jandrese

34 ms·

721.
by jandrese 1y ago
"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." Most of the time we make predictions based on how similar events happened in the past. For completely novel situations it's close to impossible to make a pr
722.
by jandrese 1y ago
No offense, but this way of thinking is the domain of comic book supervillains. "I must destroy the world in order to save it." Morality is only holding me back from maximizing the value of the human race 1,000 or 1,000,000 year
723.
by jandrese 1y ago
One example is Newcomb's problem. It presupposes a ridiculous scenario where a godlike being acts irrationally and then people try to base their life around "winning" the game that will never ever happen to them.
724.
by jandrese 1y ago
They remind me of the "Effective Altruism" crowd who get completely wound up in these hypothetical logical thought exercises and end up coming to insane conclusions that they feel trapped in because they got there using pure logic
725.
by jandrese 1y ago
Worst case you can open it up in Paint and save as JPEG. Also, I just checked and Powerpoint has no problem dropping in a webp image. Gimp opens it just fine. You are right that web forums are often well behind the times on this.
726.
by jandrese 1y ago
From what I've seen WebP is probably the strongest contender for a JPEG replacement. It's pretty common in the indie game scene for example to re-encode a JPEG game to WebP for better image quality and often a significant (25% or
727.
by jandrese 1y ago
This doesn't seem practical at all. The combinatoral explosion would make the storage requirements impractical for everything but the absolutely most trivial cases like incrementing a number as the very last digit. Even in your simpl
728.
by jandrese 1y ago
The problem with Mars is that if something goes wrong you can't just "fly back on the rocket". The launch windows are 2 years apart. You either fix it in place or you die.
729.
by jandrese 1y ago
IMHO there are only 2 requirements for a good password: 1. It must be close to impossible for a computer to guess. 2. It must be easy for a human to remember. Virtually all password policies focus exclusively on point #1, with the vast majo
730.
by jandrese 1y ago
I like the ones that not only keep a history of your old passwords but will reject any password that is similar to any of your 30 previous passwords, which means they're storing either a plaintext or reversibly encrypted list of ever
731.
by jandrese 1y ago
Alpha Centauri is a triple star system with no habitable planets. Why in the hell would you go there? Sending people to another solar system is so resource intensive that assuming you can convert the entirety of Jupiter into some kind of
732.
by jandrese 1y ago
> Like, building a fully self-sustainable underwater city or moon base would be far more in reach. It feels that SpaceX should start with prototyping these safer alternatively before overreaching to something 100x more challenging and da
733.
by jandrese 1y ago
If your travel involves the Rocket Equation the answer is no. If you are limited by the speed of light and the lifetime of human civilization then the expansion of the universe is not an issue. Traveling between nearby solar systems is ve
734.
by jandrese 1y ago
More to the point the ship needs to be absolutely self sufficient, it can't even use solar power and has no access to outside mass whatsoever. But if you have a ship like this you could build an orbital habitat using the same technolo
735.
by jandrese 1y ago
It's one of those cases where you have very small numbers multiplied by very large ones. The actual risk is hard to intuit because there are so many orders of magnitude involved in both directions. In any case it's probably a moo
736.
by jandrese 1y ago
Sabine is an asshole. Doesn't mean she is wrong, and I appreciate when she reads some paper that has made a bunch of headlines to figure out if they're full of crap or not (spoiler alert: the answer is usually yes), but while she
737.
by jandrese 1y ago
> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves" The Government person who signed this contract should be fired. While this is somewhat forgivable on fixed bases wh
738.
by jandrese 1y ago
These days something like MusicBrainz is effectively a legacy system. So few people buy CDs anymore that there's not a lot of interest in maintaining it. It's fairly hard to even find a computer with an optical disk reader these
739.
by jandrese 1y ago
Depends how long it takes you to figure out what the problems are and fixing them. Debugging is usually harder than coding, and the amount of data we are talking about is fairly small. Just typing it in could easily be faster.
740.
by jandrese 1y ago
I do find it amusing that people still say that women are "too emotional" to hold the job while Trump is throwing temper tantrums and making knee jerk proclamations almost daily on Truth Social.
741.
by jandrese 1y ago
There is another monkeywrench in road funding. Use taxes are mostly from fuel taxes, which electric vehicles don't pay. As the vehicle fleet electrifies that gap will need to be covered somehow.
742.
by jandrese 1y ago
Multitasking DOS apps is always a minefield. Most DOS apps are expecting to have total control of any aspect of the machine they want, so if they're suddenly being asked to share it's bad news. This is why DOS stuff is all virtu
743.
by jandrese 1y ago
Your electric utility could be doing this if they were more forward thinking and installed grid scale batteries, but that's not their business model so they don't do it.
744.
by jandrese 1y ago
Use taxes cover about 36%[1] of road construction and maintenance, the rest comes out of the general budget. If they were raised to cover all of the costs driving would be unaffordable to many people. Or at the very least Americans would
745.
by jandrese 1y ago
> It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation. If there is no usable public transit then people have to use cars. But
746.
by jandrese 1y ago
Many political pundits are still convinced that it's not possible to elect a woman as US president. Thus far the two that have tried have both managed to lose to Donald Trump.
747.
by jandrese 1y ago
More riders than the commuter trains in over half of the states .
748.
by jandrese 1y ago
The article talks about stress relief when it went down the rabbit hole of tiny mom & pop mills who were turning their kilns off every night because they didn't have a third shift and later discovering that turning them off periodi
749.
by jandrese 1y ago
R&S equipment is pretty common in the cellular industry. There is more of it out there than you would think. While this particular signal generator is maybe not the most common piece of equipment you will see lots of R&S spectrum
750.
by jandrese 1y ago
Yeah, the laws against subliminal advertising were written in a rather knee jerk reaction to the creepiness of the entire concept instead of as a result of careful study and analysis. How effective is it? We don't know, but there is n

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