jtolmar

35 ms·

331.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Be someone that you like and respect. Then be yourself. The usual platitude skips all the hard prep work required for "be yourself" to actually be good advice.
332.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Has anyone discredited the old deaths per kilowatt hour metric? [1] If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they recei
333.
by jtolmar 8y ago
The GPS unit needs to figure out the locations of all the satellites before it can use them to figure out your positions. The satellite positions are expressed as a function of time, and the times used are measured in seconds within the cur
334.
by jtolmar 8y ago
There's an edge case in the GPS spec that only comes up every 20 years. It's well-documented and everything, but it only comes up every 20 years and software is terrible, so not every GPS unit is going to handle it well. Last time
335.
by jtolmar 8y ago
The amount of labor necessary to satisfy basic needs has went down significantly over the last hundred years, but the amount of labor needed to afford satisfying basic needs has not. A successful strategy for full automation would see work
336.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Cuba is doing better than most other Caribbean countries despite an embargo by one of the biggest economies in the world.
337.
by jtolmar 8y ago
You could design taxes specifically aimed at lowering the appeal of landlordism, for example a high property tax (or LVT) with a deduction for your primary residence. This would encourage people to sell off buildings that aren't their
338.
by jtolmar 8y ago
There are six times more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. This is not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.
339.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Riffing on this, what about Zelda-like games /with/ foreknowledge? Let's say the game has items that serve as unique keys (like boss keys or the hammer), items that serve as interchangeable keys (like regular keys or triforce
340.
by jtolmar 8y ago
If you have some control over when a GC triggers you could sneak one in during hitstun.
341.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Energy is conserved (under normal conditions) so everything is 100% efficient if you want to include waste heat. However, "efficiency" is actually a value judgement. You probably want to heat something specific, so you're goi
342.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Power accrues to whoever has power. That's the primary use of power.
343.
by jtolmar 8y ago
> Is there a causal linkage between student loan debt and the rich getting richer? The lenders are rich. That's how lending works - you have money (are rich) so you lend it now for more later (get richer).
344.
by jtolmar 8y ago
This is very hostile to people who use screen readers.
345.
by jtolmar 8y ago
> pneumatics - that stuff is still pricey for some reason To hazard a guess, Lego's pneumatic sets tend to use just a couple pistons, while hobbyists buying the stuff want to do entire pneumatic-centric builds with many of them. Als
346.
by jtolmar 8y ago
The IWW.
347.
by jtolmar 8y ago
There are various studies of defect density (bugs per 1000 lines of code) versus whatever factor someone thought would influence bugs. "Software defect density" seem to be the magic search terms for finding actual studies instead
348.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Automation replaces the need for labor with a need for capital. That's labor in the form of whatever has been automated (by definition of automation), and capital in the form of machines, software, or whatever - it's capital if yo
349.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Don't use money to distribute things needed for basic human existence. Throw out all your ideas about economics and politics. You want as many people as possible to have a comfortable enough life to pursue things they find fulfilling w
350.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Software engineers would have extreme (maybe unprecedented?) striking power. It's an industry where the workers are needed for both interviewing and training, so hiring scabs would be extremely hard. Management knows that already, so t
351.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Video games are a hobby, my day job is GPS algorithms. More of the list is relevant for those than you might think. Most of my games have been done in Java or Javascript.
352.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Here's some other senior dev's list: Don't know: start with Dan's list, it has many similarities. I know more Bash, but not enough to write a shell script more complex than my aliases file. I vaguely know z80 and 6502 as
353.
by jtolmar 8y ago
It depends on how broad of a brush you're painting with when you say "this technology." Neural network based or neural network enhanced rendering techniques are certainly going to get applied to movie CGI. This specific adver
354.
by jtolmar 8y ago
* Physics Simulation - I wrote 2D physics from scratch for this game http://noisyowl.com/disks/ and the ability to actually use the implementation of the physics engine as part of how you solve design problems was abso
355.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Facebook's value as a company is related to the total value of its users, not its total value to its users.
356.
by jtolmar 8y ago
The best solution is to learn graphic design. Most engineers make the similar mistakes when starting out, so here's a cheat sheet: * Your colors are too saturated, desaturate everything. (If you're using LCH, make 50 chroma your d
357.
by jtolmar 8y ago
"People will come up with reasons the system they live under is the laws of nature," probably is a law of (human) nature, though.
358.
by jtolmar 8y ago
It's a shame. A lot of people on this website would love Syndicalism but can't conceive of it because a pro-market anti-capitalist ideology doesn't make sense to them.
359.
by jtolmar 8y ago
Can you imagine the bargaining power that tech workers would have if they unionized? Our industry relies on tech workers for training and hiring, so hiring scabs during a strike would be basically impossible.
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by jtolmar 8y ago
Additionally, if we brought back meta-unions like the IWW, which were able to negotiate multiple industries in parallel and cause policy changes, then unions wouldn't have to resort to holding on to unnecessary jobs to protect the live

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