mmirate

18 ms·

91.
by mmirate 8y ago
If you look back far enough, nearly every on-land government still extant today has a history of violence; be it that they conquered the land they inhabit, that they invaded their neighbors so that they might not be themselves invaded, that
92.
by mmirate 8y ago
> Together, these companies succeeded in bringing computing to billions of people. But these billions of people are still using software applications built by just 0.2% of the world's population (those who can code). > The next s
93.
by mmirate 8y ago
Plenty of idiomatic Python still contains enough magic to stymie mypy et al.
94.
by mmirate 8y ago
On the other hand, here on the other side of the Atlantic ... Silicon Valley is not only at a temperate latitude but also downwind (jetstreamwise) of an ocean; placing it in the middle of one of our continent's few bastions of reliably
95.
by mmirate 8y ago
> is it morally bankrupt to pay federal income tax, a portion of which will finance the killing machines? To be fair, it could easily be said that we all engage in the morally bankrupt act of voting for politicians whose foreign policy i
96.
by mmirate 8y ago
I said " and their chain of command ". Yes, I get that in addition to the trigger-puller following an illegal order, someone would have to have provided that order - and at worst, the buck stops with the Joint Chiefs and the Presi
97.
by mmirate 8y ago
... I think the ethical responsibility here is with the trigger-pullers and their chain of command; not the phone-finders.
98.
by mmirate 8y ago
Why not? Afraid they'll actually get things done instead of faffing about with thefts and handouts and bureaucracy?
99.
by mmirate 8y ago
Is that supposed to mean something?
100.
by mmirate 8y ago
Business negotiations are one thing. But the goal of a hostage negotiation is generally to waste enough time (and/or agree upon such a maneuver) so that the enemy exposes themselves all to simultaneous incapacitation by well-placed bul
101.
by mmirate 8y ago
Indeed, and we are able to do so via the artifices of trade and commerce - the only thing that need be agreed-upon is the price, the quantity and the quality.
102.
by mmirate 8y ago
I don't have to agree with someone else's political beliefs - or even generally like that person at all - to sell them a widget or buy from them a tool or raw-materials package; all I need are skills and a profit margin.
103.
by mmirate 8y ago
Right, and I'm saying that the landscape has changed enough that many of the behaviors and characteristics we evolved back then, are maladaptive today; just because most humans happen to have a certain trait, does not mean that others
104.
by mmirate 8y ago
Modern technology has made a mockery of the days when it took an entire family's labor just to raise an acre or two of crops.
105.
by mmirate 8y ago
Why is it necessary to truly avoid exploiting the other party, instead of merely maintaining for them an illusion that they're not being exploited?
106.
by mmirate 8y ago
I read all three of these comments and I still dislike bbq ribs.
107.
by mmirate 8y ago
That merely transforms my previous question into a question of why WiFi routers+adapters with discrete antennae, don't also ship with 10W output and a suitably-beefy electrical system to match.
108.
by mmirate 8y ago
The last time I checked, the Raspberry Pi was considered unsuitable for use as an internet middlebox (or router) due to some kind of I/O bottleneck, having to do with (pardon the faded memory) its ethernet controller being attached to
109.
by mmirate 8y ago
Got it, so a meshnet using ISM bands is limited by the radio horizon, meaning that unless the equipment is produced in very high numbers, the links won't be close enough to connect at all, outside urban areas or perhaps a few towns.
110.
by mmirate 8y ago
> The answer in 1962 would be have been, "remove the subsidies and let God sort it out." Aside from the pointless religious bit, that answer is still the correct one today. Indeed, if any policy question is answerable via &qu
111.
by mmirate 8y ago
Wouldn't they need to significantly decrease the transmission power in order to use the ISM bands, making that application more LAN than WAN? And if the result is both legal and technologically superior to existing WiFi hardware then w
112.
by mmirate 8y ago
Then why is it the hams from whom we hear about such feats as "ionosphere skipping", and not any makers of 2.4GHz equipment?
113.
by mmirate 8y ago
> First, you are intentionally limiting the scope of my claim. "Unforgiving" is just a synonym of "harsh", "challenging" or "adversarial", not about actual person forgiving someone. I wasn't b
114.
by mmirate 8y ago
How does showering at work prevent you from feeling like you're about to die while you're biking?
115.
by mmirate 8y ago
You've got it bass-ackwards: biking becomes more difficult the closer you are to the equator. You can always add insulation to protect from cold, but you can't go much further than a singlet+shorts in case of heat.
116.
by mmirate 8y ago
> Can someone explain to me why I should want to become good at management? You said half of it yourself: because transitioning from engineering to management entails a promotion. (The other half: because at most companies, a promotion i
117.
by mmirate 8y ago
> If everyone refused to build guidance systems for missiles, perhaps the missiles would never get built? Correct but incomplete. In that scenario, unguided rockets get built instead of missiles. Rockets, being unguided, will miss their
118.
by mmirate 8y ago
Post-scarcity is, at best, a distant fantasy. Ergo, sufficient resources to forgive everyone, do not exist. Ergo, it is best for any person to not expect forgiveness. It's not a perspective; it logically follows from reality.
119.
by mmirate 8y ago
And of course, things like this only erode language semantics over time by making more and more words and phrases seem sarcastic; we have "/s" but there is no reliable marker of non-sarcasm (cf Poe's Law).
120.
by mmirate 8y ago
> in Easter/Central Europe where I live the maps in Gmaps are really poor and got me lost several times, OSM is miles ahead, for POIs too OSM is nigh-bubkes without some other data from a service like Waze; else the "fastest&qu

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