merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, and that's why it should be a cautionary tale for all other hugely important referendums.

Sometimes things getting done is a good thing.

Why does 50%+1 represent the will of the people?

I used something recently where it wasn't possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a "diff", which meant I needed a "-f". It wasn't a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.

Unlimited fusion power in a decade or so.

As it has always been.

Whatever happens, it should require a supermajority to leave. Say 50.1% of the population vote to leave so it's on, then some people change their minds or some people die while others turn 18, then it's 49.9% who want independence so it's off. I don't know if 55% is enough, or 60%, or 67%. But, it should be enough that whatever decision is made, it's not going to immediately become unpopular.

If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:

At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.

One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args "tar tf <filename.tar>" and unix-style args "tar -tf <filename.tar>" but there are subtle differences in how they work.

You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.

No, I don't think so. It's true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.

In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today's programming were from Grace Hopper's era in the 1950s.

In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.

That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.

English is pretty bad at naming these things. In North-American English they're often called "Semi"s, which is short for either "Semi-Trailer" or "Semi-Truck". Why? Who knows, I'm guessing it's because the trailer part is only half of the whole. The front part with the engine and trailer hitch is sometimes called the Tractor Unit. But, that's confusing because "Tractor" mostly means the thing you drive around on a farm. The purpose is basically the same, and the name comes from the fact it's focused on something that pulls, but farming has such a hold of the "tractor" name that that's what people think of when they hear that.

18 wheeler makes sense for the whole unit together. It's also good because it identifies the thing that is instantly visually unique about these kinds of vehicles, all the various wheels. But, I'm sure there are many cases where it's not 18 total wheels. And, when they're used as road trains with more than one trailer, I'm sure it's much more than 18 wheels.

The Brits like "lorry", or "articulated lorry" but where does that come from? And sometimes shortened to "Artic" which makes it sound like it's really cold.

Other names include "HGV" for "Heavy Goods Vehicle", but that's confusing because it's not clear whether it's the goods that are heavy or the truck. Presumably they're also used for light but bulky goods.

Oh well, dumb language, we should start over with Spanish, I'm sure their name is better.

Never heard of them, and they don't have a store near me. The pictures I've found make it look basically the same as a Best Buy though.

I think having it be a dedicated games store is a losing proposition. The people who shorted GameStop back in the day were right to do it. Physical stores for video games just don't have a long-term future.

What I think would work better is something like Fry's or MicroCenter. Canada has BestBuy, but that's more an electronics store for the general public. Fry's and Microcenter are more focused on serving geeks: gamers, 3d-printing enthusiasts, makers, people into building their own PC, etc.

Sell 3d printers and 3d-printing gear. Those are often things people want to see in person before they commit. And, sometimes people want a part immediately and don't want to wait even overnight for it to arrive. Sell RGB PC gear where people need to see it to appreciate it. This won't work if the markup is too big. But, if it's close to the price you can get online, I think people would rather look at some things in person rather than based on photos and videos online. Sell Arduino and Raspberry Pi gear, along with the small, cheap discrete components you need for those kinds of projects. Obviously you can order that stuff online, but often order minimums and shipping charges make it really expensive. If you can just grab a few things out of a bin, you'd probably save money. Stock headphones, and let people try them before they buy. It can often be really hard to tell if a headset is going to be too heavy, too tight, too hot, etc. Let people test out clicky keyboards to see how they feel and how they sound. This is another thing where how it feels makes a huge difference and you can't tell when you buy online.

They should also have a very good e-commerce website with competitive prices. Assuming they're going to have physical stores, make it easy for people to have their orders delivered to the stores. Computer gear is one of those things that you don't want sitting out on your porch. And, once someone's in the store, it's easy for them to remember something else they needed to get.

It's still going to be hard for a brick and mortar store to compete against Amazon. But, there are also advantages to doing certain things in person.

Do you mean "Mask off"? I couldn't figure out what a "mask of maga" was.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of "what progress artillery science has made during the last few years".

Do rockets count as artillery science? The first rockets basically served the same purpose as artillery, and were operated by the same army groups. The innovation was to attach the propellant to the explosive charge and have it explode gradually rather than suddenly. Even the shape of a rocket is a refinement of the shape of an artillery shell.

Verne wasn't able to imagine artillery without the cannon barrel, but I'd argue he was right. It was basically "artillery science" that got humankind to the moon. The first "rocket artillery" were the V1 and V2 bombs. You could probably argue that the V1 wasn't really artillery, and that's fair, but also it wasn't what the moon missions were based on. The moon missions were a refinement of the V2, which was a warhead delivered by launching something on a ballistic path.

As for generative AI, it doesn't have zero fidelity, it just has relatively low fidelity. What makes that worse is that it's trained to sound extremely confident, so people trust it when they shouldn't.

Personally, I think it will take a very long time, if ever, before we get to the stage where "vibe coding" actually works well. OTOH, a more reasonable goal is a GenAI tool that you basically treat as an intern. You don't trust it, you expect it to do bone-headed things frequently, but sometimes it can do grunt work for you. As long as you carefully check over its work, it might save you some time/effort. But, I'm not sure if that can be done at a price that makes sense. So far the GenAI companies are setting fire to money in the hope that there will eventually be a workable business model.

If you use it basically like you'd use an intern or junior dev, it could be useful.

You wouldn't allow them to check anything in themselves. You wouldn't trust anything they did without carefully reading it over. You'd have to expect that they'd occasionally completely misunderstand the request. You'd treat them as someone completely lacking in common sense.

If, with all those caveats, you can get this assistance for free or nearly free, it might be worth it. But, right now, all the AI companies are basically setting money on fire to try to drive demand. If people had to pay enough that the AI companies were able to break even, it might be so expensive it was no longer worth it.

Are those the trucks that are only able to move 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 or 13 things at once? (I've never heard that term before)

The special area of "Etc" is used for some administrative zones, particularly for "Etc/UTC" which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with "Etc/GMT" have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the "Etc" area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g "Etc/GMT-14" is 14 hours ahead of GMT).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Area

Yeah. The level of incompetence is impressive. Full data and metadata for all customers all dumped together in one datastore, stored in the clear in AWS.

"The data includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers."

...

"The server that the hacker compromised is hosted on Amazon AWS’s cloud infrastructure in Northern Virginia."

...

"“If I could have found this in less than 30 minutes then anybody else could too. And who knows how long it’s been vulnerable?” the hacker said. "

Russia's more a friend than hostile these days.

The hostile foreign governments are probably upset that the hacker revealed all these messages were being stored in plain text on AWS.

Then again, who even are the "hostile foreign governments" these days? Canada?