mark-r

5 ms·

31.
by mark-r 5mo ago
If you blow up a satellite, half of it will end up going slower and half will go faster. The slower bits will probably burn up nicely, but the faster bits will just elevate their orbit.
32.
by mark-r 6mo ago
Automatic conversion to 1-bit has been available since the 1980's. The trick is to do it artfully.
33.
by mark-r 6mo ago
The biggest problem was when there was an established protocol, but it wasn't always followed. I remember scroll bars being the worst. Usually you could respond to the messages and everything would work the way you want, but there we
34.
by mark-r 6mo ago
I honestly don't know if Qt would have made it any easier. But this was a large and old app that relied on Win32 at its core, and nobody was going to accept rewriting it for just one feature. Plus our customers were very time sensiti
35.
by mark-r 6mo ago
But it wasn't just one window, there were lots of controls on that window and the relationship between them wasn't as obvious as you'd assume. Trust me, recreating the whole thing from scratch was easier. The fun part was ma
36.
by mark-r 6mo ago
I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new
37.
by mark-r 6mo ago
I wonder if I got Alzheimer's so bad that I couldn't remember my kids names, would I still be able to juggle? And would it be therapeutic in any way?
38.
by mark-r 6mo ago
I know mine sure did! As a kid I was totally uncoordinated, always the last one to be picked for any sports teams. But I definitely noticed the difference when I picked up juggling as a young adult.
39.
by mark-r 6mo ago
But where's the fun in that? Chasing the balls is half the challenge! Seriously, knowing the balls are going to roll away if you drop them gives you some incentive to do it right. I think I used tennis balls early on.
40.
by mark-r 6mo ago
That's circular logic. It's the demand from LLMs that are driving the DRAM shortage.
41.
by mark-r 7mo ago
It's theoretically related to color blindness, so you'd expect it to be as common. But the problem is even if your eye has the extra primary, your brain may not have developed the ability to "see" it. They had to test
42.
by mark-r 7mo ago
The bioaccumulate part I understand, for the body to eliminate something it has to bind to it somehow. Tough to do if the chemical won't react with anything. I'm not sure what "biologically inert" means specifically. A
43.
by mark-r 7mo ago
It took me about a second to realize the link took you to a list of articles. It took another second to realize the article referenced was second in the list.
44.
by mark-r 7mo ago
I've never understood one vital thing - if PFAS is by nature totally inert and unreactive, how is it harmful? If you drank a glass of the stuff, what would happen?
45.
by mark-r 7mo ago
One Google feature that I think is killing the internet is actually useful in this case - the AI summary. If your vital information is on a platform that I will never join, I can't see it directly. But Google can, and many times I ca
46.
by mark-r 7mo ago
You can combine the Sieve and Wheel techniques to reduce the memory requirements dramatically. There's no need to use a bit for numbers that you already know can't be prime. You can find a Python implementation at https:/&
47.
by mark-r 7mo ago
So are those just regular bookcases that the computers are stacked on?
48.
by mark-r 7mo ago
They've always said you spend a lot more time reading code than writing it. If suddenly you're writing a lot more code, you're going to spend a ton more time reading it.
49.
by mark-r 7mo ago
There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them w
50.
by mark-r 8mo ago
And so people learn to not make noise. And another broken system remains entrenched, forever.
51.
by mark-r 8mo ago
Tetrachromats from my understanding don't see more of the spectrum, they just have better discrimination of the colors within it.
52.
by mark-r 8mo ago
There's something that tends to go unrecognized, a function of the way our monitors work. Any color that is made of multiple primaries, such as magenta, cyan, or yellow, will naturally be brighter because more photons are emitted from
53.
by mark-r 8mo ago
In the US they've even banned selling new old stock. I believe that was a recent change within the last few years.
54.
by mark-r 9mo ago
Back in the 1970's I tried to come up with a metric time system by breaking a day into powers of 10. A centiDay was 14.4 minutes. I realized it would never catch on, because a 30 minute TV show would have to fit into 28.8 minutes, and
55.
by mark-r 9mo ago
Grace Hopper used to hand out pieces of wire to represent nanoseconds. She used pepper to represent picoseconds.
56.
by mark-r 9mo ago
I was able to do something similar by using gross approximations and conversions to/from metric. My coworker had just bought a surplus stainless steel water tank for solar heating, and was wondering how much it would weigh when full.
57.
by mark-r 9mo ago
I love the way 360 (degrees) divides evenly by so many small integers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15.
58.
by mark-r 9mo ago
We may get there eventually just as a consequence of being part of the world economy. I noticed a couple of years back that my "U.S. Customary" wrenches weren't fitting my new plumbing fittings which were definitely not metri
59.
by mark-r 9mo ago
It wasn't even next day, it was same day! But yes, it was a complete lie.
60.
by mark-r 9mo ago
I didn't need it that same day - if I had, I would have driven 5 miles to the nearest retailer that carried it and Amazon wouldn't have even been considered. I was seriously impressed that they made that promise, thought I had not

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