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cheerlessbog

802 karma · joined June 24, 2018

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cheerlessbog··on The “menu engineers” who optimize restaurant revenue
I assume that budget restaurants with large menus make heavy use of freezer and microwave. So a short menu is usually a good sign.
cheerlessbog··on Using the Linux kernel's Case-insensitive feature in Ext4
I understand that NTFS has its own case folding table which is written once when the volume is formatted. This does seem to have stood the test of time and enormous usage so maybe it is not such a poor idea.
cheerlessbog··on First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found has finally been studied in detail
That paper is a beautiful thing: 86 pages full of hand stippled line drawings.
cheerlessbog··on Expert overclockers successfully push DOOM Eternal past 1k frames per second
How does even N2 not crack and warp the packages and boards? If I plunged my TV into liquid nitrogen I would expect it to not work - in a violent way.
cheerlessbog··on A mysterious radio burst that keeps repeating
Someone who only eats when the telescope is observing FRB121102
cheerlessbog··on Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim
That's true but most people would pay that once or twice, which puts potentially small beans if it increases your productivity. Plus it's fun
cheerlessbog··on Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim
That game is a labor of love by someone - I spent weeks playing it. So much fun solving puzzles and learning at the same time. If I had a criticism is that I'm not sure much has stuck with me. I still use the same 10-15 commands and all the obscure tricks it taught me are gone. Its worth the money just for the fun alone. Great to mess with on a laptop when you're on a plane.
cheerlessbog··on Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem
It doesn't say whther the intervention was assigned randomly (and those assigned all stuck with it). Home environment and parental support has a huge influence and also those who get tuition (or stick with assignment to the tuition group) probably have strong parental support.
cheerlessbog··on Cities sue Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, claim they owe cable “franchise fees”
It's unclear they even exist..or work..our could even theoretically work now we have digital. Their true enforcement strategy is to harass the small minority who don't pay the license fee.
cheerlessbog··on USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System
This is part of the reason we still use plurality voting.
cheerlessbog··on How the 8086 processor handles power and clock internally
Is it conceivable that the clock signal could supply the power in a CPU?
cheerlessbog··on People work longer and different hours under lockdown
Doing stuff outdoors or by other means staying apart
cheerlessbog··on People work longer and different hours under lockdown
What if your employer did the same as Twitter etc and declared working from home was allowed forever. Could you imagine moving somewhere you’d love to be - with excellent internet - finding new friends there and being happier than other situation?
cheerlessbog··on People work longer and different hours under lockdown
I have a couple single friends in your position who were getting dangerously lonely. They got a cat in one case dog in the other and it hasn’t fixed anything but it’s given them a reason to get outside and a bit more of something alive in their life
cheerlessbog··on People work longer and different hours under lockdown
That’s an over simplification. My job is owning part of an open source stack. There’s countless fun projects in that which aren’t a necessary part of my job but are fun to do out of hours and and still happen to contribute to my employer’s larger goals. Eg, refactor some subsystem to make it faster. Everyone wins, and because the source is open any future employers can see it also. Plus I enjoy working with my coworkers and learn a great deal from doing so: it’sa good environment for such projects.
cheerlessbog··on Bill Gates calls Microsoft’s TikTok deal a poisoned chalice
There’s an ad when you return to the app. Since you’re expecting a full screen video to auto play, they often aren’t out of place. You can skip them immediately as well.

Besides ads, one would think there’s endless ways to monetize a strong fun brand.

cheerlessbog··on People work longer and different hours under lockdown
With all the energy drained from job +commute it can be hard to have much left to care about the planet and our community. It’s easier to be angry and isolated and fall back on tribal stereotypes and assume someone else will fix climate change and other global problems. With more time and energy, it’s easier to participate.
cheerlessbog··on C.I.A. Lacing (2014)
Barely related, but if you haven’t learned how to tie shoelaces instantly, you should:

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm

I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years.

cheerlessbog··on Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever
What makes it truly hard (speaking from US location) is having a team in both directions. If you’re an Eastward team, or Westward team, but not attempting both, there is enough overlap that with some flexibility you can have meetings when everyone is awake.
cheerlessbog··on Atlassian tells employees they can work from home forever
It’s worked better for me in teams that work on open source. Such projects tend to be intrinsically asynchronous and conducted via email, chat etc which is what you need to make a distributed team work well.
cheerlessbog··on To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
Is this a negative result of mono repo? There’s no natural boundary physics.
cheerlessbog··on Simdjson: Parsing gigabytes of JSON per second
And not so good if you want to do O(1) indexing
cheerlessbog··on Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities
Or use modified randomized response technique [1]

Roll a die and multiply (salary - 100k) by the spots on the die. Share that value publicly. Sum all such values and average them then divide by 21/6 and add 100k. Choose the 100k value to be closest to but not greater then your guess at the lowest salary.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response

cheerlessbog··on Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities
If you know who is senior, who is junior etc you can identify their values
cheerlessbog··on Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid
When you shower are you aware whether the water was heated an hour ago or a day ago?
cheerlessbog··on Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system (2017)
If you lead a tough life of crime or had an abusive childhood that led you to crime, etc - I would expect it to be hard on your body - and looks.

Whenever I see correlation assumed to be causation I like to wonder why they excluded causation in the other direction. In this case, maybe sentencing someone heavily is hard on their looks, and we know once you go to jail you’re likely to reoffend, and that continues, until you have the correlation you observe, perhaps?

cheerlessbog··on Treating children for worms yields long-term benefits, says new study
I assume you mean “non legal residents” as typically universal healthcare covers legal residents. Do you have evidence that it makes financial sense to leave unauthorized residents (likely) untreated? One might imagine they’re disproportionately young and healthy and not suffering from terminal cancer if they came here to work in fields. Going to the ER uninsured is very expensive for society.
cheerlessbog··on What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon
The appeal of horoscopes?
cheerlessbog··on StackExchange Performance Stats
Their recent blog post gives a flavor of some of the performance work in the platform:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...

cheerlessbog··on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019)
English has a relatively idiosyncratic relationship between letters and sounds. Does phonics work even better in languages that have regularized spelling, so "sounding out" always works perfectly? I could imagine that a native speaker would find it easy to learn to read in such a language.
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