retrac

26 ms·

301.
by retrac 2y ago
If you reduce the pixel size enough, it becomes a general purpose display technique and has no distinctive look to it. It blurs together into an average value, microscopically. A few display technologies, mostly monochromatic, actually wo
302.
by retrac 2y ago
Yes. But aside from the occasional moral panic that went a little overboard, and while the causation is a little fuzzy, they were basically right. Sitting in front of the TV all day is unhealthy both mentally and physically.
303.
by retrac 2y ago
15 MHz m68030 with a 16 bit memory bus and 10 megabytes of RAM -- A Mac LC II, by any chance? :) > towards the late '80s and early '90s By the late 1960s, really. It would probably be possible to port Linux to the IBM Model 67
304.
by retrac 2y ago
The story of lottery winners is sometimes an unhappy one. A windfall can ruin relationships, lead to a loss of normalcy, make one a target for crime, and as you say, enable vices.
305.
by retrac 2y ago
Dutch is so close to English that at times it is almost a dialect of English. "Ik zag de boot zinken." / "I saw the boat sink." The rest of the world can't watch English TV with subtitles for a few months&#x2F
306.
by retrac 2y ago
I think of it as synthesizing a sine wave (AC power) with DC pulses, using an inductor or capacitor for smoothing. The result is then rectified back to DC.
307.
by retrac 2y ago
The only writing system for sign languages that has significant adoption ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting ) was developed not by a linguist like other systems had been, but by a dance instructor, who was ins
308.
by retrac 2y ago
It's also possible to detect the presence of an AM transmission (if not necessarily decode) at a much lower received power than with FM. With FM there's little in the way of graceful degradation. As signal strength falls it can
309.
by retrac 2y ago
> They extracted the data from the drives many years ago There are a lot of drives in museums out there that might be worth reading. Same with the magnetic core memories (which are persistent and keep their data without power). For exa
310.
by retrac 2y ago
Hydroelectric plants along the La Grande river in northern Quebec run a substantial part of New York and Boston. The power is transferred across about a thousand miles. Transmission loss is about 10%. Ten percent would be intolerable for
311.
by retrac 2y ago
Mesopotamia in particular is so strange. It feels like we don't understand them. Not nearly as well as many other ancient peoples are understood. Their religion was obviously terribly complicated but so little of it makes sense to t
312.
by retrac 2y ago
It is. But when the front line person has received a bunch of spam calls they start hanging up when they hear the relay disclaimer at the start of the call, whatever the law says. Similar issue here in Canada.
313.
by retrac 2y ago
I can't really understand speech these days without the captions to go with it. But I encounter discrepancies with AI generated captions very often. As in, I heard something and from context I know I'm right and the AI is wrong.
314.
by retrac 2y ago
Yes. I use it every day and it's what I was benchmarking against mentally.
315.
by retrac 2y ago
Deaf here. In some contexts yes. In many, nope. Whisper can't talk to the other person. AI transcription systems on the phone are very awkward for both parties. Slow. Long pauses. Asking for clarification is a pain since the tur
316.
by retrac 2y ago
Deaf relay is done by transcriptionists. The end user relies on deaf relay in a way where automatic systems are not really an option - possibly in a life and death way if someone is calling their pharmacy or doctor or whatever. It's c
317.
by retrac 2y ago
Death, magic, alchemy, transmutation, poison (and so perhaps by extension, radiation) are all associated with fluorescent green to some degree. (Do a Google image search for "necromancy" or "poisonous dragon" and the ma
318.
by retrac 2y ago
By the end of WW II American torpedoes were automatically programmed (direction, speed, fusing) before firing. The heavy calculations would be done by the shipboard firing computer while the parameters set would be used by the simple compu
319.
by retrac 2y ago
Here's my old Kindle Touch 2 running a hacky Android 4 port attempt and a Game Boy emulator: https://i.imgur.com/m7ZZ1Xm.mp4 I'd say more like 2 - 3 fps. Not sure why there are random black lines. Display drive
320.
by retrac 2y ago
Organizations are greater than the sum of their parts. To extend the insect metaphor, an ant colony has complex emergent and intelligent behaviour, far more complicated than any individual ant could be responsible for. For example when in
321.
by retrac 2y ago
Non-human systems created by humans (social entities like corporations or governments) have a certain kind of decentralized intelligence, one that isn't localized in any one person's mind. Insects and perhaps even plants show ada
322.
by retrac 2y ago
Back in the late 70s and 80s, many computers and other digital systems were actually designed using basic blocks similar to this. Since chip layout is by far the biggest expense (especially back then) it made sense to design just one custo
323.
by retrac 2y ago
Antibiotics are diagnostic in a sense. Take antibiotics active against H pylori. If your ulcer goes away, it was H pylori.
324.
by retrac 2y ago
The region in question is where the eastern Goths lived: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Goths and they kept speaking Gothic until at least the 1700s in pockets. Old English was probably still close enough to G
325.
by retrac 2y ago
You're on the right path. There's a bit of a learning curve for what you want to do but it should be doable. Stockfish is written in C++. What you need to do is compile the C++ to either to WASM or Javascript -- a browser hostab
326.
by retrac 2y ago
> irrefutable I'm not sure I'd go quite that strongly. The Horse, The Wheel, and Language is a good book (IMO) and while from 2007 still reflects the general consensus, as I understand it. The author refers to it as the Ku
327.
by retrac 2y ago
In most countries, the advanced class (or equivalent) is a licence to design, construct, and operate your own radio transmitter for experimental purposes. (Just about anyone with a serious interest in electronics has thought about building
328.
by retrac 2y ago
IIRC the Sun-2 has an 8 MB virtual memory limit, which prevents most modern programs from fitting.
329.
by retrac 2y ago
Aside from a few early VAX models, I am pretty sure the Sun 3 machines are the oldest computers that can still run a full contemporary software stack (if you're patient).
330.
by retrac 2y ago
We have no idea because we don't know the properties of super-heavy elements. There is some conjecture from theory about an "island of stability" where super-dense elements above 118 become more stable, with half-lives in hu

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