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smadge

1,717 karma · joined July 21, 2013

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smadge··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
If you have a hub generator system, they sell rear lights with controllers which detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation and start pulsing when you decelerate.
smadge··on How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?
The joke is that Warhammer sets are expensive.
smadge··on Trump says U.S. will 'get Greenland,' military force not ruled out
Even if we accept the premise that Greenland is vital to national and international (read as western) security, the west abandoned naked colonialism decades ago because they could maintain military and economic access to a country without resorting to it.
smadge··on Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software
The obvious solution if you want to badge on exits but maintain fire safety is emergency exits trigger the fire alarm when opened.
smadge··on You Need Subtyping
I think subtyping is the general concept in the programming language / type literature and interfaces / traits are an example of subtyping. If A implements interface B, A is a subtype of B.
smadge··on Abundance Isn't Going to Happen Unless Politicians Are Scared of the Status Quo
This is because ADU laws don’t go far enough. If you can sell your property to a developer for 3x the times the price you paid for it because all of a sudden it’s legal and financially viable to build a sixplex, many people will take that offer.
smadge··on Why did you stop practicing?
Presumably the skater who attempts a trick a dozen times before finally nailing it is having fun.
smadge··on The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
I agree with that, but:

- the language still allows you write the unsafe version even with defer. By your logic fallible humans will continue to write these class of bugs because they can. - adding a whole new flow control construct will introduce a whole new class of bugs. The dog barking example is cool for demonstrating how defer works, but is completely unreadable for what it does, programmers will write code like that because they are allowed to, and unreadable code becomes buggy code. - to make a language safer you should remove the things that make unsafe behavior possible, not add constructs which make safe behavior easier.

smadge··on Breaking Up with On-Call
Does that apply to salaried/FLSA-exempt workers?
smadge··on Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf (2022)
Thoughts my own, smooth, uninterrupted video playback is much higher priority than recovering a small amount of ad revenue.
smadge··on Steam Networks
“Fifth generation” district heating uses heat pumps to extract heat from a network of lukewarm water.
smadge··on Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy
When I was in middle school we actually cooked and baked in home economics, we didn’t memorize recipes showed on an overhead projector. In Physical Education we ran the mile, didn’t want videos on optimal technique. I think this is the main point.
smadge··on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website
In Trumpverse “hard power good, soft power bad.”
smadge··on Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral
And opportunity cost of having unused capacity in one location and unmet demand in another location.
smadge··on You should write "without bugs"
The point is to not write bugs in the first place. At the point you’ve noticed a bug and measured it in your bug tracker you’ve missed your goal. You did not write “without bugs.”
smadge··on Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway
Why does the time horizon matter? Imagine I own an immortal goose that lays a golden egg every 100 years. I may not live to see an egg but I can sell the goose based on the expected future payout. A bank could invent some financial instrument that pays me 1/100th of a golden egg every year for a fee.
smadge··on The majority of traffic from X may have been fake during the Super Bowl
Maybe

> Ads revenue sharing lets you share revenue from verified user's organic impressions of ads displayed in replies to content you post on X.

Accounts can post content, and have bots click on ads shown in the replies, and gain a portion of the ad revenue.

smadge··on Farms drained part of the Merced river for months
> California’s water board doesn’t have the staff it would need to monitor river levels statewide

Isn't water flow rate automatically collected, at least for larger rivers and creeks? Can't low flow be flagged automatically?

> Even if the state water board had learned of the Merced’s withered conditions earlier that summer, it might still have taken months to enact new regulations to protect the river

This seems like something that shouldn't require enacting new regulations. Enact the regulation once, and enforce the regulation always.

smadge··on About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
When a company isn't profitable you hire developers to build a product which can make you profitable. When a company is profitable, you fire all the developers and start collecting dividends.
smadge··on Queueing Theory: An introduction for software development
Are cumulative flow diagrams useful for serving systems, where arrival rate > departure rate causes immediate user visible issues?
smadge··on Category Theory Illustrated – Sets
A relationship between two sets is a set of pairs.
smadge··on There are now two types of PayPal dollars, and one is better than the other
PayPal is not a bank. It does not offer checking accounts. Do not put money in PayPal.
smadge··on Japan's abandoned villages
Cities are the engines of the modern economy. We can revert to an agrarian society if you please, but not without consequences.
smadge··on Malignant melanoma deploys elegant molecular mechanism to evade immune responses
True, but by that analogy it's an extinction event, not a death. Any mutations the cancer cells acquired will not be propagated.
smadge··on Malignant melanoma deploys elegant molecular mechanism to evade immune responses
How do cancers have sophisticated mechanisms for evading immune responses when they don’t have any adaptive pressure? The cancer dies with the victim. It seems like the equivalent of mashing on the keyboard and getting a valid program.
smadge··on Apple co-founder sells Carmel Valley ranch, will become nature preserve
Wait so California state granted $24 million to the private Wildlands Conservancy, who spent $35 million for the property. California should have just bought the property and turned it into a state park. This should be public land.
smadge··on Apple co-founder sells Carmel Valley ranch, will become nature preserve
The article also says he was the third employee after Jobs and Wozniak.
smadge··on The US government is buying troves of data about Americans
> The government couldn't do it this easily if it wasn't for sale.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but the government being allowed to buy this data can create the market for the data in the first place, even if no one else wanted the data.

smadge··on California spent $17B on homelessness – it’s not working
There was a survey (San Fransisco Homeless Count and Survey, 2022) which says 71% of the homeless in San Fransisco were living in San Fransisco at the time they became homeless, 24% were in another California county, and only 4% were out of state. But generally it makes sense that if a single county adopted housing first at a large scale these numbers might change. Additionally, the primary cause of homelessness is the severe housing shortage and the high cost of housing. So homes for the homeless should not be implemented in only cheap areas, but the expensive areas with the highest homelessness rates. This should be combined with a large increase in general housing production in these areas to mitigate the cause of the homelessness in the first place.
smadge··on US arrests suspect behind leak of Pentagon documents
Age is not what matters here.
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