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adhesive_wombaton Starship.rs: minimal, fast prompt for any shell

I can honestly say that has never once been a problem I have had, and I've had git information in the prompt for over 10 years.

Also how is "enter" less convenient than literally any other command that you'd still have to type and run to get up-to-date information in a command line?

adhesive_wombaton The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

And in the spirit of the Uncomfortable Ruler, this has the same frustrating design flaw: the scale doesn't start in the corner so you can't butt it up against something and use it like a depth gauge!

adhesive_wombaton The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

Assuming an architect doesn't have the right kind of workshop needed to make them herself, the capital outlay to tool up any of those objects except the broom and the fork (for which you'd take existing products and modify) would be pretty enormous. The ruler probably would be the easiest - a company that already makes steel rulers could likely make it for a relatively modest set-up cost.

adhesive_wombaton Starship.rs: minimal, fast prompt for any shell

Git information is extremely useful to me. I notice colleagues who don't have that tend to struggle using git on the command line and use git status nearly every other command (much as I tend to do when I'm remoting into a shell with a plain prompt).

Python venvs are useful too if you have a shell for running the program and other shells that just happen to be within that directory.

adhesive_wombaton The Annual Cost of Technical Debt: $1.52T

Honestly, sounds low. Technical debt is just like real debt: a useful tool to allow you to borrow against the future to get things done today, and an existential threat if not serviced before it gets out of hand. A tool that everyone else is using to the hilt and if you don't you'll be at a severe disadvantage. If it accumulates, it can sometimes be cleared down to a sustainable (and even useful) level through a painful multi-year process where no-one is having fun and you don't get to do many nice things you thing you should be able to.

adhesive_wombaton Sports Illustrated implosion shows the ugly, ongoing collapse of U.S. journalism

That's a funny one too me, because they do some very good journalism that spans many many years on many people up to no good. Frequently, they're the only ones doing anything more investigative than rewriting press releases and newswires and they must have an absolutely enormous library of material on public figures to be able to connect the dots that they do.

But when they report on something, it's gone from the public view in a few weeks as the only place you could find it would be your own archive, assuming it goes back that far (and you wish to dedicate the space in your house), or a major library of which there are only a handful in the country that would maintain an indefinite archive.

Something more impactful than a report on another suspiciously "bungled" contract by a councillor would be to be able to see the other articles they've done on that person over the decades. Even if there was, say, a year-long delay in putting them in the archive, there's a difference between "Eyes passim" (doubly irritating as there's also no thematic index and hundreds of back issues you'd need to look in) and seeing the older reports in front of you.

adhesive_wombaton Heat exchanger masks for cold weather cycling (2019)

Does that stay true when exercising? At rest, with a tidal volume of 500ml ish, lungs are least 5/6 full of stale air, round down to 3% ish CO2.

When exercising, the tidal volumes are far higher (2-3L), and you breathe faster, so the lung air is at least twice as fresh as it was at rest, probably more, since fresh air is functionally 0% CO2, and you're moving maybe 6 times the gas volume in each direction.

Does that massive change in volume and diffusion gradient (at least at the start of a breath) means that you might be able to tolerate a higher CO2 level in the inhaled air?

adhesive_wombaton Man Allegedly Raped in Jail After AI Wrongly IDs Him as Suspect Despite Alibi

I believe the 1979 original read "...Therefore a computer must never make a management decision".

https://constelisvoss.com/en-gb/pages/a-computer-can-never-b...

adhesive_wombaton Ambient light sensors pose imaging privacy risk

WiFi backscatter "radar" is another one that is surely going to find uses all along the useful-innocent-seedy-nefarious-malicious spectrum.

adhesive_wombaton Chinese researchers planning 1,600-core chips that use an entire wafer

Wayne Gretzky's post-retirement career in semiconductor engineering may not have been expected, but seems to be going well.

adhesive_wombaton Boeing whistleblower: MAX 9 production line has "enormous volume of defects"

It is. William Boeing's father was German and was called Wilhelm Böing.

Source: entered "Böing" into a search engine.

adhesive_wombaton Elevator Expert on How to Move 10k People Up a 118-Floor Skyscraper [video]

> algorithms governing that were closely-guarded secrets

Do many lifts have fancy algorithms in practice? I don't think I've ever had one go backwards to pick up a nearby floor, for example.

I suppose optimising where the lift loiters while empty is something I wouldn't really notice happening.

adhesive_wombaton Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

The Nam-shub of Hockney?

adhesive_wombaton The possibility of making money from shredded banknotes using computer vision

They're not different codepoints, they're being rendered as mathematical markup by MathJax. This rendering includes using a LaTeX-esque font rather like Computer Modern.

Arxiv does this presumably because some papers have mathematical expressions in the titles and abstracts. For example https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04991

adhesive_wombaton Google to invest $1B in UK data centre

It's not irrelevant to why Eindhoven is how it is today, in the same way that HP is a split-up shadow of what is former influential self, but it's partly why Google now is in Silicon Valley.

adhesive_wombaton Google to invest $1B in UK data centre

Plenty of things that used to be Philips are still in Eindhoven, like NXP (semiconductors) and Signify (lighting, including Hue). Philips has been a huge part of what made the Eindhoven area a high-tech industry hub, even if much of it is under new ownership structures.

adhesive_wombaton Google to invest $1B in UK data centre

There's a fairly large advanced hi-tech industry hub in the Netherlands. Philips and ASML are big names, but there are very many more. As they're all fairly near each other on the scale of things (often near Eindhoven, with more "non-physical" tech in Amsterdam), there's some Silicon Valley-style network effects at play.

Also French labour laws and norms are probably frightening to union-phobic Big Tech companies.

adhesive_wombaton Tour of new custom M1 macOS runners racks with Christina Warren [video]

Seems completely nuts that you have the "shuck" entire assembled computers for this. Reminds me of the story about the Soviet factory ordering tractors just to remove some component like a single bearing for manufacturing something else.

adhesive_wombaton Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

> it's far easier to change the workflow than it is to fix the software

This is just something software seems to do. There's a mature and fully-fledged industry in modifying entire workflows to fit software which is implicitly viewed as something that simply is the way it is.

Jira and SAP are some obvious big ones, almost with their own priesthoods, but at all levels, "capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say".

And let's not forget that the entire capital-C Content industry is completely subservient to the vagaries of "The Algorithms" that are not just considered ineffable by the supplicants, but were in fact specifically designed to be that way.

adhesive_wombaton One-Pedal Driving Explained

Some BMW 5s can do regenerative braking and use it to charge the "normal" (well it's a big stop-start one these days I would think) battery instead of having the alternator load the engine. So the electrical systems can be running on regenerated power.

adhesive_wombaton The failure of self-checkout technology

Indeed. Could you understand "unexpected item in bagging area" in, say, Russian or Arabic? Hell, I have no idea how to translate "bagging area" from/to my second-best language and I've been learning it for over 10 years.

adhesive_wombaton He spent his life building a $1M stereo

It was an interesting (to me) footnote to the point that even if you massively overspec your audio stream to the point of physically being unable to record the audio at that quality (the footnote being why it's unfeasible), you can still easily fit many such streams down a single modern-ish digital link.

The point isn't that you shouldn't record audio at 32-bit depth (which you probably shouldn't if you expect it to bring much benefit, but that's by-the-by), it's that even if you did, and you have a 7.1 system with 8 uncompressed streams, you still won't be anywhere near the point where USB 3 cable grades will start to matter.

You're the one who asked for clarification on the footnote specifically.

adhesive_wombaton The incredible shrinking podcast industry?

But if we put it on The Blockchain, you can mint PodCoins by listening to podcasts! Of course, to ensure you're really listening, you'll also need a secure cryptographic module installed in your auditory cortex. Depending on how well that surgery goes, maybe it finally can put the killer in killer app.

adhesive_wombaton He spent his life building a $1M stereo

If the sample clock edges aren't very (very very very) regular, on a sample-and-hold ADC, the waveform isn't sampled evenly and that manifests as noise that swamps the detail provided by the higher bit depth.

This is called "sample aperture jitter". Requirements scale linearly with frequency and exponentially with bit depth.

These a calculator here:

https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/interactive-design-t...

https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/aperture-jitter...

Sure enough, 32 bits sampling a 96kHz signal, which is the Nyquist frequency of 192kHz sampling rate, is 0.3fs. At 24 bits, it's more like 100fs, which is much more doable, but still not easy. Which is why audio bit depths usually don't go to 32 bits, despite formats like FLAC supporting that.

The practical upshot of this and other noise sources is that higher audiophile-grade bit depths and sampling frequencies are quite likely to have at least some of those bits swamped out by noise on real hardware.

This is just getting the audio recorded. Playing it back as physical sound waves adds something between quite a bit and radically more noise to the signal, even if there's never any lossy compression.

adhesive_wombaton He spent his life building a $1M stereo

Right, but in the context of an audio stream, it's not going to matter these days.

Even a hugely overkill uncompressed 8-channel, 32 bit, 192kHz sample rate audio stream[1] is under 50 megabits/second.

Any digital cable and transceiver from USB 2 (480Mbps) or 100BASE-T Ethernet (100Mbps) onwards will handily do that, with headroom for so much forward error correction that you probably won't expect a single bit error in your lifetime.

[1]: good luck getting a clock with low enough sample aperture jitter to actually record that in the first place, it's probably under a femtosecond.

adhesive_wombaton The Flappie AI cat door stops your pet from gifting you dead mice

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gift#Verb

And here's an use of it from 1670, so it's not a recently-verbed noun: https://archive.org/details/nature00lucy/page/137/mode/1up?q...

adhesive_wombaton Smart binoculars can identify 9k birds

Indeed, the same reason Brother makes sewing machines and printers.

adhesive_wombaton Single SF restaurant may be operating 70 different storefronts on DoorDash

Certainly it's questionable that it encourages market participants to be informed, rational and consenting actors, which we are told is a foundational principle of a market economy.

adhesive_wombaton DevDocs

There's also the user-contributed (but Dash-hosted) docsets: https://zealusercontributions.vercel.app/

adhesive_wombaton A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

Considering that the brine output of a single large-ish plant might be 150,000m³ per day[1], that's a hell of a mine shaft to take it continuously. The rock with the same volume as a day's brine would weigh a million tons. The entire Aberfan spoil tips were only 2 weeks worth of that much volume (2 million cubic metres).

The gigantic Hambach open-pit mine grows by 0.3km³ a year, so that could take it (but it can't take the Saudi million m³/day plant). By the time the mine is depleted, the resulting 18km³ pit would not be filled by our single hypothetical plant for over 300 years, assuming it won't evaporate. Which leads to:

The evaporation pools might work: they'd "only" have to be 3000 acres (12 km²) to gather the 4GW of solar power at 1kW/m² for 8 hours a day to continuously evaporate that much water daily[2]. Which is certainly large, but not completely impossible. But then there's 2 million tonnes of salt per year which will accumulate continuously over time.

[1] the largest is over a million

[2] not including water not bring a perfect absorber of solar energy or differing insolation