wheels

34 ms·

331.
by wheels 5y ago
At least in Germany, having to cancel by sending a letter (or, amusingly, sometimes a fax works) is still common.
332.
by wheels 5y ago
To some extent, yes, I could imagine external intelligence arising in something that approximates a colony rather than a single organism. There are a bunch of (much simpler) examples of that on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org&#x
333.
by wheels 5y ago
It does here; there's nothing that guarantees that it would elsewhere. Taking our biology as a starting point, imagine that red blood cells reproduced independently, and could compete and be upgraded within the organism with no loss o
334.
by wheels 5y ago
This puts so many weird and obviously unproven assumptions on other intelligence that it's hard to take seriously. It's not obvious that morals at all are necessary for intelligence. It's not obvious that another intelligence
335.
by wheels 5y ago
Fun Texas fact: Beto O'Rourke was also part of the BBS scene (Cult of the Dead Cow). For me, I've been in Germany longer than Texas, so I'm not sure I could still call myself a "Texpat", though points for introduci
336.
by wheels 5y ago
While I did later briefly live in Waco, those were after my BBS days. I was running the board in Beaumont (called Pilot's Hanger). I was aware of TENET in those days, but the Unix shell was still a couple years away from my radar. A
337.
by wheels 5y ago
I got into BBSes around 1992, and started running one around 1994 (when I was 14). I was living in a medium sized town (150k) in Texas, and our city had around 20 boards. The main costs were a computer ($2000-ish, $3700 in 2021 dollars), a
338.
by wheels 5y ago
I think the argument that you're making is that smoking is a net-negative economically, which strikes me as plausible, if not obviously true. There you'd also need to go a step further and consider the economic contributions of t
339.
by wheels 5y ago
I'm not arguing in this case that it's more accurate, just that it's sometimes easier: if I've got a mixing bowl on a scale, I find it easier to pour things in by weight rather than to measure them all out. On recipes
340.
by wheels 5y ago
> Absolutes aside, a smoker should have higher insurance costs than a non-smoker. This is probably false. Smokers rack up less health care costs than nonsmokers because they die earlier. The study I'm linking doesn't consid
341.
by wheels 5y ago
I use it semi-regularly; once a week or so. It's a genuinely useful tool that was just greatly oversold on launch. Things I use it for: - Converting units while cooking. I prefer to cook by weight, and for most ingredients, you can
342.
by wheels 5y ago
Germany's basically the same. I've lived here 20 years. I went to a liberal arts college in the US. Shortening the time to getting a PhD is the only argument I could make for the European system vs. a liberal arts system. Germ
343.
by wheels 5y ago
There are 53 shared libraries that our small app depends on (this is not strange on Linux). Getting them set up to all be built independently by our build system would be a large task, and a large thing to maintain. Technically it's
344.
by wheels 5y ago
Sure, but there are very few UIs that require 100% of a modern CPU core. Exceptions exist, but they're just that, exceptions. I'd go one step further and say that if modern apps are doing that that they should move the CPU heavy
345.
by wheels 5y ago
That's significantly less true than it was in the past. I think it's pretty easy to argue that the browser is the most important desktop app now and all modern browsers are multiprocess / multithreaded. Beyond that, almost e
346.
by wheels 5y ago
> It's just a static shared library [...] No. First, "static shared library" is self-contradicting: libraries are either shared or static, not both. The longer answer is that plugins have to be compiled with the `-fPIC
347.
by wheels 5y ago
What you may be missing is that that comes from necessity -- again, for an app like ours, 1% of our users are on Linux. Producing packages for Ubuntu along takes about as much time as producing for Windows and macOS, where almost all of ou
348.
by wheels 5y ago
Yes, it is a VST plugin (and standalone), and amusingly probably works better in Wine than Native, aside from the fonts being craptastic. Containerized distribution doesn't really work for plug-ins. This is the first time I'm rea
349.
by wheels 5y ago
That only works for open source packages.
350.
by wheels 5y ago
We do that. In bold. Still doesn't stop people from writing to us at least once a week asking for something else or reporting that the Ubuntu package doesn't work on their distro.
351.
by wheels 5y ago
For an audio app that I work on, it's similar, but different: around 1% of the users are on Linux, and around a third of the bugs / complaints come from Linux, but they're virtually all Linux specific. We're having to s
352.
by wheels 5y ago
Squaring those things mostly involves deciding if there's moral value in work. If there is, you effectively create a subsidy for low-paid work by supplementing it via welfare or tax credits. If you don't believe that there'
353.
by wheels 5y ago
F.B. Purity does just that, but the HTML is fairly complicated (if I remember correctly, the relevant words are a jumble of absolutely positioned spans, with a lot of fodder thrown in to throw off blockers). Facebook changed their code abo
354.
by wheels 5y ago
My kids are just 6 and 3, but they don't do screen time at all. Compared to my friends that have tried limiting screen time, none seems a lot easier. They just don't miss or crave it.
355.
by wheels 5y ago
> For obvious statistical reasons most companies [...] are mediocre That's assuming companies exist on a one dimensional spectrum. The more prevailing wisdom is that companies will be mediocre or bad at many things, and good at a
356.
by wheels 5y ago
To be fair, this is not a publication for lay-people; it's obviously and explicitly a publication for electrical engineers, which would not need these things explained. But it's still a terrible analogy since the phrasing seems t
357.
by wheels 5y ago
I thought the same initially, and do think the analogy is bad, but a few seconds later I wondered if the point that they were making was that the interconnects carry the same amperage: the required gauge for a connector (i.e. wire) is dete
358.
by wheels 5y ago
Not in Croatia, but I have experienced corruption as a tourist in Serbia and Bosnia: - Serbia: Driving in Novi Sad, and another driver illegally passed me and hit my car coming back into traffic, causing a few hundred euro in damage to my
359.
by wheels 5y ago
Low corruption is not a reasonable description of any of the Balkan countries. Croatia is a little bit better than Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, but on corruption indexes is still considered to be one of the most corrupt countries in Eur
360.
by wheels 5y ago
I'd largely agree on the Balkans, though the trick would either to be in one of the large cities, or in the real countryside. A lot of the smaller cities are pretty depressing. I've been to every country in the Balkans except fo

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