mrec

12 ms·

151.
by mrec 2y ago
Interesting. This idea appears pretty much exactly at the end of Bob Shaw's 1972 SFnal collection Other Days, Other Eyes . The starting premise is the invention of "slow glass" that looks like an irrelevant gimmick but ends
152.
by mrec 2y ago
I read the complete short stories of Arthur C. Clarke recently and one of the things that really struck me was that several of the early stories (long before NASA) had lunar-native plants growing wild on the Moon. For a hard SF writer I fou
153.
by mrec 2y ago
NVCleanInstall, maybe? I couldn't find anything called "NV Install". Personally I'm still running with the drivers that came with the box when I bought it in 2020. GeForce Experience is an abomination; besides the mind-b
154.
by mrec 2y ago
Yes, I saw it chugging down the Thames around this time last year. A nice little surprise when you aren't expecting it.
155.
by mrec 2y ago
"snicker-slithing susurrential warrens" is just insanely beautiful.
156.
by mrec 2y ago
Oh, that brings back memories. Somebody didn't get as far as #34 on the Evil Overlord List. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList
157.
by mrec 2y ago
Middle-clicking on individual feature links to open them in a new tab is broken. Given that these are real `<a href="/features/foo">` links, and the URL is exactly the same for broken and not-broken, I've no i
158.
by mrec 2y ago
Coincidentally, I've just finished Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic . It's very long and massively overexampled, but still a good and eye-opening read. When it came out in 1971 it cost an extortionate £7; one nation
159.
by mrec 2y ago
Heh. I remember doing your first solution for an Eye of the Beholder -style FPV engine back on the Amiga circa 1994. This was using existing blitter mask bitplanes so there was no sprite creation, everything was very fast (assembly). Can&#
160.
by mrec 2y ago
Maybe it's just me or something temporary (I use Old Reddit, like all right-thinking folk) but for the past couple of days the image wrapper page seems to have been sent to the glue factory. I'm just getting the image now, unadorn
161.
by mrec 2y ago
Yes, I encountered one for the first time in the bathroom of a holiday let and, having no idea what it was, got very confused as to how I was supposed to turn it off. Fortunately we had an experimental nuclear physicist in the party who was
162.
by mrec 2y ago
For a blast from the past, Ursula Le Guin's The Author of the Acacia Seeds is also fun: https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/u... (Note: PDF)
163.
by mrec 2y ago
My black pepper is BBE Jan 2006 but still tastes peppery.
164.
by mrec 2y ago
Hmm, I hadn't heard about Dev Drive before, that might actually be mildly interesting. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
165.
by mrec 2y ago
"it takes nontrivial effort to do so" - not sure I agree. My desktop (high-ish spec when I bought it in 2020) came without TPM 2.0 enabled, which effectively blocks 11. I could probably enable it, but that to me looks like the non
166.
by mrec 2y ago
Firefox has had PiP for yonks. And is this release really only for Windows 11? I thought pretty much everyone was skipping that, like Vista and 8.
167.
by mrec 3y ago
What's the "egress" footprint you mention? I hadn't come across the word in this context before.
168.
by mrec 3y ago
It's yonks since I read it, but IIRC Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937) played with (alongside everything else) the idea of stars as life-forms themselves. I'd strongly recommend it; it's very weird and obviously quite
169.
by mrec 3y ago
> Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all b
170.
by mrec 3y ago
> The built-in collection of primitives is already quite sizeable And yet no teapot! Literally unusable.
171.
by mrec 3y ago
Yes, I had the exact same reaction. Strong "We got both kinds, we got country and western!" energy here.
172.
by mrec 3y ago
You'd think, but I'm currently looking at a 161/863 split which has been pretty stable for a while now. I thought at first that ball speed is being scaled by territory size to cancel out the negative feedback, and the "w
173.
by mrec 3y ago
SumatraPDF opens ePub, supports multiple document tabs and doesn't maintain any kind of library.
174.
by mrec 3y ago
Brian Anderson (AKA brson, who as it happens used to head up the Rust project) wrote a good piece back in 2017 called "The Minimally-nice Open Source Software Maintainer" which has tips to reduce burnout/disillusionment in ju
175.
by mrec 3y ago
Interesting about the immune system link. I noticed my terrible hay fever eased a lot after my BP came way way down (from ~220 to 130-something).
176.
by mrec 3y ago
Huh. OK, I'm surprised, but that's a useful datapoint, thanks.
177.
by mrec 3y ago
I'm not swigging the Kool-Aid yet either, but I think you're being a little dismissive. I've found ChatGPT useful for some sorts of questions that can only really be posed in natural language, particularly grammatical odditie
178.
by mrec 3y ago
I not only upvoted but bought the book. HN would be a poorer place without occasional dashes of serendipitous whimsy like this.
179.
by mrec 3y ago
To be fair, Apollo also had government funding to the tune of approximately 2.5% of GDP. Starship would probably go a bit faster too with an annual budget of half a trillion.
180.
by mrec 3y ago
Oh, I know. If I had a dollar for every time that's happened to me, I'd have $3, but it's weird that it happened thrice.

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