sambeau

No-one wants to listen to a Jazz band with bad players. A good band leaders hires great players and lets them shine.

Jazz Bands have band leaders, they choose the players, the tunes and lead the concerts.

Of course—that's how a Jazz Band works.

My metaphor for product leadership is a Jazz Band: step back and let your players shine.

Pumped Hydro and battery storage are a drop in the ocean of the amount of storage needed to secure the grid, especially as people shift to electric cars.

Isn’t this likely to add to global warming by adding huge amounts of heat into the atmosphere at night, when it would normally be radiating it away?

It also has the potential to disrupt local ecosystems with light and heat pollution.

I thought this was stupid.

Then I tried it. It's awesome. I can't tell you why, but there's something about it that, I guess, has been programmed into my brain over decades.

Great work.

I am writing children's books. One mantra I try to keep to is to make my chapters ~15 minutes long when read aloud by a parent at bed time. This gives them the ability to be consistent in their bedtime routine.

This way children don't get short-changed and adults don't find they have committed to something they can't get out of. It also allows them to easily give in and do another chapter — after all, it's only 15 minutes.

30 mins reading out loud is about 4,500 words, so 15 minute half-chapters are 2,250 words.

A 2,250 word chapter is also very manageable by a child.

Most techie people I know have an Apple TV, most of the others have a Chromecast. I'm in the UK, I don't know if that makes a difference.

"Hello, Bignose!"

I worked at Realtime Worlds, maker of Crackdown. In the first week of joining I was privileged to attend a small talk where Hugh Malan explained how he rendered the skybox. It was fascinating, if somewhat over my head. I still think that Crackdown had one of the most beautiful skies—it holds up nearly two decades later.

It seems that Hugh worked on 'Horizon: Forbidden West' too.

In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig' in the US and other parts of the UK it's called 'tag'

In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig'

It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition.

And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.

Here's the paper if you'd like to skip the horribly ad-laden science alert site.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41531-024-00724-z

I think you have that the wrong way round. They are the way they are as a result of play. Play is fundamental to their adult behaviour.

<3

If only I still had it. It was literally printed out and put in a plastic binder. I think it was written on a Sun Sparcstation in LaTeX.

This is interesting. I came up with a very similar idea in the late 1990s to JIT a lazy functional language. The idea was to only compile the code that you needed to execute next, so you could run lazy code without needing to compile it (recursing across infinite lists, etc). It had templates with holes (for things like cons etc.)

I stuck my paper on it under Prof Phil Wadler's office door and ran away. I have no idea if he ever read it :D

This is a rather good YouTube documentary about it.

"Bionic 3rd thumb: The future of human augmentation | Hard Reset"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba4YklRq0Po

A film literally about the consequences of a young fish 'booping' a boat.

Ah, is it because Orcas aren't fish?

My rules on code duplication:

- For code in different files you get 3

- For code in the same file you get half a dozen

- For code in the same function you get more like a dozen

- For code in a single repeated block you get as many as you want

They knew what they were doing. It would be funny if it wasn't so common.

>scratches meet the needle once per revolution, regardless of the needle's position

I need to go away and think about that :D

Or the plot to Finding Nemo

Very cool. Great aesthetic and copy. No notes.

My first thought was that it is listening to the scratches rather than the music, but I guess they speed up as the record gets played and the arm moves inwards. So, my second guess is that it's listening to the pitch of the notes being played. Of course, old albums (especially punk albums) are probably tuned to whatever worked on the day—maybe a tuning fork, possibly a piano, maybe just to one of the instruments.

The Minecraft team at 4J have just announced a new voxel-based crafting game platform.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/dundee/4988656/4j-studi...

So, I take it the UK now needs to rename Land's End and John o' Groats.

Ha. I did this back in 2003. It's surprisingly fast, and makes it simple to do granular locking.

I used it as a per-user database for a web-templating language for a giant web-site building tool.