nonesuchluck

Maybe someone here can help me remember. I had a PalmOS app that I loved, back in the day, and I can't remember what it was called. It was a shareware clock app, with hand-drawn time that animated from one numeral to the next. I used to use it as an alarm clock, in my Sony Clie dock, by my bed. Would love to see it again.

Yeah. Now we have parallel murders.

That would certainly be an improvement over their current strat (ignoring what I want to click on, showing me what's most profitable for them instead)

Seems a natural fit for a notebook UI. If a PRQL cell doesn't start with "from," just continue adding filters to the pipeline above. Would let you progressively build pipelines by adding filters and derivations, while previewing the data each step along the way. Split a cell to debug a pipeline at any point.

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today to simulate that appearance.

The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.

Could have packaged up the Amiga chipset on an ISA card, an all-in-one video/audio/io gizmo. Sell that to 386 owners and give the OS away. Bonus points for a ROM socket to insta-boot AmigaOS with no disk.

AT stands for ATTENTION. In command mode, it configures the modem for data transfer. It is an excellent name for a social network protocol.

They did just that in 1989, with the Macintosh Portrait Display [1]. It was designed to fit snugly on the Mac II. Like other CRTs with fixed resolution and refresh rate, the phosphor persistence was perfectly tuned for comfortable, fatigue-free document viewing.

Curiously, tho, I don't think it was a perfect 72dpi like the 9" CRT in compact Macs, so it's not precisely scaled with printed output.

[1] https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-portrait-display/

Forget satellites: launch water, rocket fuel, 3D printing material!

Relativity Space is building 3D printers large enough to construct orbital-class rockets in one piece. Others will follow. If they can make printers work in vacuum at 0g, that's how we build our next-next generation of space stations. SpinLaunch wants to launch around the clock, multiple times per day. Just keep flinging materials and consumables to the construction robots building our future habs.

Yeah, the capacitive touch screen feels really tetchy and imprecise. Frustrating to use, even for simple card games with large touch targets (ex. Dicey Dungeons).

But I've found the dual thumb pads to be surprisingly good for mouse input. And with the inbuilt controller mapping software (WASD etc), I don't even need mouse all that much. I've been playing a little bit of Guild Wars 2, which doesn't even support controller input in the options. With a community-made control mapping provided in Steam, it works surprisingly well for casual adventuring (probably not for PvP).

I've never seen anyone use this logic to recommend installing Windows Insider on production servers.

Whole thing boils down to "I've always been in the cultural in-group, but man it sucks here in the out-group," as he notices for the first time what life has been like for most people, for most of history. Hilarious.

Oh. To this modern reader, L. Bob Rife was just an obvious parody of L. Ron Hubbard.

But he wasn't a Texan, so I suppose I see your angle. Interesting bit of flavor.

I sympathize with this sentiment, I hate printers. Worked in a copy shop for a time. Hate em.

But there has been at least 1 good printer, and HP made it: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5

Also, 9-pin dot matrix printers were workhorses.

This mini-thread accidentally explains why the West don't, won't, and can't care about Azerbaijan/Armenia violence: it's fucking incomprehensible. Tribes killing each other for generations, for complicated reasons that no one without a relevant PhD will understand. It seems intractable, so we throw up our hands and focus elsewhere, somewhere with a simpler narrative.

Everyone gets uptight about the word "uncivilized," but this kind of generational tribal conflict _is_ a failure of civilization. I don't know what causes civilization (it sure ain't skin tone), but without clear villain/victim narratives, and heroes to root for (brave Ukrainians fighting for their own liberation), no one will care. And that's tragic, too, but it's not a commentary on the underlying tragedy of human suffering and death, that people in every nation hurt the same.

Pretty poor execution by Tesla though. It didn't even honk and yell "ride on the sidewalk, moron!"

They probably do, then give themselves a nice round of applause. They're getting rid of their (unprofitable) discerning users, and keeping all the (profitable) naive users. On average, this increases the effectiveness of their ads and decreases costs. It's a big win for Google's customers (not you).

550km is also just the operational altitude. SpaceX initially releases satellites in a much lower initial orbit. If they fail to POST, they fall into the atmosphere months after launch. Starlink climbs slowly to 550km with the same ion thrusters used for station keeping. SpaceX does not want dead birds in their orbital shell.

Has live search, it's as quick as you can type.

I use Automattic's Simplenote. I pin the web app in a Firefox tab, avoiding the Electron app. The Android and iOS apps are both great tho. Live sync is perfect, you can publish read-only links to notes (like pastebin), and it has basic Markdown support but basically no other frills.

"Laptop?" More like, revenge of the luggable!

Mix up a cup of fiber supplement (I use BeneFiber) and drink it 10 min before you plan to eat. You will eat less and feel fuller for longer (eating slowly increases the effect). If you're already choosing healthy foods, portion control is the last barrier to conquering waistlines.

Many people don't get enough fiber in their diet anyway. Just be sure to start drinking more water to overcome the, err, digestive difficulties of higher fiber consumption.

A bit later, it seems Netscape wanted to connect to the Visual Basic hype of the time: https://web.archive.org/web/19971022101212if_/http://www101....

I'm not sure if Visual JavaScript is archived at all: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42968

Nothing you wrote contradicts anything I said, because I did not claim Tesla or SpaceX invented anything brand new. I said they built existing inventions into viable products and brought them to market. They were each great ideas whose time had clearly come, and yet, no one was building them.

The examples I picked were historical inventions which were actually built by Trouvé and Bell, not merely conceptualized or patented. And we spent decades whining about GM killing the electric car blah blah, when all we needed was somebody to come along and actually do the heavy lifting.

To me, Elon Musk is the antithesis, rather than fulfillment, of the great man theory of history. In each case, somebody else would have gotten around to it, eventually, because the ideas were ripe. And yet, time and again, it's Musk there at the finish line, not somebody else.

And yeah, hyperloop-style systems have been built. That's the point. I don't think that's an idea worth stealing, but Elon does, and Elon has the $billions and the engineers to push it forward, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2006: There is a reason Gustave Trouvé invented the electric car 125 years ago and it never took off.

2011: There is a reason Bell invented VTVL rockets 50 years ago and it never took off (lol).

Musk's _entire deal_ is taking well-known inventions that he thinks haven't received adequate investment, and building great engineering teams to commercialize them. They're not all good ideas (I would argue Hyperloop isn't--but it's irrelevant). But "never took off [before]" is an exceptionally poor argument against Elon.

I've lived in Chattanooga long enough to call it home (decade+). First thing about Chattanooga is, it's built on the backbone of the Interstate system, in the valley between some mountains. It's a bigtime car city. Anyone outside our immediate downtown has to hop the highway to even get here, or brave treacherous mountain roads (our W Road is even a tiny bit famous... W not being a compass point, but a shape).

As you've noticed on Google, our downtown and close-lying (expensive) neighborhoods have sidewalks and bike lanes aplenty. They're fantastic. But there's no similar facilities in older, poorer, and outlying neighborhoods (many of which were simply suburbs until the city crept in). Nor any practical connection between neighborhoods for foot+pedal traffic.

But our internet's great.

Similar problem I've encountered is AWS Athena not supporting Parquet files compressed with Zstd. I re-wrote files with Snappy to get around it.

Yep. The peculiarities that make this Excel workflow unreasonably effective are pretty easy to identify:

1. Tabular data. There's some tricks with named ranges etc, but for the most part your entire application state is spread out before you, scrollable in every direction. It's just tables, and clicking into a cell highlights relationships (data dependency) between cells.

2. Visible data, hidden code. =macros are hidden behind their result; the most obvious thing is to treat them as tiny black boxes, applying a single data transformation (or small set of logically related transforms), and immediately see the result applied to your data set. This is a tiny bit like functional programming, and a tiny bit like Pandas or Spark (immutable data, lazy evaluations). Except unlike those worlds, Excel pushes the data front and center, not the code.

And prob a bunch more I'm forgetting. It doesn't even feel like programming, more like building data pipelines in Unix or something. Except you can easily preview the data at each step in the pipeline. What I really want is Excel or Siag, but with Python and SQLite and a nice spreadsheet UI.

Now I've only watched to the 2nd episode. But there are _some_ very special people in Asimov's universe. I'm withholding judgement on who that pregnant woman might be, or who her child might become... it's a detail left mostly unsketched in Foundation & Empire, and might turn into an interesting tale.

We are stuck in a local minima with C and C++. Rust is a particle with high enough energy to tunnel through the barrier to a lower, safer energy level.

To some degree, it doesn't matter how Rust acquired the energy; if you want to hop the gap, gotta hitch a ride on the highest energy wave.