mjd

23 ms·

331.
by mjd 5y ago
Hi Tom! I'm glad you liked the post even if I thought it was not of general interest.
332.
by mjd 5y ago
The approach in this case was: I was in the middle of buying a house and had a hundred other details to attend to. Investigating Brenda's brokering wasn't in the top fifty. I knew at the time that I could shop around for insuran
333.
by mjd 5y ago
“It is possible to entertain no thought about this, and not to be troubled in spirit; for things of themselves are not so constituted as to create our judgements upon them.” (Marcus Aurelius)
334.
by mjd 5y ago
Agreed. The first words are: > I doubt this story will be of interest to anyone but me If you read past that, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
335.
by mjd 5y ago
I offered the Open Steno folks a subdomain of plover.com, so they could set up a redirect or something, but Mirabai said they didn't need it.
336.
by mjd 6y ago
The destructiveness of "close tab" is not equivalent. Control-shift-T will instantly undo the close-tab action. And there is a menu item that lists "recently closed tabs". Try finding the menu item that brings back the
337.
by mjd 6y ago
Getting it right is hard. Takes talent, smarts, hard work. But recognizing when it's wrong, not so much.
338.
by mjd 6y ago
Title needs more fucking obscenities.
339.
by mjd 6y ago
> I kind of feel like this post shouldn't exist without the author taking the time to explain his POV better than a few bullet points on a slide. I agree. It was a five-minute throwaway talk. Here's the same guy writing a bett
340.
by mjd 6y ago
tl;dr
341.
by mjd 6y ago
I can remember my mom telling me, sometime in the late 70s or very early 80s, that she thought the new version of Fortran was an improvement because it had `else`.
342.
by mjd 6y ago
You are absolutely right. I have corrected the article.
343.
by mjd 6y ago
Absolutely this. I've also taken to putting a QR code on the first slide in the deck, when I give the talk live. It seems silly to have people rush top copy down the URL when we have this convenient URL-communicating technology at han
344.
by mjd 6y ago
I also recommend Matt Levine, he's just great. Here's a blog post I wrote a couple of months ago to talk about him: https://blog.plover.com/ref/money-stuff.html I said "Almost every issue teaches me some
345.
by mjd 6y ago
I posted this because around 2003 I spent a significant amount of time tracking it down. So I saved it, so that I wouldn't lose it, and so if I ever got around to writing an article about the message, I would have it handy and easy
346.
by mjd 6y ago
https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p23.html
347.
by mjd 6y ago
I wrote a long series of blog posts about every aspect of the messages. They are among the blog posts I'm most proud of. I think there are 25 in all, one for each of the 23 pages, and a couple of extras about the message as a whole. T
348.
by mjd 6y ago
I was delighted to discover that AO3 has no fewer than _eleven_ fanfics about the complaint tablet: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Ea-Nasir%20(Mesopotamian)/w... Including at least one smutty one, which I though
349.
by mjd 6y ago
A while back I looked at a problem where Monte Carlo simulation said that the answer was probably 4. But analysis showed that the actual answer was 9304682830147 ÷ 2329089562800 = 3.994987…. https://blog.plover.com/math&#x2F
350.
by mjd 6y ago
I fixed it on my side also. Thanks to both of you for the correction.
351.
by mjd 6y ago
If you did it, I'd enjoy seeing it.
352.
by mjd 6y ago
I really like the idea of Idaho and Montana as the Inner Mongolia of the United States. Clearly, Mongolia itself is analogous to Canada.
353.
by mjd 6y ago
Yes, definitely. This sort of issue is very hard to resolve adequately. There's no definition that always does everything we want. A while back I wrote an article comparing each U.S. state's largest and second-largest cities. (
354.
by mjd 6y ago
Dingle is bigger, and is in the same box. The article mentions this, but thanks for pointing it out. The author of the map is preparing a corrected version.
355.
by mjd 6y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it. (edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)
356.
by mjd 6y ago
Not everything needs to have utility. Some things are just for fun. Utility is important, but fun is important too.
357.
by mjd 6y ago
I stand corrected.
358.
by mjd 6y ago
Since you want to quibble, I'll just point out that the word “rectangles” does not appear in the article.
359.
by mjd 6y ago
Matt Levine, who writes the “Money Stuff" column for Bloomberg News, described it like this: > When a company is going around accusing reporters of conspiring with short sellers to bring it down, that is an almost infallible sign th
360.
by mjd 6y ago
“Wife” and “woman” don't have the same meaning. I think people learning Middle English are often puzzled when they try to read “wyf” as “wife”, which is why I mentioned it.

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