such. One specific example is the convention of cos^-1(x) referring to the inverse cosine of x, instead
33.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I haven't heard this term, either. I've always heard 5.25" floppies referred to as "diskettes", because they were a smaller diminutive version of 8" disks.
34.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Hang on... to go from "System32" to "System33" is one bit flip, but to go from "System33" to "System34" is three bit flips at once. Doesn't that seem astronomically more likely to be a malicious
35.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Yes, definitely. I feel a profound sense of despair when we purchase a mobile device with the most cutting-edge CPU and insane amount of memory, and proceed to saddle it with a bloated VM that's designed to guardrail and protect the de
36.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Exactly. I can admit that it would be sort of cool to be around Elon for a bit, just to have a good story for parties, even if it means staying past 1am at the office. But let's not pretend they're building something earth-shatter
37.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
And what exactly is the vision? Elon keeps changing it by the day. Twitter itself has already been built. What new thing would they be building? A slightly different content moderation system? Slightly tweaked steps for verifying accounts?
38.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
> Plumbing is easier than you think. Learn to do it yourself. Yep, same with electrical work around the house. Obviously not for everyone, but once you get past the initial hurdle of getting comfortable and safe with electricity, there&#
39.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Using that rule of thumb, you would successfully avoid Amanita virosa (destroying angel), but you could still get poisoned by Amanita phalloides (death cap) which has a pale-green cap. I don't endorse any rules-of-thumb for foraging, b
40.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
It's cultural knowledge passed down through generations. Mushroom foraging is super popular in Russia and other Slavic countries, and my grandmother taught me most of the fundamentals before we immigrated to the US, and I continued to
41.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
To be honest I don't recall the last time I've ever accidentally picked up a poisonous specimen along with the good ones I was intending to pick. At this point it's such second-nature that telling apart an edible vs. poisono
42.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I've been foraging mushrooms for 30+ years, and I triple-check every single specimen before cooking it. The idea of a novice forager using an app to identify mushrooms is... unconscionable! Like... breathtakingly stupid. I've comm
43.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I assume this is already being done, but I've had the following idea kicking around for a while: Create a simulation, down to the quantum states, of a lattice of molecules at a certain simulated temperature (say, room temperature), and
44.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I have similar issue, but with a different flavor: About 10 times per day I receive a blank email from an obviously throwaway spam account (e.g. vishal382190130 at gmail dot com) For the life of me I cannot understand the purpose or goal
45.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
This is possible only in very specific and controlled cases. We would need the original uncompressed footage, before Mike encoded it and published it as compressed video. It would also need to have been 16 bits per sample or greater, to p
46.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories: "Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly done it in 1969?"
47.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
> So just a Lisp interpreter for Android? A Lisp interpreter for a single specific ABI of Android, with which you communicate through a local web server. That's... one way to build an app!
48.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Needs to be 16-colors though, with that distinctive dithering effect.
49.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
It's from the Serbian word "čuda", which is pronounced "chuda". It means "miracles", and also occurs in many other Slavic languages (Russian "чуда", etc)
50.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I would never say that it's "impossible" for the U.S. to end up like Bosnia, but is rather unlikely, and I don't see many indicators for such a scenario within our lifetime. Knowing a bit about human nature, however, I&#
51.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
The author's experience during the Bosnian conflict was no doubt horrific, but translating it directly into an American context doesn't quite have the same effect. In the US, a lot of very different things would have to go wrong
52.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I'm not denying climate change, but that's... a bit hyperbolic, with a bunch of silly absolutes. Mass death everywhere ? Wildlife is thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.[1] The world has been getting greener with more plan
53.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I have a mostly Pinkerian view of the modern world, which is to say that by nearly all metrics, the world is better today than it has ever been, and is continuing to improve. Will we go through local minima while on the path towards absolut
54.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
Yes, that's generally true. Galaxies that are redshifted are moving very fast relative to us. But the only reason for them to be moving so fast is due to the expansion of the universe, and these galaxies being sufficiently far away.
55.
by dmitrybrant 4y ago
I stopped using Dropbox when it started asking if I want to back up every USB drive that I plug into my PC, and started to pollute my removable drives with a configuration file. (Because for some reason that's the only way it can kno
56.
Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi(dmitrybrant.com)
196 points by dmitrybrant 5y ago|38 comments
57.
by dmitrybrant 5y ago
One of my first tasks after a clean install of Windows is to disable any unnecessary services, including the Search Indexer. Not only do I disable the service itself, but I also explicitly remove all folders from the "indexed locations
58.
by dmitrybrant 5y ago
The author doesn't seem to take her own brilliance into account when composing these self-study guides. For the other 99.99% of us, it would take many lifetimes worth of free time to make a substantial dent in these materials. To me, g
59.
by dmitrybrant 5y ago
I definitely agree that computer programming is an art (as does Knuth and many others), and I believe that the emotions we feel when producing particularly clever bits of code are comparable to the emotions that a poet feels when writing pa
60.
by dmitrybrant 5y ago
Correct, all modern storage media perform plenty of internal ECC. That's basically what "bad sectors" means: the drive wasn't able to correct the data on that sector using ECC. The drive will never return the actual &quo

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