asplake

In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.

Can you be one without the other? Serious question – I’ve written five books, and the first draft was like 5% of the work.

> 3. Why the Obvious Answer Fails: The Center-of-Mass Trap

You can @decorate a for-loop?

I wish there were easier ways to play with syntax in Python, but there we are.

My take (several years old now) https://www.agendashift.com/done

> It’s one of the ways you can tell the true lover of the emdash from an LLM

Quite apart from this tiresome and unreliable LLM detector, it’s also a way tell an American from a Brit. We Brits use spaces (and endashes).

Michel Barnier (EU's Brexit negotiator and later PM of France) suggests otherwise.

Exclusive: Former chief Brexit negotiator says staying out of euro and Schengen area would be ‘perfectly possible’" https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/18/uk-could-ke...

Via (with a rather more ironic headline) Paul Krugman: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-...

Via the BBC: Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given vaccine https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621z28z138o

Reminds me of Ackoff’s Idealised Design [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_planning#Idealized...

Not a core tenet [note 1] at all - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessationism_versus_continuati...

[note 1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/tenant-vs-tenet-diff...

> For years, people have tried hard to get websites to build accessibility affordances. Now developers are willingly building them for AI.

“Kettle lead” is definitely good here too. It is, after all, more than just a plug.

Is transposition a common enough operation that it might be better to avoid it by having versions of the operations/functions that take matrices that do the necessary transpositions implicitly?

I

And now you have 84,689 problems

In practice, it can be very relevant. With my own household solar/battery system, I am sometimes frustrated more by limits on how much current I can draw, not by capacity. I could add more batteries, but it seems that the inverter is the limiting factor. And 12MW of inverter is impressive, no?

Another old person here. At an office in Zurich I saw a layer of smoke filling the upper reaches of the atrium. I wondered how many working (i.e. smoking) hours it would take before it reached the balcony on which I was standing.

“Friday next week”. Sorted.

Yes, it's great that civilian homes and infrastructure are sacrosanct now. Saracasm aside, that's a matter of perspective, no?

I wasn’t taught it, but that was forty years ago

IANAD, but sounds like IBS or similar, not necessarily age-related, and potentially treatable.

Previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=orange+peel

I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious body of knowledge. Taken together, business schools have become cash cows for universities while still being held in disdain by academia. This from the first dean of Oxford's Said Business School.

And to ease oil prices, the US takes its already limited pressure off Russia meanwhile. Given the Ukraine situation, I can't see how that helps EU and UK.

Is tossing stuff over the fence considered ok now? Review the slop with the person that submitted it.

Agreeing first that it is genuinely interesting, let me make a constructive comment on the text: Early on, there are too many small paragraphs that don't on their own make a cogent argument. That important but easily overlooked structural work is pushed back to the reader. I felt rewarded in pushing past that though. Bravo.

Because you buy not just a device but into an ecosystem. Because you have expectations of future development. Because, as far as a changing political landscape will allow, you hope you can trust their judgement. Because you want support. Because you want to be able to walk into a store. Lots of reasons…

I suffered a highly unpleasant vertigo attack yesterday - happens every once in a while. Tinnitus was the warning, and I was definitely over-tired beforehand.

After an ear infection 30 years ago I lost most hearing in my left ear and my balance was affected. Not a massive problem most of the time but I regret not being able to read when travelling, even by plane or train. It’s audiobooks all the way…