kovvy

The sleeping kitty is from, or perhaps descended from, https://webneko.net/

To the decorative text behind the kitty, I would add that it's almost always helpful to include some form of praise and redirect, for example, "The current approach of doing X has worked well, but aspect Y could be improved by doing Z."

A related alternative would be that the listed tv price included the price of time spent viewing ads, and the sale price of your usage data (and that changing the price, say by showing more ads, required agreement).

A DUMB TV costs $x, while a badly behaved smart TV costs $y up front, plus $z per hour for the next few years, where y is potentially slightly less than x.

Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.

The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.

Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.

The figures are about the change rather than the absolute value, so it's not too terrible, but even given that, they could have been normalised by being relative to year 1. A quite warm mess, perhaps?

I have high hopes for Daggerfall once they finish fixing the main bugs and it goes into beta.

Was that a complete ban, or was it an attempt to get your phone number and other personal details?

Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.

There is also 'homeograph' - "A word similar — but not identical — in spelling to another." That seems a better fit for your needs.

A lot of humour consists of buildup followed by a twist - the humour is in the contrast between the expected and the actual. This is very similar to explaining a concept that is flawed or misunderstood by building up a scenario where the expected outcome can be contrasted with an actual outcome. A smaller set replaces 'actual' with 'nonsense'.

The text may present this as wisdom, but I would say it is both wisdom and humour.

On my map it seemed like the road consisted of a few points, rather than the points plus lines between them (or however it's described). Selecting intersections (maybe bends?) lowered the distance.

I find that students talk to each other and spread interpretations of the assignment. They might be correct, they might not - either way the interpretation spreads (never through anything like 'official' course forums set up for students to ask about interpretations, of course). They've also gone through shared experiences in other courses beforehand and will often simply come up with the same incorrect interpretation. For 5 years the basic assignment was clear and easily understood, then the next year it's almost universally misinterpreted. Those shared misunderstandings have easily outnumbered creative interpretations to help grades in my experience.

It's all so ... readable.

They're pretty similar concepts. Either way, they're administering drugs to affect health.

"Remove dead code"

Many people put answers to assignments and exams in the course material and very few people get it.

Generally, anyone writing a paper about something that could benefit from bugfixes would love to accept them, but doesn't have the time or resources to actually do so - unless there's another paper in it. If they have somehow managed to find enough personal time to have a hobby project, then they probably do accept bugfixes - and you should get them in before that person burns out.

There's already a lot of published work in that area. Are you looking at confirming earlier work, or is there a particular focus that introduces novelty?

I had zero problems keeping myself still for an MRI, but I really wished I had picked a more comfortable position.

Standing still, now there I have all the problems.

Research is also hampered by non-obvious changes in the product. Even when a good, reliable product is released, it can be modified to be cheaper to make/more expensive to maintain with no external indication. This isn't even necessarily about cost-cutting, a component may no longer be available and is swapped for something that claims to be identical but is not as reliable.

Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.

Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.

My most cited paper has the head of an institution down as an author. Most, but far from all, of the citations are from students there. A previous paper introduced the concept and tools to apply it, while the cited paper just adds an example application and a host of authors.

The hard part of fixing it can be that the manufacturer used a range of sources for each part. The parts are available, but it can be difficult to tell which easily available part is the right one. This is only a problem for fixing a single device - if you fix many, then you likely have multiple parts anyway.

Perhaps start with a set of blocks representing available resources. The 'top' equivalent could be a stream of blocks falling down the screen. Manipulate and rearrange the blocks to create new sets of blocks representing your desired function.

Deleting a file would be similar to any current GUI file manager, but with more blocks - drag file block to delete block. Opening a file with a particular program would be similar. Chaining a series of operations would be where it gets interesting. The shape of the pieces would control what can be chained together.

Souffle: https://github.com/souffle-lang/souffle

Used by projects such as Doop: https://bitbucket.org/yanniss/doop and Ddisasm: https://github.com/grammatech/ddisasm

The personal massager. After 53 years of sales it's still very well regarded.

If you miss a word in a conversation, you automatically fill it in. This is usually pretty reliable even with unfamiliar material, since if you follow standard grammar rules there's a decent amount of redundancy. Sometimes, though, this doesn't work. You think you were paying attention, but you missed parts and filled them in with what you wanted to hear.

Ideally there is a back and forth that checks that important information was correctly passed on. Failing that, some redundancy can make a big difference.

I'm close to this, and if I make an Instagram account it's banned before a single page is loaded.

Instagram insists I'm a bot and immediately blocks any account I make. Using Instagram without an account is a rather dismal experience since it blocks viewing any posts, or scrolling too far through previews of posts. I also deal with businesses that post all their updates on Instagram.

User experience doesn't seem to be a priority for Instagram.

I had a protocol fail repeatedly, and expensively, because of a combination of a contaminated reagent and a tiny amount of sample. Took me ages to even approach being able to debug that one as the protocol worked for everyone else. Turned out everyone else using the same materials had so much input sample that the contamination didn't matter, or used the non-contaminated part of the output.

Almost to the day I worked out the issue, I saw an immensely more experienced lab person running an almost identical experiment to my setup. They always added another reagent "in case there's contamination".

Changing from Blackboard is a lot of work, and the replacement isn't guaranteed to be better (although while you're using Blackboard it does seem that any replacement at all would be better).

Blackboard has a lot of useful features built up over the years, and they're not all bugs.

Recommendations used to seem to be affected by your ratings. That may still be the case to some extent, but Netflix's preferences seem to be way, way more important now.

That aside, I don't live in the USA so it would be nice if Netflix stopped claiming that USA content was local, and non-USA foreign. It's not just their recommendation system that is poor, their general categorisation also is.