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placesalton The Fall of Stack Overflow

My assumption whenever I see that behaviour in a response is that the responder simply does not know the answer to the question asked.

It’s fine, I think, to answer a question and then suggest a better method. It’s presumptuous in the extreme to dismiss a question with some pseudoacademic neologism.

placesalton Amazon is getting ready to launch a lot of broadband satellites

I looked it up, and

LEO = <2000km altitude, and

rEarth = ~6300m, so

surface area of a sphere with r=6300km => ~500,000,000 km^2

surface area of a sphere with r=8300km => ~860,000,000 km^2

so roughly 1.5x the surface area at max LEO compared to earth's surface

(feel free to correct me if my arithmetic is off :)

placesalton Amazon is getting ready to launch a lot of broadband satellites

Has anyone heard much about the Telesat Lightspeed program?

As far as I can tell, there is no regular consumer access planned for it. It seems like a missed opportunity on their part.

placesalton 90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president

These (and the ones in the GGP post) are very good points.

To play devil's advocate,

- With data plans based on minimum speed, there would still be a possibility of service being degraded below the paid-for minimum speed during times of high usage at a cell site. There would have to be an asterisk in the contract to the effect that minimum speeds would only be supplied while possible. And, ideally, some regulatory oversight to ensure sufficient cell site capacity is installed based on the cumulative speed of the plans sold, if that makes sense.

- I wonder, to what degree is the structure of cell phone data plans constrained by regulation and private agreements? IOW, are carriers allowed, under current regulation, to sell minimum-speed plans? How complicated and time-consuming would it be to unwind inter-carrier cell-site-sharing agreements?

placesalton Kevin Mitnick has died

Sad to see. Pancreatic cancer is one of the scary ones, since there are so few symptoms before you hit stage 4.

For those who haven't seen it, Freedom Downtime is a movie by the 2600 gang which is mostly about Mitnick's imprisonment, and the whole Free Kevin movement.

(I wonder who wrote the obituary, it's especially wide-ranging, and poetic in parts.)

placesalton How to register a Kei truck in Pennsylvania

My corolla takes 10' long boards. Never maxed out the bags of mulch, but it's >10 for sure.

Have been thinking about a roof rack for sheet goods. Can't see why it wouldn't work.

placesalton Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

Again, not a geologist (or glaciologist), but glaciations happen frequently, in geological terms - every 40k? years or so. And, they don't dig very deep. Mines go >1km deep, so are below what I think any glaciation would have an effect on.

placesalton Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

FTA:

“The best [counter-argument] is probably the issue of deep mining,” Schmidt said. “We are mining very old deposits for metals and ore, and if these had been depleted by a prior civilization, it might have been noticed. These place limits on the scope of a prior civilization, but don’t eliminate the possibility.”

This has interested me before, and I think it's good evidence to the contrary.

I am not a geologist, but from what I know, "Very old" means the precambrian shield in Canada, for example, which is among, if not the, oldest rock on earth (~3.6Gy). Oldest, because before that time, the planet was molten on its surface. We're mining that today, and the geology can be fit to geological models: afaik, the geology being encountered in the very old rock is what people expect to see from naturally-occurring processes.

I do still wonder, though, what rock would look like after ~billions of years, if parts of it had been mined out, and whether that mining would be detectable. The rock is hard rock; would you see a corridor of rubble in solid rock, from a collapsed tunnel? Or are there still enough geological forces acting on the rock to turn the rubble from a collapsed tunnel into something resembling metamorphic placer (river-borne) rock, for example?

Interesting question, either way.

placesalton Chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird and developing a browser engine

Wasn't one of the lessons of The Mythical Man Month that building from a spec produced good software? That was talking about System/360, my recollection is that most of the effort went into creating a very detailed and internally consistent specification/manual for the system. Implementation followed the spec, and the results were long-lasting and solid.

placesalton Chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird and developing a browser engine

(Irrelevant post, but this was a missed opportunity for an article with the title "Kling on Ladybird")

placesalton A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow

Non-paywalled article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/massive-peak-collaps...

placesalton Tuesday set an unofficial record for the hottest day on Earth

Direct temperature measurements go back century or so, but proxies for temperature go back much further. Error bars may be larger but it's not like there's nothing to base the models on.

placesalton Radioactive spill near Richland WA worse than expected

Thanks, I'm stealing this :)

placesalton SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe'

Not generally known, I think, but Canada is technically part of ESA. Not a full member, a 'Cooperating State', but there are some benefits. Wiki sez "Canadian firms can bid for and receive contracts to work on (ESA) programmes."

placesalton SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe'

I came across this the other day, it's pretty elegant and basically solves the problem. Comes in handy when you have eg a call with people in >2 timezones.

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

placesalton Radioactive spill near Richland WA worse than expected

I'm absolutely sure they've thought of this, but I do wonder why they don't just divert the rivers around it and mine the entire place like an open-pit mine. Cart the square km or two of material off to some processing location and be done with it. It'd likely cost less than what's been spent already.

Again, I'm sure this has been thought of and rejected for a good reason. Still, doing it piecemeal doesn't seem to be working.

placesalton Racket frustrates me

There's a live coding talk by John Carmack where he uses Racket for making small programs for the Oculus:

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

He seemed happy enough with the language.

placesalton Microwaved plastic containers release microplastics into food

I don’t like the academic publishing racket either, but that is an exaggeration.

Presumably you were being sarcastic, but it’s still caustic. What stereolab called easy cynicism.

placesalton Larry Ellison: Oracle Database 1,000x Faster Than AWS Aurora

https://youtu.be/0FacYAI6DY0?t=57

Should have had an ellipsis between the 2nd and 3rd bit, but the intent wasn't altered. He's calling it gibberish and nonsense.

I wasn't trying to imply that he actually was confused, I was trying to show how he thought the term was gibberish.

I mean, who would take seriously the thought that Ellison actually thought of himself as an idiot.

placesalton Larry Ellison: Oracle Database 1,000x Faster Than AWS Aurora

Funny to see this now, when thinking about a response he gave to the question 'what the hell is cloud computing', way back in ~2009:

"it is the most nonsensical .. maybe I'm an idiot, it's really just complete gibberish..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0

placesalton MS Teams is down

I find those cutesy error messages just make a bad situation worse.

Error descriptions are probably too much to ask these days - I would bet they'd be perceived as intimidating by the UX group, given that the same group seems to prefer a level of discourse appropriate for grade-school classrooms.

A error code would be wonderful, though, since it would be a nice unique search term. It could be put in small greyed-out text in a bottom corner, too, to make everyone happy.

placesalton How not to write a pipeline

> In code or short tweets, fine, but in composition of an essay it looks unscholarly and pretentious.

I think a good general rule is: for a single sentence, not capitalizing the first letter (and not using a period) is fine. Longer than that and it both makes parsing more difficult and looks strongly like an affectation. There is a practical purpose for sentence start/end punctuation.

placesalton “Elemental” Is a Tearful Metaphor for Pixar’s Decline

This line was good:

"The sheepish alienation of sitting through “Inside Out” amid the static of my fellow-theatregoers’ sniffles and nose honks must have been what Data from “Star Trek” felt like all the time."

placesalton The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”

Maybe it is meta commentary on how broken automatic content filters are when applied to forum posts.

I too got 11% but stuck assiduously to powered vehicles on the ground of or launched from the park.

I did not include the tank.

I also got the exact same percentage saying 'yes' to everything.

I also got the exact same percentage saying 'no ' to everything.

27 * .11 ~= 3, fwiw

placesalton Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

> when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep

I recently spent a hair-pulling near-week encountering then trying to figure out the DLL search path in Win32 because a library was messing around with it. Documentation is straightforward enough, I suppose, until you get to SetDefaultDllDirectories, which has this in its discussion: "It is not possible to revert to the standard DLL search path or remove any directory specified with SetDefaultDllDirectories from the search path."

I guess my point is, environment variables can be tricky.

placesalton Some were meant for C [pdf] (2017)

>> History does show that most of the largest, longest running, most depended on open source projects like Linux, Apache, Git, MySQL, CPyton, OpenSSL, Gcc, Curl are written in C, so its hard to argue that the language isn't maintainable.

> I don't think this is a sound argument because of survivorship bias.

The argument is that those projects prove large C programs/systems are maintainable. 'Survivorship bias' doesn't enter into it; they are large and have been well maintained.

Edit: I remember a time when "correlation is not causation" was the endlessly-repeated phrase. La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme.

placesalton Maps distort how we see the world

I agree with many other comments here that this is more an effect of the practical purpose that maps are created for than any presumed nefarious motivation. Look at the list of supported projections in the PROJ database - it's a very long list, and they're all there to solve some particular problem.

Also, it's worth acknowledging that projections like the Robinson projection are often used now instead of Mercator on general-purpose wall maps.

Since the topic came up, this is one of my favourite special-purpose global maps: a map of global ocean circulation, centred around Antarctica: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c4et3x/global_ocea...

placesalton Ego and Math [video]

The answer by user 'Blue' on the same thread seems more practical to me. Their answer[1] uses notation that doesn't translate to this messageboard.

Perhaps a reordering of their method, using the existing caret notation:

  b^p = r :: the result from base b with exponent p

  ^pr = b :: the base giving result r from exponent p

  br^ = p :: the exponent yielding r with base b

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1158802

placesalton Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

Foolishness

placesalton Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

I have the same keyboard (MX Keys). I didn't have the flashing-light problem, but the lights nevertheless would constantly turn themselves off, after a very short (~5s?) period of inactivity.

I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to find a fix, including removing an internal cable and putting electrical tape over the top. Nothing worked. The closest I got was keeping the wireless keyboard plugged into its USB-C charger so that the timeout period before shutoff was longer than it was in battery-only mode.

All of which is annoying, because it's not cheap (>$100), and the fix is so stupefyingly simple - an addition of one or two settings in the configuration software. And, yes, countless people have reported this to Logitech and their 'support' consists, at best, of saying "I'll pass this on to The Team".

Never have I been more tempted to go all-in and become a firmware hacker, though the feasibility in time and probability of success are both quite low.