AdmiralGinge

In my experience this eventually happens to most iPhones. I know it doesn't fit with today's aesthetics but those older phones with rubber caps or sliding doors effectively prevented this issue.

UI-wise, I think macOS 10.4 is my favourite. There's just something really charming about the 2005-era Aqua design.

I know it's probably old news to most of you, but Facebook's content policies are genuinely moronic. I ran a confessions page when I was a student and some of the moderation decisions were breathtakingly idiotic. They'll let racists, homophobes, anti-vaxxers (a genuine threat to public health!) and all kinds of terrible people off scot-free but an off colour joke specific to a tiny university gets the page removed and the owners are forced to build up their userbase again.

I suppose any attempt at terraforming has to create oceans if we want an Earth-like habitat (theoretically this could be achieved by re-directing enough comets at Venus or Mars provided we can utilise that kind of energy in the future). Could perhaps a form of sulphur-fixing bacteria be developed to colonise these oceans and remove it from the atmosphere as sediment?

As for the magnetic field, if the lack of convection in the core is a problem (perhaps due to the core completely solidifying) couldn't we just dump enough heat energy into it to restart the dynamo action? In the future it's not completely unrealistic to think antimatter production and storage will improve, that's certainly a way of releasing absurd amounts of energy.

There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much increased need to click to read a thread as well.

The UK is really weird in this regard, things like ID cards were massively rejected as far too authoritarian but we also have a government that wanted to bring in an insane internet restrictions. I think it comes of not having had a revolution in our recent history, much of Europe has the Nazis or Soviets in living memory to inoculate against trusting the government too much, our last experiment with overthrowing the government was Cromwell in the 17th century and he imposed a regime so austere and repressive we reverted back to a monarchy (albeit a constitutional one) and have stayed that way since.

I agree, I use it as my main search engine as I'm trying to go Google-free at home but finding UK-centric things is annoying. I guess we must just be a much smaller market for them.

I'm amazed any self-respecting criminal would carry a smartphone (or arguably even a dumb phone) while committing a crime. You might as well spray-paint "I'm a criminal, come and arrest me at [address]" on a bedsheet and hang it off a motorway bridge.

I'm English as far back as I can find out, and I'm neither great in hot weather or cold weather. I think we're just genetically predisposed to complaints about the weather.

I do marginally prefer the cold to the heat though, for what that's worth.

Not the parent, but that would be very much a yes from me. Writing something safety-critical in a language like Python or JS would terrify me.

>most importantly, take a break from smoking which is know to increase ACE2

Not going to lie, I'm very very glad I quit smoking before this coronavirus business. I was down to just a vape by June last year and I quit that in December.

I kind of went the other way, I prefer the discussions on HN. Any subreddit that gets over 100K (and arguably fewer) subscribers just becomes a cesspit.

Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the board for an hour or so. After 2015 (and even more so after the EU referendum) the subscriber count exploded and now it's a complete echo chamber. Try making an argument that the EU isn't some sort of Star Trekkian utopia or that Scottish independence might cause a lot of economic problems on that board and you'll get downvoted out of sight within maybe half an hour. It's very, very black and white now, the board is so fast that it's all about quick, karma-farming content rather than actual political debate.

I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. It's a problem I'd be interested in knowing more about because I'm working on a platform with user-generated content. It's currently using a very naive "rank by votes, exclude old or heavily downvoted posts" approach but I fear this approach could lead to the same problem as Reddit.

I've always been a bit sceptical of things like a citizen's income, but a negative income tax instead of things like universal credit seems to be quite an elegant solution to dealing with benefit cliffs.

Not really, there's been scholarly argument against a literal Genesis since at least the 5th century A.D. if not before.

What would economics aimed at a sustainable planet look like? I guess this is quite an interesting question, are there any elegant solutions to penalising climate change in the same way a land-value tax penalises passively holding on to land? We definitely need to wean ourselves off unbridled consumption at any rate, even if it wasn't an ecological nightmare it's terrible for people's mental health. Existing to consume like chickens in a human battery farm is no way for a sentient species to live.

Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.

I wonder if anyone's tried to write a language primarily for manipulating the DOM that's less... "quirky" than JavaScript? With WebAssembly being fairly well supported these days I suppose someone with a background in language design could write an interpreter in C for such a domain-specific language and target WASM.

Of course, people would say "what's the point" when JS is a thing and widely supported. I wonder if there'd be a) a compelling improvement in performance and b) a compelling improvement in reliability if we just wholesale replaced it based on lessons learned? I reckon even just keeping JS and eliminating implicit coercions would be a huge improvement (as well as maybe automatic semicolon insertion) and reduce the debugging times considerably.

I tried this in a FreeBSD VM and it booted fine afterwards. OpenBSD wouldn't let me do it at all for some reason.

Obviously no warranty on bare metal/systems that are actually used for anything.

I had an internship at a mostly Apple place at one point. Using the mac `say` command with cron or a timeout in the background was a lot of fun.

One of the Linux guys had a script that detected changes to his wallpaper, set it back to the previous one and insulted the person who attempted to change it.

Isn't that only a GNU and FreeBSD thing? I think other Unixes will still let you rm -rf /.

On FreeBSD you can do

    sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem

and it will do exactly that, write random crap into your memory without any sort of safeguard, causing a spectacular crash and a console that looks like it's having a seizure. Linux won't let you do that unless it's been compiled with a flag to enable full access to /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.

I do the same, except I tend to buy vinyl records if they're available rather than downloads.

>I spend so much time with computers and virtual things, that there's something about the physicality of the thing that's incredibly refreshing.

I can relate to this, I've been restoring a sound system from the early 1970s that'd spent decades in a damp garage and it's immensely satisfying to see and hear it working again. There's not a single circuit board in there, it's all just old fashioned point-to-point wiring. The turntable is a gorgeous Lenco one that's so solidly built, compared to a lot of flimsy stuff today it's a huge contrast. I just replaced the motor which has run for nearly half a century and still did, I only swapped it because the motor's power supply had a noisy transformer and it was easier to just swap out the whole unit. It'll probably keep working just fine long after I'm dead.

Because unless you're paying for an expensive service, it's uncompressed vs whatever bitrate your streaming service decides to use. It's usually cheaper just to buy the CD (and rip it if you want) if you're after quality.

It's not uncommon for the engineers put more effort into the vinyl mix because it's a much harder medium to get right. It's actually vinyl's flaws as a medium that make it sound better in a lot of cases as you can't get away with sloppy mixing as much. Things like the "loudness war" (where the industry demanded engineers increase the overall level at the expense of dynamic range - it's why a lot of recordings from the '90s until about 2005 sound absolutely rubbish) just can't happen to the same extent with vinyl, if they tried that nonsense the needle would literally jump out of the groove. It's also associated with audiophiles these days which is another reason modern vinyl mixes often sound better, the market they're targeting values high quality audio more than the average consumer. If you don't believe me, compare the original CD pressing of Led Zeppelin's Presence with the vinyl. It's honestly night and day.

Obviously this doesn't matter if you're comparing a naff Crosley record player from the supermarket with a naff bluetooth speaker playing 128kbps MP3s. These kind of distinctions don't really matter if your setup isn't great to begin with but it really does make a difference with decent kit. A sound system is only as good as the weakest link in the chain and there's a certain point at which that becomes the storage medium. Overall, a well-mixed lossless file or something like reel-to-reel tape is going to beat vinyl every time in theory but in practice the vinyl mix is often the best.

I'm the other way round, I have visual snow syndrome and light mode is often retina-searingly unpleasant.

Same on Kubuntu 19.04.

Jung was famously sceptical of psychedelics, telling people to "beware of unearned knowledge". I think he might have a point, especially considering how much human culture dating back to our earliest records apparently warns of the same thing. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Pandora's Box etc, the idea crops up everywhere.

I certainly don't think we should have the destructive, Puritan regime of prohibition in place (it was pretty much an excuse to arrest members of the left-wing counterculture in the 1960s rather than any genuine public health concern), but completely heading in the other direction isn't a good idea either. The cultures that have used psychedelics for millenia have lots of cultural/spiritual practices around them to make them safer, just taking a pill and thinking you're ready to meet God without any sort of preparation is a recipe for going spectacularly mad.

Being able to isolate the part of the experience that deals with time sounds like it could create some interesting/horrific implications for society.

You could give a criminal multi-century prison sentences for crimes and they still have their life left at the end of it all. You could contract the boring parts of your life and extend the interesting ones. Forget "living to work", you could do a full day's work in the blink of an eye and have a decade-long evening to enjoy life.

It's one of those things I'm perfectly satisfied to read about. I have a bit of a guilty pleasure of reading trip reports of ridiculous stuff like Datura on Erowid, that alone would convince all but the hardiest souls to give it the same wide birth as the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl.

I use it for my primary email, absolutely no complaints about it. The web interface is nice and clean, the app is pretty good too. I migrated from Gmail about five years ago (after an invite from a friend) and I've not looked back.

>If I'm not in I expect another delivery attempt or for the package to be taken to the secure local* depot where I can pick it up.

It's not the lack of localness that's the problem for me in the UK, it's more that most depots are only open 9-5 when people are at work. If you have anything resembling a long commute (particularly by public transport) then you can get really screwed over, especially if you can't drive for whatever reason you pretty much have to take half a day off to collect your package in many cases.