duskwuff

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.

The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample.

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf

TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.

Air travel has also become ~100x safer on a per-passenger basis:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...

> 'Run by one individual in Denmark.' is an interesting statement of bus factor

I find it more interesting as a statement about organizational oversight. If there are multiple people involved in operations, they can keep an eye on each other and speak up if they see anything weird going on (e.g. a DNS resolver implementing selective logging or interfering with results). If there's only one person running the show, there's no one to call them out.

(And if you're thinking, "but so-and-so is a principled person, they would never do anything like that" - pressure from law enforcement can be a powerful thing.)

> Quake III Arena had no single player.

It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrmJgXT8WSY

> It was a wristwatch back then, right?

Only if the application explicitly set the cursor. There was no default indication that an application had stopped processing events - your only clue was that everything stopped responding.

pngcrush is pretty old. A newer, more effective option is oxipng: https://github.com/oxipng/oxipng

> They've wanted Larry Gone for years

Larry was essentially inactive* on Wikipedia from 2002 until he started stirring things up last year. Nobody "wanted him gone" - he simply wasn't relevant to the project.

*: Aside from updating his user profile and commenting on talk pages about himself and his projects.

The dark patterns aren't just in online gambling. Nowdays, a lot of brick-and-mortar casinos encourage, or even require, clients to create an account (often framed as a "members club" or "rewards card"), which is used to track the client's activity at the casino and target them with promotions tailored to their behavior. These can be used in some really troubling ways, e.g. by identifying clients who may have a gambling problem and targeting them with promotions to come back to the casino more often, to stay longer, and/or to start placing larger bets.

Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of illicit use as well. But scraping is what the network is being actively marketed for, and it probably amounts to most of their traffic by volume.

Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".

Apple's devices use an IR depth scanner, not the camera, and do not expose the data to software.

More to the point - if they expose their model's "thinking" inference, competitors can train on that to replicate the results. If they postprocess that content, e.g. by summarizing it, it's no longer as useful to competitors.

No, this one is just flu.

Buried lede: this is, in large part, a self-created problem. Many states set restrictions on where people who are registered sex offenders are allowed to live (e.g. disallowing them from living close to schools and day care centers), and those restrictions can make it much more difficult for these people to find housing.

(Anecdotally, I've heard of situations where these restrictions effectively ban sex offenders from living anywhere in a city, because the overlapping exclusion zones leave nothing uncovered.)

Re. "dirtiest power" - coal is dirtiest at the site of consumption, but if you consider the entire supply chain, diesel generators at remote locations might be worse. (Coal is usually supplied directly by train; diesel has to be refined and shipped in by truck.)

And, as far as I'm aware, they don't charge for relay bandwidth even if you do end up needing it (which most users won't).

> Also I was assuming it was picking from a huge set, but it seems everybody was shown the same words

I don't think I got "breviary" when I tried. Maybe it's using a decision tree, but everyone's ending up on the same branch by getting most of the words right?

Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.

> It seems below about ~80F you lose consciousness.

Interestingly, the case report notes that "classic cardiac electrical activity" started once the patient reached 82°F.

If only there had been some kind of geological steam turbine to go with it... :)

This is mentioned in the article "A Note on the Word 'Zork'", linked right above the 'pterodactyl chopper':

https://web.archive.org/web/20100112110305/https://nickm.com...

> What's that? Just keep using an older version of Linux?

Or move the AppleTalk stack into userspace. I don't see why it needs to be in the kernel - certainly not for performance.

On top of being much more complex to encode and decode, and being encumbered by patents, JPEG 2000 was only marginally better than JPEG in terms of quality vs. size. At the time it came out, it wasn't worth using; nowadays it's thoroughly outclassed by any newer image codec (JPEG XL, WebP, HEIC, etc).

I mean... yeah, it's beyond time.

AppleTalk was a local, non-IP networking protocol used by early Macintosh systems, akin to IPX. All Mac OS systems have supported IP networking since the release of System 7.5 in 1994, and have used it more or less exclusively since the release of Mac OS X in 2001. Virtually no Linux software ever supported AppleTalk - the main exception I'm aware of was netatalk, which used it to implement the AFP file sharing protocol, and which also supports AFP over TCP.

All of this is to say that AppleTalk support in Linux had essentially no practical value, even when interoperating with old systems. It's unlikely to be missed.

> Personal blogs are not necessarily self hosted. Substack is very popular and not uncommon nor dying.

That isn't necessarily quite as personal as a personal blog from the era I'm remembering, though. My impression is that Substack blogs (as well as similar sites like Medium) are typically used for content about particular topics, deliberately crafted to appeal to the interests of some audience. They're more akin to a newspaper column than a diary, if that comparison makes sense.

Some contemporary social media sites which operated on this model were LiveJournal and Xanga.

> Personal blogs aren't going to disappear, there's right now more of them than ever!

I'm not at all convinced. The personal blog, as it existed in the 2000s/2010s, is essentially dead. There are certainly still some sites which operate on that model - most commonly, in my experience, ones operated by professional authors or artists - but those, too, are increasingly rare.

In fact, I think this is an aspect of a broader trend - having a personal web site is increasingly uncommon. The default nowadays is to post your creations or experiences on social media, and to create communities within hosted services like Reddit or Discord.

The threatened cancellation was over Watterson demanding an unmodifiable half-page for his Sunday strips, not over the content of his strips.

Not just that, but also - it's not as though there's a single Optical Mouse Interface which every mouse uses internally. There's probably hundreds of slightly different sensors, all of which work differently - having a single, standard interface to them (USB HID) is a lot better than having to support every single one with its own driver.

(And that's even without getting into the bandwidth issue - the camera on a modern optical mouse captures far more data than it can transfer over USB.)

> By "that mode", do you mean "1.5A @ 5V" permitted by BC

Neither - OP means devices with missing CC resistors which will fail to charge with a compliant PD source. (The A-to-C cable works because it provides 5V Vbus unconditionally.)