Doggy paddle is not a very efficient stroke. When will cats learn?
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- 2 yr. ago
I'm still trying to make 'sloppers' happen. Perfectly describes the lack of thought that goes into what they produce.
Oh, interesting. A couple hundred years again, it used to be the done thing in written English to capitalise every noun in a sentence, German-style. The Yanks have "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility", for example. We've mostly stopped doing that now. There were a lot of German immigrants to the early US; whether they've taken your influence on colons, or whether it's just pre-standardisation English and it needed to be one way or another...
We'd consider excessive capitalisation, or worse, running all-caps, to be the sign of a diseased mind, now. Not naming any names.
People will generally write in order to transfer information; perhaps a story, some information that's new to you, or to change your mind on something. AI produces text in order to fill space. Empty paragraphs devoid of information but which continue anyway are the give away; the Wiki article has some more telltales. You might have some false-positives on people who write like machines, but you're not losing anything by ignoring their writing.
AI writing also tends be free from fucks, spelling mistakes and odd grammar, since it's humans that throw those into their prose.
Speaking as a Brit: using a capital letter after a colon or a semi-colon just looks weird to me. I'm continuing a thought, not starting another mid-sentence. Using an em-dash - or even just a hyphen, I think it's an acceptable alternative when you've not got adequate input available - lets me show a slight change of thought mid-sentence in a trans-Atlantic way.
Also, fuck AI.
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The ability to do some basic calculations is what was missing in CSS from the start, IMHO. You don't want paragraph text to be too narrow or too wide as it would become unreadable, so a rule like "at least 20 ems, and then whichever is smaller of 100% or 80 ems centered on the page". But that required either really convoluted layout and rules, or just to work it out with JS after the page is loaded.
Would have been even better if we'd got Donald Knuth involved in the early CSS efforts, with some LaTeX-like attention to the details. There's no reason that computers can't render beautiful text, but it's rare for one person to be an expert typesetter and an expert programmer.
I've used "Linux for work" and "Windows for gaming" for a long time, about twenty years now. Got fed up with Windows shitting itself on a regular basis, and made myself a new year's resolution to try Linux-only gaming for a bit, see if it would work for me, and I never went back. That was in 2021, and it's just been getting better and better.
Linux Mint has always been an easy install, and putting Steam on top to get Proton is pretty trivial. A few things have made an amazing difference:
- installing the official NVidia drivers used to be a pain in the arse. Download them, stop your display manager, blacklist Nouveau, install them from the command line, restart and hope for the best. Awful. I've gone fully AMD, but I understand they're pretty much a non-issue now.
- Proton keeps getting better and better. Seriously, they fix compatibility with about 99% of the games that were broken every year, basically everything runs now. Maybe leave off buying anything with a tech-demo engine for a week, and accept that you won't be playing stuff with certain anti-cheat, and it's all good.
- DXVK gets overlooked, but it's amazing. Basically frame-for-frame with Windows on every game, and on some it's better as it fixes intrusive stutter by precompiling. Can't argue with that.
You can turn off "delete", but modification is a danger, it's true.
Turning off delete makes it excellent for eg. backing up photographs on your phone. I've got it doing this from my Android to my raspberry pi, which puts them on my NAS for me. Saves losing all my pictures if I lose my phone.
Think if the GNU project had spent less time working on 'clever' recursive acronyms and fitting Scheme into everything, and more time hacking, we might actually be using their kernel.
Linus locked himself in his bedroom for the summer and got almost all of POSIX working on 386. That's the level of geek to aspire to. If RMS had just decided to name his kernel after himself rather than messing, we'd all be be using Stallix instead.
Yep. Got an Intel AX210 Typhoon Peak in my (AMD) laptop. Never had a single issue. Their CPUs might be crap, but their wifi is the business.
The 'traditional' way of storing a database is on a mainframe or supercomputer, where all the information is stored in tables with the information all uniquely stored, frequently containing id references to other tables. For instance, an 'orders' table would have a customer id in it, and the 'customer' table would have their name and address. The programming language for databases like that is SQL - PostGres and Oracle are examples. That model gives you a lot of advantages - the data is always consistent, changes are either made completely or not at all - but every query has to go through one machine, so performance can suck, and you waste a lot of time 'joining' tables together for certain kinds of query.
If you're storing eg. a blog with comments on it, that model doesn't make sense. Each page has a varied selection of comments, comment will have a username and maybe their icon, which will rarely change, but will need to be evaluated by the database every time. It would make more sense to output the pre-rendered page as a JSON blob, and you could have a hundred machines with a few pages each to share the load. Updating people's icons and adding new comments would need to be done by telling each machine to make a certain update if they've a copy of that page; you'd 'eventually' be consistent, but if you don't care about that then you get a very scalable robust solution quite cheaply. Examples of such 'NoSQL' databases are MongoDB, Hadoop and DocumentDB.
Linux foundation have looked at DocumentDB's license and said 'yes, free enough for us', so they'll adopt it.
Literally literally anything?
Agreed. Got a huge amount of Indian and Asian cuisine that happens to be vegan, either incidentally or for religious reasons, and it's all absolutely delicious; but no, 'vegan food' means deep-fried highly processed dinosaur shapes and cheese with a distinct aftertaste of sewage.
I feel bad for vegetarians. If pubs and restaurants have one meat-free item on the menu then it's going to be vegan, and if it's going to be vegan then it's going to be some awful faux food where the main plant source is chemical plant. Vegetarian meals that celebrate the quality and freshness of the vegetables are the equal of any meat meal, but you're not having those.
What you can achieve in a couple of pages of Python can be pretty spectacular. It's also mostly very easy-to-read, with the possible exception of class inheritance, which is confusing mess.
If you need to write more than a couple of pages, then its lack of types becomes a hindrance to me - doing refactors when functions can take basically any arguments is quite painful, for instance. Not requiring any particular structure is great, up until you start to struggle with lack of structure.
Ideal programming language for when you're wanting to do something that would be a bit too unwieldy for a shell script. It also makes network requests and json parsing very straightforward, so it's great for interacting with REST APIs and writing simple microservices. Fast to write and runs quite quickly, so a good choice for Advent Of Code-like tasks. Would probably choose a different language for larger projects or when working in a team, though.
Hey! You've copied that app that I've been working on, you dirty thief. Not even bothered to make any changes, either. Switch that off at once!
Yeah, some of the answers it produces are very questionable. The implementation of a lot of the stat functions is super-naive and not very stable in borderline cases. Take the standard deviation of three identical numbers, get an answer which is nearly-but-not-quite zero. They've also refused to improve their algorithms as it might break existing customer worksheets.
Go fash, run out of cash.
Visited a traditional water-powered flour mill recently. Very cool, beautiful building, and the end product makes really delicious bread and pasta. Wholemeal, not too fine, nothing in it but grain. Perfection.
From the water flow, drop and wheel turning rate, I made the maximum possible power as about 5 kW. Probably optimistic to think you'd get a quarter of that in practice. Still, that's a huge amount compared to what a person can produce, and it's 'on tap' 24 hours a day. That kind of thing does explain why, in the days before electrification, that having 'the right landscape' made some areas really wealthy and some others not. Exploitable renewable energy, what a concept.
So yeah, your proposed map would be really interesting. The Romans burned down whole forests to make steel - you simply couldn't refine it in a place without. It would be fascinating to see the map of "power resources" and the resulting industries, even if it would be very hypothetical.
Possibly metal barrels could be air tight, but even a master cooper wouldn't be able to make a wooden one that good. The wood itself is slightly permeable. When making eg. whiskies, the fraction of the alcohol that soaks through the wood and evaporates is known as the "angel's share". Makes distilleries smell amazing, of course, but all the barrels would be wooden in Shakespeare's day.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/angels%27_share