rmunn

10 ms·

91.
by rmunn 2mo ago
What is the best language for controls and embedded, in your opinion? I assume from your comment that it's not a great choice as a first language to teach newbies, but I've never done anything in the field of robotics or embedde
92.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Most of the time downvoters don't explain their downvote, but I'll explain mine. I voted this comment down because it's just plain incorrect.I worked with PHP for nearly ten years (and I never want to go back). Maybe PHP has
93.
by rmunn 2mo ago
To bring some clarity to this, it seems people are talking about being "forced" in different ways. WalterBright is using the correct definition of "forced" that means "you must buy this thing or else I'll shoot
94.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Where are you? North America? Europe? Asia? Somewhere else? I've flown quite a bit in the USA and in Asia, and airlines feel somewhat different in America vs. in Asia. (Not 100% different, of course). Oh, and I've flown a few Midd
95.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Feel free to pay extra for the fancy seats up front, known as either first class or business class depending on the airline you're flying (I've seen other names for them like "premier" or something, too). But if you keep
96.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I'm just grateful that one calendar became the international standard, otherwise the combinatorial explosion would have been even worse. Imagine having to track not just one or two local calendars plus one international one, but the ha
97.
by rmunn 2mo ago
But the example I gave was of politicians seeking power for the sake of making money. Which is entirely different from making it via the free market. I'm very much pro-free-markets, but I don't think that (for example) members o
98.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Just to clarify, I didn't invent this. I don't think you were attributing it to me when you said "rmunn's mnemonic", I think you meant "the mnemonic that rmunn posted". But just in case anyone thinks I i
99.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Like I said in answer to a similar question somewhere else in this thread, I rarely actually need to use this. But there have been times when it's come in handy, such as when I'm away from my computer and someone calls me on the p
100.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Did not know it was called that; thanks for the link. And invented by John Conway (drawing on work by Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), no less? Man, the guy was a genius , wasn't he.
101.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Not that often, maybe one every couple of months. Usually when someone asks me "are you available at (time) on the 31st?" they actually expect me to pull out my phone and load the calendar app. But it's nice to be able to t
102.
by rmunn 2mo ago
For keeping track of the "key day of the week" from year to year: as you move forward through the years, it advances by one when you move into a non-leap-year, and advances by 2 when you move into a leap year. This year (2026) tho
103.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Excellent article, and very useful for programming. For figuring out the day of the week in your head , there's a different (and very useful) trick. It uses the month and day from the Gregorian calendar, rather than the day number, be
104.
by rmunn 2mo ago
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambiti
105.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Right. It's actually amazing that large language models can be as effective as they are, given that at their core they are simply matching up word-frequency patterns. But with a large enough context and enough parameters, those word-
106.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I've seen two expressions referring to "it's difficult to put the (thing) back in" that are in more-or-less common use in English. The slightly more common one is "You can't put the genie back into the bottle&q
107.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I have family in California so I've visited often. It's got beautiful geography, and very pleasant weather most of the time (at least in the areas people have chosen to live: few people voluntarily choose to live in the desert a
108.
by rmunn 2mo ago
P.S. Lyrics can be found at https://genius.com/Joshua-tyra-i-am-the-very-model-of-a-bibl... if you would rather read them instead of watching the video.
109.
by rmunn 2mo ago
This has nothing to do with the library of Ashurbanipal itself, but is still worth mentioning. Ashurbanipal's library gets referenced in the VERY clever parody song "I Am the Very Model of a Biblical Philologist", which you c
110.
by rmunn 2mo ago
It's probably a function of how your brain works whether or not you prefer music or silence. For me, a middle-aged man with ADHD, my brain is constantly wandering off to some other thought that isn't what's in front of me. Th
111.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I think I read a different article than the one from CBS that got posted here, but I can't remember where it was (sorry I can't be more specific, but it's been a busy week for me and it's gone clean out of my head). Anyw
112.
by rmunn 2mo ago
While you might be correct, I wouldn't necessarily assume the "and only if" part of your statement. There might be companies that choose to proactively purchase support contracts. And there are companies that have paid $150
113.
by rmunn 2mo ago
As andrewfinr mentioned, it seems like you might be working with a different definition of "consciousness" than most people are using, hence why their responses appear to be nonsense. Certainly when I talked about consciousness an
114.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I'm not GP, but the brain is a fantastically complex machine at the cellular level. It's not just electrical activity in neurons, there are also chemical neurotransmitters that play a significant role in emotion, memory, and so on
115.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I was initially confused what Dawkins was doing with books, until I realized that the "he" in your last sentence was Kahle, not Dawkins. Might want to edit your comment to put his name in, because otherwise you have a pronoun refe
116.
by rmunn 2mo ago
What happens if you try to run Python eggs under Chicken? Do you get Roko's Basilisk? :-)
117.
by rmunn 2mo ago
> He knew to crash on a golf course so the doctors didn't need to walk very far. (Not a joke. That happened.) The link only mentions that he crashed on the golf course, not why he chose it. (Well, other than "can't mak
118.
by rmunn 2mo ago
Claw "game" (scam) machines have deliberately-weak grasps, designed to drop the item they've grabbed whenever the arm is jolted — and then it's jolted at least once, usually twice, in the process of bringing it to the ou
119.
by rmunn 2mo ago
For those who use Chicken Scheme: what made you pick it over other Lisps? What are some things it does particularly well?
120.
by rmunn 2mo ago
I was expecting something about double-entry accounting and how it can (initially) be non-intuitive whether to mark a given entry as a debit (-100) or credit (+100), especially for liabilities (when you enter a credit card payment in your l

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