BitwiseFool

That reminds me of this, https://xkcd.com/1897/ perhaps it was based on something after all.

The refrigerator is a distraction, the toaster is the real threat.

>"You're smarter than this."

Regardless of how correct you are, or how persuasive you might have been up to this point, uttering this accomplishes nothing and is entirely counterproductive.

I assume that person is talking about blood tests for suspected DUI's.

>"All U.S. states have driver licensing laws which state that a licensed driver has given their implied consent to a certified breathalyzer or by a blood sample by their choice, or similar manner of determining blood alcohol concentration." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_consent

>"Everyone thinks they are familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect. Probably 95% of people get it wrong."

How sublimely apropos!

If someone were able to break Bitcoin's encryption we'd have much bigger problems to worry about - It would upend modern cryptography.

This is a tangent, but I'm genuinely shocked that "dune.com" is not the website for the Dune franchise.

I'm fairly certain NASA will dispose of Europa Clipper in order to prevent any chance of forward contamination, just like what was done with Cassini.

One of my ThinkPads had a debilitating thermal throttling issue. On occasion it would inexplicably limit the CPU to .39 GHz and the fans would spin at max RPM. Yet, it wasn't hot to the touch and it hadn't been doing anything to build up any significant heat. I tried several things, but to no avail. I simply had to be issued a new ThinkPad.

I distinctly remember running a firmware update and the utility had several typos in it: "Updating fimiware". Sure it's just a status message on an installer, but I lost a lot of confidence in Lenovo's quality control that day. I have no proof but I'm sure that thermal control code was outsourced.

It could also be a snowball effect or a self fulfilling prophecy. If liberal news outlets produce 10x as much content as conservative news outlets, any model trained on newsmedia would end up having a liberal bias, no?

I don't know what the actual makeup of the news market is, but it seems like having 10x as much content is more valuable than having 10x the readership because LLMs are trained on volume.

"Book Banning" is always to be taken with a grain of salt. What typically happens is that a school library is not permitted to have copies of books considered inappropriate for children of a certain age.

These sorts of accounts are just not worth the hassle. The interest rate seems spectacular but it's contingent on satisfying conditions that are easy to miss each month. Plus, the fallback rate is punishingly low. When looking at the effort required compared to a "normal" savings account, it's a terrible deal.

The brilliance of naming an ideology "progressivism" is that it is forever associated with something people consider beneficial, progress.

>"Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment."

I've never seen a UBI experiment which demands that the participants pay more in taxes and forfeit all other welfare benefits in exchange for the payment. Every "experiment" so far has been measuring the happiness impact of the upsides without any of the downsides that would be necessary to make the program work.

Is there some poison pill in the bill? It's a really common tactic for the party in power to put wishlist items in the "Good things for America Act" that they know the opposition cannot support in order to get fodder for making the other side look so unreasonable.

Can they make us adopt the Metric system while they're at it?

In our internal Q&A system I make it a point to describe what the resolution was, even when the mistake is something obvious or embarrassing that I did. I like to think my legacy will be leaving several dozen self-answered questions on common problems that other developers didn't feel the need to type up.

It would be surprisingly difficult to do, mostly because of local politics and views on development. See https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2017/08/puc-pulls-p...

I prefer the term "Domain Scalper". As it so happens, domain squatting is a legal term and it refers to buying the domain of a registered trademark just to sell it to the owner of the trademark. It doesn't even have a good resolution rate either.

>"provide an ELI5 but for a software engineer (ELISE)? Have they literally created a device that causes photons to travel into the past?"

I spoke with the client and I still don't understand what they're getting at. Sales said that our requirements are to create a device that can reflect light through time.

Interesting video, but I can't help but think the roadway is now worse. It's disjointed and there are two intersections instead of one. Why not install a red light or a roundabout?

When I was in school we were taught about Iambic Pentameter and even had a few demonstrations. But I was never able to grasp or appreciate the significance of it. To me it seems no different than the 5-7-5 rule of a Haiku. Neat, but nothing profound.

Many of us wondered why our English curriculum was so keen on Iambic Pentameter despite the fact that it doesn't really seem to have affected modern English. I say that because it's so hard to recognize, even when using fully modern vocabulary. Apparently the Gravemind in Halo 2 speaks in IP and I'm sure that fact is lost on over 99% of players.

Whereas teaching students about all the words Shakespeare introduced and just how many tropes originate from his plays seems far more valuable to know.

>"...or just vote with your Dollar"

What do you mean by this? People can't really vote with their dollar when it comes to the USB Implementers Forum and the decisions they make.

>"or will forever be demonizing the very people you want to help"

I'm not demonizing anyone and this choice of words shows a gross misunderstanding of how most people feel about theft.

>"because they're not behaving in the way you've decided they should to be worthy of sympathy."

What's so wrong about this? I can definitely lose sympathy for someone who makes the choice to break the law and harm others when they could have chosen a non-violent alternative that would have probably helped the more. When that happens they should face consequences, be judged, and hopefully be rehabilitated.

Don't assume my stance comes from a Catholic upbringing, or from any religion at all. There's no need to frame this in terms of "honor and the nobility of suffering". I'm not saying people should suffer, I'm saying people shouldn't steal, particularly when alternatives exist.

If the question is "when is theft permissible" most people aren't going to agree that stealing "laptops, phones, tvs, video games" is okay because it will make the thief feel better about how shitty their life is.

>"It's not entirely clear how punishing it harder"

It seems like nowadays 'punishing at all' is a serious issue. If the police say they won't show up for theft under a certain dollar amount they've basically made it legal to steal up to that amount.

>"until you actually help the truly desperate"

Food banks and welfare programs exist. I feel like sympathetic people are ignoring the fact that some people realize they can do illegal things because it gives them an advantage, not solely because there is no other option.

>"But if the only two options are give everything away for free or put everything behind a paywall, the internet as everyone knows it is dead."

There's also the third option, saturate the "free" version with an increasing amount of advertisements and make it user-hostile enough to entice people into paying for the "premium" version that is ad-free. Then, create multiple tiers of the premium subscription and only make the most expensive one ad free.

Low background jpegs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

The trouble is, how do you effectively oversee an agency that specializes in lies, misdirection, cover-ups, coercion, and blackmail?

I also worry that our three letter agencies have collected an immense amount of dirt on Millennials and Gen-Zers. It's not hard to imagine blackmailing politicians or releasing dirt on candidates running on a platform to curtail or rein-in such agencies in order to prevent them from getting elected.