retrac

46 ms·

781.
by retrac 3y ago
In sleep, there is a state in which we have a inner mental narrative, with subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions. And we usually forget it even if we remember at all; most of it never enters the awareness of our wake selves.
782.
by retrac 3y ago
For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board. Later games sometimes included a lot more functionality on the cartridge (battery-backed save RAM, bank switching hardwa
783.
by retrac 3y ago
Helvetica, or Times New Roman. Or any of their relatives or clones. Modeled on fonts that were modeled on fonts that were, originally, modeled (for lower case) on Renaissance Italian scribal forms, and (for upper case) Roman monumental in
784.
by retrac 3y ago
Pyrex, the term, was originally a brand for borosilicate glass. It has become partially generic over the years, like Aspirin or Kleenex. Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer in Canada; if they want to switch to ibuprofen instead of aspiri
785.
by retrac 3y ago
> lliberal societies are also suffering from the same phenomenon There's one major historical outlier from the whole industrialized societies not having children trend -- the Soviet Union. Like everywhere else industrialized, the f
786.
by retrac 3y ago
> The claim from the company was that Oxycontin, which was a slow release form of oxycodone, was less addictive because of the slow release. A similar claim is now made about Vyvanse, a pro-drug for amphetamine. Like a slow release form
787.
by retrac 3y ago
We probably would. Thinking about writing on paper in the late 20th century, in terms of sheer quantity, it's mostly ordinary paperwork, package labelling, receipts. A random piece of paper from the ordinary home is probably more lik
788.
by retrac 3y ago
Not to the same degree. The United States is a major outlier on this. Psychiatric medication, in general, are prescribed at much higher rates than in most other wealthy countries. And not by like 50% more, but like two times or even ten
789.
by retrac 3y ago
> mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries: > On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with
790.
by retrac 3y ago
Most of the current major C implementations are written in C++.
791.
by retrac 3y ago
Not in quite the same way with people's imaginations running away from them. Perhaps important to remember how opaque the USSR was at the time -- e.g. when Chernobyl blew up, no one outside the USSR knew until radiation drifted over t
792.
by retrac 3y ago
Beyond quaint; I think a lot of people born after genuinely find it hard to comprehend the mindset. (Maybe we're just still in cultural shock from winning. If we won so handily it couldn't have been big of a deal, was it?) I enc
793.
by retrac 3y ago
> how fast we can think [...] an analysis of one of our code bases Well, with coding that's certainly true. I can spend all day trying to come up with a dozen lines of code. Input speed is not the barrier there. But for writing
794.
by retrac 3y ago
Surprisingly hard to "translate". Double, triple meanings abound. Somewhere between "bring about the apocalypse" and "live mentally in a state where history is already over".
795.
by retrac 3y ago
I believe they're referring to that cranky guy who argued to save even more. Every culture has one, I'm sure. I'll be that guy today. Every industrialized country should have decades worth of dried food stockpiled for ever
796.
by retrac 3y ago
Yes, you have it right. Japan collapsing politically would invite Soviet "aid" in the occupation of Japan. A partition like Germany was to be avoided. I just meant that you won't find anything from MacArthur clearly explai
797.
by retrac 3y ago
This is a constantly changing area of history, so we're on shaky ground. The diaries of the chamberlain to Hirohito were only published a couple years ago, for example. They implicate the emperor deeply in war-time decisions in a wa
798.
by retrac 3y ago
The Apple 1 ROM is quite a tight piece of coding. Just 256 bytes which implements basic console IO, and memory editing in hex. And still two bytes left over. Legend is Woz wrote it directly in machine language. One version with lots of c
799.
by retrac 3y ago
The boundaries between languages over time are as elusive as they can be between dialects in the present day. Most educated people can read English prose from the 1800s on a familiar topic and generally understand it. It's English.
800.
by retrac 3y ago
Maybe the concept is not much older than that. Luddite implies resistance to technological change and the disruptive consequences of those changes. Before the early modern era, you might go your whole life never encountering/seeing&#
801.
by retrac 3y ago
Sure. You'll see it very often in codec implementations. From rav1e, a fast AV1 encoder mostly written in Rust: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/tree/master/src/x86 Portions of the algorithm hav
802.
by retrac 3y ago
Small embedded systems. There are microcontrollers that cost like 3 cents in bulk. 8-bit machines with a few kilobytes of PROM and perhaps just 64 bytes of RAM. While such machines often do have C compilers (of a sort) for them, old-scho
803.
by retrac 3y ago
Total solar irradiance on Earth appears to have decreased, from when measurements began in the 1950s. It continued into the 1990s, and has started to slowly reverse in recent decades. [1] Gasses and particulate pollution from industrial
804.
by retrac 3y ago
It's analogous to frequency multiplexing in radio (and radio carried over a wire -- which high speed codings like modern Ethernet or PCIe are, in practice). For example, sending one channel on a carrier at 100 MHz, and another at 102
805.
by retrac 3y ago
Aside from local communications here on Earth, high bandwidth to deep space missions would open up many possibilities for astronomy. Multiple telescopes can be linked and a view synthesized in software. Greater physical distance between t
806.
by retrac 3y ago
I remember reading about the efforts to restore colour to material that had only been preserved in black and white. Before magnetic tape for video really became feasible (1970s), to make a record of television broadcasts, the BBC (and many
807.
by retrac 3y ago
> the carpet can be switched if the country is at war "There is a temple to him in Rome, which has two doors, and which they call the gate of war. It is the custom to open the temple in time of war, and to close it during peace. Thi
808.
by retrac 3y ago
A similar problem comes up in digital design. Behaviour is often specified in terms of exhaustive truth tables, perhaps tables that were generated automatically, from a hardware description language. While such a table can be directly tra
809.
by retrac 3y ago
As I understand it, the main difference between the Chinese room, and a philosophical zombie, is that the p-zombie would be, by definition, a biological organism physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from ordinary humans. The Chin
810.
by retrac 3y ago
You might mean that it does not detonate -- it does not. It is not a high explosive. But gunpowder (of both smoking and non-smoking varieties) is still generally considered an explosive. An explosive is something that can produce an expl

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