beobab

I have GamePass, so I thought: "I'll give this a go. How hard can it be? I'm really good in Elite Dangerous."

Turns out: Quite hard. I have a newfound respect for airline pilots.

On a related note, even my RAF cadet experience 20 years ago counted for naught. Whilst I could keep the plane in the air, landing proved the most difficult, and I crashed and bounced and would not have survived without invulnerability switched on.

Weirdly, my initial thought there was "that's only 9 years ago", and then did a quick double take when I realised that it wasn't.

They already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.

I learned to always have one database with every custom schema change in, and run my database unit tests (tSQLt is my favourite) on that one database.

I remember reading "Heirs of Empire" by David Weber, and it casually mentioned that Dakax had a database that was immutable. I remember thinking that was a good idea, and planned to think about it later, but alas I had forgotten about it by the time I'd finished the book.

[edit: added who's database it was]

I had to zoom in to 400% to be able to see the detail there.

Nice. Bought it and will try it out.

The website says: "accurately identifies upto ten Pantone® colors"

What is the ten referring to? Total times you can use it?

I can confirm anecdotally that having a baby crying at all hours of the day and the night also makes humans less interested.

I understand what you mean. There's an incredible amount of tactile information in the real world, and I can't help feeling that there's probably almost as much information flowing in as audio or visual (that we as humans can process at any one instant), but I have been unable to find anything to back up my wild hypothesis.

I never remember to put comments in when I am beer-coding.

Caffeine-code is much easier to follow later.

You still have to know exactly the same amount of information to know if someone is working or not, but you only have to know one piece of information per moment, because "what time is it now?" is the same for everyone.

If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.

Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

One time I had TomTom accidentally switch itself on in my bag on the floor, set to Homer Simpson's voice and trying to redirect me to home.

As I got further and further away the "turn left here" and "turn right here" directions got more and more frequent, until eventually he just started repeating "turn around where possible" until I was able to find somewhere reasonable to stop and turn it off.

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"

You could spin up a virtual machine and try it out on there.

Sign language (BSL) uses air keyboard for "programmer": https://www.signbsl.com/sign/computer-programmer

"If the headline is a question, then the answer is no." - Betteridge's law.

I get a security error clicking the link above. Does anyone have another link?

Do you know of a tool which allows two (or more) people to share their screens with each other at the same time?

i.e. A can see (at least) one of B's screens, and B can see (at least) one of A's screens at the same time as talking to them.

That's the tool I'm missing to be able to work productively remotely.

Is it safe to assume that you've never used a car with cameras? I'd be very interested in a camera feed from my front bumper when I'm pulling out on a difficult bend, for example.

Agreed. The amount is right on the edge of legality. Should you report it? Should you make an effort to find someone to hand it to? If the first shopkeeper around the corner says "Could be anyone's. Keep it" for a fifty, does that constitute a reasonable search for the owner?

I'm pretty sure I read a short story about this in an anthology called "Black Holes" by Jerry Pournell back when I was a youngster. In short, the black hole was a "gift" from some advanced race who dropped it into orbit of our star by braking it with Pluto (hence its erratic orbit) for the purpose of interstellar travel.

Honest people do need to be kept honest. Even the most saintly can be tempted.

If you found a twenty on the floor in an abandoned alleyway, would you hand it in to police, or would you steal that money?

If your first thought was "It's not stealing for such a small amount", or "It's clearly been abandoned, so it's ok to take it", then you're the target audience for being kept honest.

Your other point is spot on: the aim is to increase the friction of entry and raise a mental barrier in the mind of the subject which results in an outcome you would prefer (no break-in).

And you'd better do it with ludicrous speed. ;)

I like the line in that article which said that they wrote about it "1.5 months ago". It's an oddly precise measurement with an imprecise unit.

Hmmm. I definitely don't like the "give me a ton of money, and you might get what you want" payment mechanism. I saw it with PacMan cards and football cards back in the 80's, and then Pokemon cards for my own children.

I got "stung" enough by a trader in London who demonstrated that you shouldn't buy a pig in a poke. I still keep the cheap trinket I got instead as a reminder to always find out what I'm paying for.

I do the visual reading thing that is mentioned in the article. I get a sort of "movie in my head" when I'm reading, and often become unaware of the words on the page. Sometimes I have to pause to let the action catch up to where I am on the page, and sometimes I'll be focused on one character in a story and miss incidental things that happen in the book to another character.

I can read just under a couple of pages of a standard paperback in about a minute. It's a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

I don't read non-fiction like that, though. It just doesn't happen, and I don't know how to make it happen.

And yet, direct witness statements from two helpful people standing next to each other, made immediately after the event can vary so wildly that you would wonder if they are describing the same event.

paraphrased from "The Invisible Gorilla: and other ways our intuition deceives us" (Chabris and Simons)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003P9XE56/

Possibly irrelevant to this discussion (you decide): the level of stupidity in any human undertaking is almost always a) higher than you'd think, and b) pretty constant across all cross-sections of humanity.

Source Carlo M. Cipolla, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley: https://advanced.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Basi...

Despite widespread attempts by humans to eradicate it, it exists everywhere; ignoring race/class/education/gender/orientation/profession or any other sub-division you can think of. You'll find roughly the same amount of stupidity in a gaggle of university professors as you will in a humdrum of railway attendants (I made up those collective terms, in case it wasn't obvious).