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drbw

96 karma · joined July 18, 2013

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drbw··on People who come off slimming jabs regain weight four times faster than dieters
In the UK, yes.
drbw··on Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
FWIW, the UK Met Office's models are described here: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/approach/modelling-sys...
drbw··on Mike Mageek is dead
Yeah, it was definitely inspired by the Eye.
drbw··on nic.funet.fi: Serving freely distributable files with FTP since 1990
Blimey, that's an address I haven't seen in a long time. Happy times downloading Amiga shareware from a university computer lab.

And now I feel old...

drbw··on Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time
Try this from Fermilab's Dr Don Lincoln: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zspu7ziA8Y
drbw··on Craft using an inertial mass reduction device
Next stop, Arisia!
drbw··on Get Running with Couch to 5K
Yep, after years of being a couch- and desk-potato, this got me out and running. That, and having a young and energetic dog in the early stages of lock-down!

I've managed to stick to 5-10km every other day (though it's a challenge in the winter, admittedly), and did my first half marathon in 2:09 a couple of months ago.

drbw··on Compare Webb's Images to Hubble
Astrophysicist YouTuber Dr Becky covered this last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNJR3lenz1I
drbw··on Vitamin D supplements lower risk of autoimmune disease, researchers say
Yeah, I've seen "Vitamin D enriched" mushrooms at the Coop supermarket in the UK.
drbw··on Best practices can slow your application down
As the old saying goes, "normalize until it hurts; denormalize until it works".
drbw··on Django, HTMX and Alpine.js: Modern websites, JavaScript optional
So pretty much the Blazor Server approach in the Dot Net world then?
drbw··on What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)
As the article says

> The details of how AlphaFold 2 works are still unknown, and we may not have full access to them until their paper is peer-reviewed (which may take more than a year, based on their CASP13 paper).

So it's not particularly surprising that we haven't heard much yet.

drbw··on Creating an Excel Add-In in D
Yeah, it's practically archaeology now! It is very fast for doing some things, though.

If anyone's interested in it from a Dot Net perspective, ExcelDNA [0] was excellent when I used it a few years ago.

[0] https://excel-dna.net/

drbw··on Ultra-weak gravitational field detected
Try this episode of PBS SpaceTime which goes into the dichotomy between GR and QM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNEBhwimJWs.
drbw··on Not the 'Beowulf' You Think You Know
No, but now I'm thinking about the early days of Slashdot, when "imagine a beowulf cluster of those" was a common in-joke. Along with the obligatory dozen claiming to be "frist".
drbw··on 'Dord': A Ghost Word
Pretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out.

Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.

drbw··on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI free until May 28th
I spent most of the money I'd saved from my summer job during my first year at university on a 42MB hard drive for my Amiga just so I could play Civ I without continually swapping floppies.

... and now I feel old.

drbw··on Deno 1.0
Or use something like Nexus or Artifactory to host a private copy of dependencies.
drbw··on Apache NiFi
I haven't used SSIS since about SQL2008 - back then it terrible to use with version control - not only was it a huge blob of XML, it had more xml escaped and shoved into attributes of the main document! Whats more it seemed to re-allocate the GUIDs of the elements every time you opened a diagram, so there were always changes...

Sounds like it's improved a bit since then.

drbw··on Microsoft REST API Guidelines
Aren't things like $filter, $orderBy etc. straight out of the OData standard[1].

[1] https://www.odata.org/

drbw··on Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak
I think it uses it: https://thenextweb.com/security/2018/06/26/mozilla-bakes-hav...
drbw··on Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles?
Maybe, but he's always been lazy and unwilling to do much actual work, apparently [1] his headmaster wrote to his father in 1982:

  Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies... 
  Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of 
  responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School
  for next half): I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard 
  him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.

[1]: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/letter-to-boris-johns...
drbw··on A Common Lisp Interpreter Built in Cobol
Yeah, but there's no local variables or dynamic memory allocation (from what I remember of COBOL85 on Tandems, anyway)
drbw··on A new experiment hints at surprising hidden mechanics of quantum superpositions
There's a good episode of PBS SpaceTime about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs
drbw··on Inside tiny tubes, water turns solid when it should be boiling
No - they mean hydrogen ions, which are just bare protons.
drbw··on Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law
> they will have to outlaw inability to decrypt.

The UK's already done that - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 already made it an offence not to divulge encryption keys when asked. [1]

1 https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investig...

drbw··on Multi-byte NOP opcode made official
I'm somewhat surprised that I can remember that the NOP opcode was EA. Amazing what sticks in your mind for almost forty years...