watersb

32 ms·

1. 451.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   The selection looks to me to be an emphasis on readable, English technical typesetting... and then a collection of experiments used to think about features they didn't want to leave out. Ligatures in Baskerville, mathematical typesetti
2. 452.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   I shall never forget skimming through some of these, when they were first released.. Surreal feeling to see the deposition of your previous-job boss' boss in the news. It sounds like a distant connection now, but it was intense. Doubt
3. 453.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   My analogies were wrong: I was thinking of a small (radius) black hole disrupting a star like a bullet shot through an apple. The Hubble telescope observed a star that had been pulled out into a long stream, that ends in a massive donut aro
4. 454.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   This isn't an Einstein Ring, where gravitational lensing can make a star look like a donut. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring This is more like a ring galaxy, formation models of which usually involv
5. 455.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   (Holy cow, just did remedial maths: 550m is a Large Number! Would like to know more details.)
6. 456.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   Cool, you filed NOTAMs; I just read them. If you like lots of daily mail, become responsible for the operation of a Cessna 172 (Skyhawk), the type of aircraft with the most units built of any, ever. Endless variations. Unending stream o
7. 457.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   REALLY IMPORTANT NOTAMS tend to alert pilots to RESTRICTED AIRSPACE or AREAS OF UNUSUAL AIR OPERATIONS. You can't fly anywhere near the President of the United States, the movements of which can change from day to day. We get NOTAMS ab
8. 458.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   Malls are cool again. They could sell theirs.
9. 459.▲
   by watersb 4y ago

   > They mentioned an "NUI" and called it a "Network User Interface", would the modern equivalent just be interactive websites that we are very used to today? Yes. I think that the lesson of “NUI” is basically ChromeO
10. 460.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Frankly, the offline feature was never a satisfactory experience. It was making the best of the reality of slow modem speeds, versus the clear increase in demand for interactive and multi media web services. Netscape was trying to address a
11. 461.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Another big application is drug discovery and development, computational chemistry. I don't believe that Frontier was used directly for COVID vaccine research, but it very well could have done.
12. 462.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Wow. I was a contractor on the Netcaster team summer of 1997. That's the offline web subscription thing, the UI of which runs along the right side column in that Constellation screen shot. A small group built a simple desktop UI as a t
13. 463.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    A close friend of ours tried to work part time, reported everything, worked with job counselor etc. but after six months was unable to continue work. It took her another six months to get it all straightened out. It's risky. The case w
14. 464.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Then there's that strange feeling when "The Matrix" film trilogy... In the future (when?), aliens take over, and we're all living in a simulation of 1993. Watching the films when they were first released was great fun. W
15. 465.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    https://xkcd.com/1491/
16. 466.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    I've never met Professor Knuth, but he taught me a lesson that I treasure. I suppose these days the best way I can describe it is that his example "de-weaponized" Christianity for me. It could be said that religion is like a
17. 467.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    PDF can embed scripts, but I haven't done this in a long time and I imagine that apps-in-PDF would expose wonky unmaintained code paths in a renderer. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scr
18. 468.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    I don't know. But roughly, stability in our own habitable-zone planetary system is determined by interaction between the Sun and Jupiter, further modulated by Saturn-Jupiter interaction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
19. 469.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Thanks for the examples. I gather that zig "comptime" is somewhat like C++11 "constexpr". https://www.hackingnote.com/en/cpp/const-vs-constexpr/index....
20. 470.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    I've been playing with Intel's "Implicitly Parallel SIMD Compiler" (ISPC) [0]. The ISPC User Guide was easy for me to work through, and there's a section on "Structure of Arrays" (SOA) programming [1]. Thi
21. 471.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    "Firewalled" and "balls to the wall" are aviation terms for full engine power, and refer to the forward wall of an airplane cockpit. On a good day, the wall keeps any fire from the engine from entering the human-rated zo
22. 472.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    On my vintage jacket, the gore Tex membrane itself is less than 5 mils thick. There are freaky chemical burns on the front of it, ate through the tough external facing material, but didn't react to the Teflon. So I can see directly how
23. 473.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Sort of a joke, sorry. Plastic used to connote poor quality, but now the products have micron-level precision. Steve Jobs had a beautiful phase 20+ years ago, selling MacBooks made of "the finest German polycarbonate"... ... which
24. 474.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    A day after my rant: I noticed that I still use Panic Software's "Coda" on my 10-year-old iPad 4, and the terminal, editor, and keyboard design choices are the best I've found for iOS. And that said, I wanted to call out
25. 475.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    I purchased a North Face jacket at their factory store in Berkeley, mid-1990s, the Gore Tex "Mountain Light" and a fleece "Denali" inner jacket. It fit me really well, for a 30-year anniversary I decided to get a new one
26. 476.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    A series of exercises from 1970s, so exercises tend to be good Perl or Bash one-liners these days. But! The real point of this book is How to Ask Questions . Anyone who has written an entire AI-based inference engine, when the customer wan
27. 477.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Thanks, that's possible. But my real gripe is the lack of these keys in an onscreen keyboard that I could use in Safari. Online, web-hosted VS Code (via GitHub dot-dev, in my case), and Jupyter notebooks via CoLab or local hosted -- th
28. 478.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    Termux on my $95 Kindle Fire is more useful than anything I’ve yet encountered on iPadOS simply because of the execrable keyboard options available on the iPad. There are great prices on wonderful M1 iPads right now, and I love my MacBook A
29. 479.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    The linked press release from the company mentions "startup mistakes" and "the declining economy", which seems fair enough. But it also calls out "reputation attacks" and "multiple negative media stories&q
30. 480.▲
    by watersb 4y ago

    > I think it would be much better for both patients and healthcare staff alike if there was a greater emphasis placed on focusing on the series of successes and failures that happen over the course of someone's care, not just seein