staplung

10 ms·

121.
by staplung 1y ago
Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.
122.
by staplung 1y ago
Couldn't find this on Internet Archive but if you set your user agent to something that looks like google's crawler you can get past the paywall. It's easy on Safari if you already have the Develop menu enabled. Develop >
123.
by staplung 1y ago
Any chance this could lead to a resonance cascade? I saw some documentary where that happened at a remote corporate facility in the desert somewhere... Dark Table maybe. I was surprised to see such heavy use of a crowbar at a place doing a
124.
by staplung 1y ago
Other than potentially reducing maintenance costs, I'm not sure any other part of this stacks up. I don't see how electrification would allow you to save weight in other parts of the aircraft. I don't think electrification ad
125.
by staplung 1y ago
Many moons ago, William Gibson did a piece for Wired about his obsession with mechanical watches[1]. The whole thing is worth a read but this bit is worth quoting: """ Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary. Any Sw
126.
by staplung 2y ago
Thanks for the links. FWIW, the link for 4 (aog) is currently 404'd, which is amusing because the site is still up. They just seem to have deleted their own top level index.html file. Anyway, this works: https://aog.makie.
127.
by staplung 2y ago
On the one hand I feel like the #WARNING_SIGN is a welcome addition. On the other, I'm sensitive to the idea that it will be totally obnoxious if you need to grep/search for it in whatever tool you're using. Was a little surp
128.
by staplung 2y ago
You can see it on any unix system: $ cal sept 1752 September 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
129.
by staplung 2y ago
But that means Lotus 1-2-3 will be wrong again in 2100! We need to start a giant initiative to make sure everyone's Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets are Y2K1C compliant. Maybe by then, we'll be able to afford more than 640K of memory.
130.
by staplung 2y ago
That’s no asshat; that’s Broccoli Man! Not the hero we needed but the hero we deserved.
131.
by staplung 2y ago
Oh, interesting. Makes sense, I suppose. The article you linked doesn't recommend it but if you wash your hands with detergent (e.g. a drop or two of liquid Tide) you'll pull all the oil right out of your skin. No fingerprints! I
132.
by staplung 2y ago
As you pointed out, reusing parts of old books or manuscripts was quite common. Evidently, there was quite a lot of it going on in England just after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Their libraries had a lot of books that
133.
by staplung 2y ago
Better access for Hittie texts? I'm already deluged with nešili texts of the "Triple your barley yields with this one weird trick" type or, "Phrygian raiders don't want you to know this secret". Lately they&#x2
134.
by staplung 2y ago
Another scientific bit that's almost always ignored in the growing/shrinking trope is that the pitch of one's voice would change. The incredible shrinking man would presumably have an inaudibly high pitched voice. His own cil
135.
by staplung 2y ago
One of the biggest problems with on-call rotations is that you're actually incentivized to do it poorly. Every minute you spend doing on-call work is time that you can't spend on the things you've actually been assigned to do
136.
by staplung 2y ago
It's true that the Earth does not usually take exactly 24 hours to rotate, it's only 24 hours on average over the course of the year. However, the difference is only ever off a few seconds at most. Those seconds pile up acros
137.
by staplung 2y ago
Ah, okay. Criticism retracted from RedHat and redirected at (python) Anaconda.
138.
by staplung 2y ago
It seems that companies often end up with On-Call after they've reached some critical size but decide to do it in the cheapest possible way: let's just make our engineers do it! One big problem is that they tend not to make any at
139.
by staplung 2y ago
Gah! Why did they name their installer Anaconda? That name is already totally overloaded by the python Anaconda, which I notice now bills itself as "The Operating System for AI". That's like naming your programming language &
140.
by staplung 2y ago
Great work. Love the austere style. Nit: don't think you need to prefix "database" with "searchable". If it's a DB, searchability is implied.
141.
by staplung 2y ago
I think plans for a Dark Crystal sequel were stuck in development hell for decades and then Jim Henson died. It was actually announced in 2005 but never got made into a film. Think there was a comic series though. Also, can't help poin
142.
by staplung 2y ago
If you want to decode transmissions from common weather sensors, be sure to check out rtl_433 [ https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 ]. If you have and RTLSDR dongle, it should just work.
143.
by staplung 2y ago
There are others besides the ones that the author mentions. Some that come to mind: 1. The Gold Bug (E.A. Poe) 2. Enigma (R. Harris) 3. Cryptonomicon (N. Stephenson) In the comments however it appears that the author meant specifically Bri
144.
by staplung 2y ago
Hadn't though about openai, which does seem like a possible interested party. The problem for them however is that they make money from subscriptions, not ads which presumably makes it much harder to monetize via control of the browser
145.
by staplung 2y ago
Honest question: who are the potential realistic buyers of Chrome? OS vendors already have their own browsers and Chrome doesn't directly make much (any?) money.
146.
by staplung 2y ago
I think it's sort of a companion bit to the short story 2430 A.D. The story line is a bit different but the internet suggests that as an addendum or companion article he did a kind of back of the envelope calculation going from the ele
147.
by staplung 2y ago
I did this recently with a new Mac Mini that I set up. MacOS recently added the ability to locate the home directories on any volume. There's a somewhat hidden feature too that if you drag the Applications directory onto an external dr
148.
by staplung 2y ago
~70% of the world's phosphate reserves are in Morocco. Considering how important phosphates are to the entire planet's food security I'd rate it near the top of the list. Practically speaking, phosphates are a non-renewable r
149.
by staplung 2y ago
Technically, satellite positioning only needs 1 satellite. GPS requires several but one of its forerunners was Transit[1] which I believe only needed a signal from a single satellite at a time. It worked by measuring the doppler shift of th
150.
by staplung 2y ago
> So when do we put up GPS satellites around Mars? A system like GPS? Probably never. It would be fantastically expensive and solve a problem that no one has. In any case, the moons would be a poor choice for signal transmitters: 1. land

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