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placesalt

292 karma · joined May 4, 2023

Provider of peak HN comment excellence
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placesalt··on On Keeping a Logbook (2010)
I've found a plain (hardback, moleskine-like) notebook with no preprinted page numbers / dates works for me. Dates are filled in when entries are made.

It avoids situations where there's a feeling of wastage when a page isn't fully filled, or cramped writing when there's more than a page worth of information to write down.

placesalt··on FPGA N64
Related, any recommendations on low-cost ways to start playing around with FPGAs? Boards, chips, projects?
placesalt··on Pepper X
AFAIK that usage traces back to the 1990s TV show "Quantum Leap", in which the protagonist would travel in space & time to a new place each episode.

The phrase 'Quantum Leap', then, was popularly taken to mean a large change.

The damage done to the vernacular by that show's title is only exceeded by the damage done to the vernacular by another piece of 1990s popular culture, Alanis Morissette's song 'Ironic'.

placesalt··on In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
I still miss the Trivia sections.
placesalt··on An ultra-quiet electric leaf blower
Have you tried using a broom?
placesalt··on An ultra-quiet electric leaf blower
The only downside I see for electric yard equipment is the vendor lock-in with batteries. Other than that, they work just fine.

Pay up front for two batteries and a fast-enough charger, and you can charge one battery while you wear the other down; there's still some downtime, but after wearing out a battery the human operator probably needs some downtime, too.

The cost is basically equivalent, minus the battery cost; consider it a prepayment for gasoline, and it probably works out on that front, too.

placesalt··on Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
50cm, not 10cm, but enough.

TBH I thought they had 15cm, but for human-scale large object monitoring (fires, traffic, construction) 50cm is enough.

placesalt··on Edinburgh couple are handed £17K bill by Tesla as they 'drove in rain'
The article also says

> Obviously, it was wet with the weather last week, but I honestly can’t remember any huge puddles or anything like that. It’s not like I was driving my car through the Cairngorms.

placesalt··on Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
What about the power/weight budget, esp. for the 110 ft. wingspan aircraft mentioned above?
placesalt··on Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
Not live at that resolution, AFAIK.

Planet has the spatial resolution but not the temporal resolution.

NOAA has the temporal resolution but not the spatial resolution.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

placesalt··on Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic
This kind of argument-against-perfection / argument-against-absolutes is so transparently useless. It may be that I've just been noticing it more, but it seems more common lately.

Perfection of any kind does not exist in the physical world, so any test against perfection will fail - it's simply a matter of phrasing to choose what you want to identify as failing.

The test isn't whether All or Every such-and-such meets some test, it's the current state (do many or most meet the test?) and the direction (are more or fewer meeting the test?) that matters.

placesalt··on Not setting up Find My bricked my MacBook
I was going to post the same thing.

A moral of the story is: put a sticker on the cover of your laptop. Similarly, a bit of flagging tape[1] on luggage isn't a bad idea. Having an expensive and precious belonging that looks exactly the same as an uncountable number of other people's belongings is, on the face of it, unwise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagging_(tape)

placesalt··on Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer
age old
placesalt··on 23andMe says user data stolen in credential stuffing attack
I guess one question is: should

> did not have 2fa enabled

be allowed to coexist with

> pretty extensive and personal data

placesalt··on International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service
> I wish they hadn’t changed their name from the more evocative “International Earth Rotation Service”. It used to make me think, “What if we stopped paying them and they stopped cranking?”

They always had the single most impressive name for any organization, anywhere. It's a shame it changed.

Edit: typo

placesalt··on Krita fund has no corporate support
About 10-20 minutes of your time, if you include the task-switching cost.
placesalt··on 32 MiB Working Sets on a 64 GiB machine
The effect of caching on Windows can be quite pronounced if you process large datasets on a machine with a large amount of RAM.

If, say, you have 256GB RAM and a 100GB folder of ~1GB files, you will only ever have a few GB used actively. A first pass of processing over the folder will take a long time (reading from disk). Subsequent passes will be much faster, though, because reading is done from the RAM-cached versions of the files (the output from the previous run, was my understanding).

placesalt··on 'Couple,' 'Few,' and 'Several'
Same here, in Canada; it's a metaphorical use, by my reading, similar to '<blank> will only take a second'
placesalt··on Microsoft Says the Days of Free Windows 7 to 10 or 11 Updates Are Over
I tried the above method, but I didn't see any change in Windows update.

What seemed to work for me was a group policy (requires local admin, and probably the non-'home' version of win10):

gpedit > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Windows Update for Business > Select the target Feature Update version

Then, set "product version" to 'Windows 10', and "Target Version" to '22H2' (or whatever you want).

Seems to work; after that, the Windows Update pane will say "Some of these settings are managed by your organization", and (for me, so far, at least) there isn't any more browbeating for Win11 installation.

placesalt··on High-Resolution Lidar Images of Rivers and Deltas
From the most biblically-named government department comes a biblical amount of data:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/bathymetry/

See the topo-bathy lidar datasets (or, turn on DEMs for in-browser viewing).

placesalt··on Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]
Wishing him a speedy recovery.
placesalt··on Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030
The meme was that fusion was always 30 years away. This is obviously a lot closer, so if nothing else it doesn't deserve to be tarred with that brush.
placesalt··on BOOX Palma
Does anyone know any more about Boox & GPL compliance?

The wiki page effectively says they are in violation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_Compliance

> As of 2022, Onyx International Inc. has declined[20] to release the source code with Linux kernel modifications licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 in response to a written request by a user. The GPLv2 license states that if a modified version of a covered work (such as the Linux kernel) is released, the corresponding source code must also be released under GPLv2.[21]

placesalt··on Julius Caesar is banned on Bing's version of DALL-E
FYI the error message is

> This prompt has been blocked. Our system automatically flagged this prompt because it may conflict with our content policy. More policy violations may lead to automatic suspension of your access.

> If you think this is a mistake, please report it to help us improve.

placesalt··on OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return [video]
They said during the broadcast that it deployed at 20kft instead of the planned 5kft.

But GGP is correct, it really did look for a little while there like it maybe hadn't deployed on time.

placesalt··on OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return [video]
Pretty exciting stuff, showing a live image of the capsule entering right now

Edit: Neat seeing EDL from an earth POV, too. Kind of reverses the usual formula for eg landing on Mars.

Edit edit: touchdown!

placesalt··on Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study
It took ages, but that is finally being phased out

> On February 23, 2022, the FAA joined aviation and petroleum industry stakeholders to announce a comprehensive public-private partnership to transition to lead-free aviation fuels for piston-engine aircraft by the end of 2030.

https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas

placesalt··on Comp.lang.c is now full of spam
A piece of software I use has google groups as the main interaction point among users & between users and the dev. It works quite well.
placesalt··on Meta wants its open source AI model to be as capable as OpenAI’s best model
I think that was Churchill, but the point stands
placesalt··on Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
The geometry available and the frankly very subtly good alignment-snapping that it has makes it very useful. Posters, ERDs, I'm sure there are other applications too.
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