jhbadger

4 ms·

1.
by jhbadger 5d ago
I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
2.
by jhbadger 5d ago
The US is weird in that we can't really decide if you are an adult at 16 (can work a standard job, can drive), 18 (can vote, can serve in the military) or 21 (can drink). In fact for a while between the Vietnam War and the late 1980s,
3.
by jhbadger 5d ago
It starts out that way, but moves more into the viewpoint that the American university system is several things bundled together that are coming apart and AI is only part of the issue (others are just the Internet in general creating a para
4.
by jhbadger 6d ago
Mel Brooks also lessened the effect of Blazing Saddles by reusing a lot of the gags in other of his movies -- like the joke where dramatic music is played and the characters look around wondering where the music is coming from, implying tha
5.
by jhbadger 6d ago
I think the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on rivers manages it nicely, with no confusion with aqueducts: "A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside caves towards another body of water at a lower el
6.
by jhbadger 6d ago
>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't dr
7.
by jhbadger 7d ago
That's a huge number given that there were only 26 in total, and many of them had historically used Cyrillic anyway. Basically everybody who weren't Russian (or a close relative) switched.
8.
by jhbadger 8d ago
I think it is true in general at least for people older than their twenties. People who have gotten divorced dread getting back into the dating scene.
9.
by jhbadger 9d ago
True. But they were still kind of addictive (at least to me)
10.
by jhbadger 9d ago
There was also Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures which used the same engine. Both were rather harshly reviewed at the time for being "pointless" - presumably the reviewers didn't like the random generation - while "rogue&
11.
by jhbadger 10d ago
Some people might actually prefer physical books and are making an informed decision, but I suspect more simply haven't experienced e-books, or only have tried on a suboptimal device like their phone and just assume that e-books are an
12.
by jhbadger 14d ago
The Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point --
13.
by jhbadger 14d ago
Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting
14.
by jhbadger 14d ago
The difference is some taboos are just based on tradition, and others are based on actual damage. Nobody is hurt by seeing someone walking and eating -- they can just not look at them and the problem is solved. You can't not just hear
15.
by jhbadger 14d ago
I think it started in 2000 when Al Gore who clearly won the election was discarded in favor of Dubya thanks to a biased Supreme Court.
16.
by jhbadger 14d ago
I think you are vastly exaggerating the power of a few nerds -- the vast majority of people have never heard of Gamergate. I'm a nerd and even I only vaguely heard about it at the time.
17.
by jhbadger 14d ago
Logo is a serious programming language. People maybe only know it as the thing to teach kids programming via turtle graphics, but people like Brian Harvey at Berkley have used it to teach functional programming rather than Lisp or Scheme.
18.
by jhbadger 14d ago
Not to mention numerous ex-Soviet countries have replaced their Cyrillic system for Latin ones to demonstrate their independence from Russian colonialism.
19.
by jhbadger 15d ago
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people mu
20.
by jhbadger 15d ago
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily
21.
by jhbadger 16d ago
It literally is a reference to the Japanese hobby of collecting bugs and making them fight each other, so yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_fighting
22.
by jhbadger 16d ago
Yeah -- I remember in old (1960s) TV shows and movies the headquarters of organizations would always have a map like that, often huge on one wall. It makes sense -- why not just peel the Earth like an orange and flatten it out?
23.
by jhbadger 17d ago
It really was. Outside the nerdosphere, articles about fictional people or places in TV, movies or games were widely mocked and seen as "unprofessional" -- people were saying if Wikipedia needed to be more like Britannica if it wa
24.
by jhbadger 17d ago
The problem was in the early days when people were still mocking the idea of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, journalists would snark about how (for example) the article on Captain Kirk was longer than some historical figure. So you can see ho
25.
by jhbadger 17d ago
Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic and who wanted his religion in LOTR to not contradict his own, literally had minor gods (the Valar). He squared that with his Catholicism because he had them subordinate to Ilúvatar (God), much like how sa
26.
by jhbadger 22d ago
I'm just saying it's analogous to Long John Silver's parrot saying "Walk the plank!" - the agents involved can't possibly understand what they are saying.
27.
by jhbadger 22d ago
I think that sounds scarier than it is because while it sounds like language evil hyperintelligent AIs would use in science fiction, that's presumably where they got these descriptions as they've been trained on "shadow lib
28.
by jhbadger 22d ago
Nearly all languages designed for mathematics are 1-based - R, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. because that's the mathematical convention and allows using formulas directly. The fact that Python isn't is a drawback in the domain.
29.
by jhbadger 23d ago
I think you miss the point of Star Trek, it, even more than most SF, isn't "really" about the future fictional or otherwise -- it is using the tropes of SF to make commentary on our society through analogy. That being said, I
30.
by jhbadger 24d ago
Maybe, but these are pretty famous writers and artists. I'm sure we would care today if say, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald had locked away some works 88 years ago.

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