soneil

From the places I've worked, drip coffee is essentially free, but the cup it's served in .. less so.

Even for "speciality coffee" it went lid, cup, sleeve, milk, (syrup,) coffee.

They really don't explain the difference well.

AIS is a local broadcast. It's like having a number plate that's visible from 10 miles away.

VMS is 'phone home' system. It's like having a gps tracker with cellular connectivity on your car, reporting into a federal agency (not hyperbole, that's the design goal.)

This is what ends up driving me nuts about IoT - these should be the kinds of low-hanging fruit that are already solved.

Dishwasher, laundry, etc, should be able to ask the house when the most sensible time to run this load is. For grid-tied that could be off-peak, or even better, an API from your energy supplier. For off-grid, this could be during surplus generation once the batteries are already charged, etc.

Or perhaps we're midwinter and it makes more sense to run one today and the other tomorrow.

Instead they're more worried about making sure my dishwasher can re-order Genuine Partner-Brand Tablets, so I never have to worry about running out of Genuine Partner-Brand Tablets. Reducing my energy usage only seems to matter when it's legislated, but that kickback from Partner-Brand pays off every day.

I've had An Post deliver some that weren't just partially addressed, but wildly inaccurately so.

The most notable example was addressed to "correct name, house number (no street), wrong city entirely". It arrived two days late, unopened.

I like to imagine there's a little old lady sat in a sorting office somewhere, who simply knows everyone's business. Everyone's.

It's sad how much of this sounded like pure sci-fi to me. And that's not to be critical - I'm in a world where observability means snmp and frequently modbus. So much of this hit home that I'm in the wrong century.

Technically yes - but the difference amounts to 2 seconds per century. Your lunar clone would be younger than you, but the difference would be less time than you spent calculating the difference.

The really weird part to get your head around here is that in case of relativistic differences, it's actually time that's changing. So cesium still has the same frequency, the same number of events per second, but their second is not the same as ours.

When people talk about clocks running faster or slower, it muddies the topic a little because it makes it sound like a fault of the clock. The clock is accurately measuring the time it experiences.

My favourite trivia on this topic is that this is not hypothetical. If the clocks on GPS satellites kept earth time (eg, without accounting for relativistic drift), the entire GPS system would accumulate 10km of error per day. This is a genuine thing with measurable, real-world effects.

Every time I see someone propose scrapping timezones, they end up in one of two traps. Either unilaterally dictating that Australia, NZ, etc become fully nocturnal - or they end up re-inventing timezones with a different name.

This is actually where the term comes from, lat. lunaticus "moon-struck". So the pun is almost full-circle.

The difference between "effectively" and "literally". You're effectively giving Amazon your copyright because the contract gives Amazon control of who can make copies (and removes that control from the author).

I genuinely find this useful, in scenarios where filters and regexes are likely to devolve into punctuation explosions otherwise.

That did strike me too. Setting out into 100F with less than a (US) gallon of water, but a selection of knives ..

Although if he was 50 miles away from the trail he was planning on, I'm not sure how much he was really relying on the phone either.

It does smell to me more of something I see a lot "outdoors" that isn't uniquely American though - the idea that you just need more kit to solve problems. Knowing how to use it is unimportant, planning ahead is unimportant, being more prepared simply means buying more Stuff.

> If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly.

I'm not sure I'd trust a human more than a machine in this circumstance. Just being dropped in with a split-second to make a decision? It's not like you can get 30 seconds of replay to get your bearings etc, otherwise by time the human is ready, the problem's already over.

There's a lot of "state" that a driver should already have built up for this. Traffic, road conditions, who's behind me, etc. Just being thrown into a situation that's rapidly devolving sounds like a nightmare.

I had no idea my podcast client (overcast) could do chapter artwork. Chapters are still somewhat cutting-edge, let alone per-chapter metadata. That episode felt like you went nought to sixty real sharpish. Credit is well deserved.

A funny story that's vaguely related - Here in Ireland, alcohol sales were prohibited on Good Friday until surprisingly recently. But there were some exceptions, and one of those was travelling.

I've heard stories of people buying a ticket to the next town so they could park themselves in the Station Bar for the afternoon. And the lockdown equivalent - a budget flight so you have similar free rein of the airport for the day.

edit: the quote “nobody likes them except the public and the public have flocked to them” rings awfully familiar around here.

They did throw photos in for their "weird boards" one, which was awesome (and really benefitted from it). Otherwise - it's a podcast, I suspect Youtube is just the easiest version to link to.

It seems to me that a lot of waste in this area is tax dollars paying for commercial prices. The US has some truly insane baseline costs in healthcare. Having the state pay for them, or having the state provide an insurer, only kicks the ball into someone else's court.

Figure out why a hospital can charge you $25 for an aspirin, and start there. If you just let the state pay that $25, yes your taxes are being wasted.

Seems somewhat ironic that this is tape?

I think they're a lot more natural than you make it sound. I mean we have denonyms from placenames. Some of them are fairly rote (newyorker, londoner, dubliner), some take some imagination (okie, mackem, geordie).

I really don't see why this is any different?

They’ve done a stellar job of standardising the name. So many different cables & capabilities, one standardised name.

I love that board! I have one that's very much in the same spirit as "kludge.2" (and also red, for the same reason they describe), but the first (Gemini?) board made me realise I need to up my silkscreen game.

They hedge in where they think the currency is going too, as they appear to avoid changing a price between releases.

So it's USD * exchange rate * VAT + pessimism.

DEL's an exception because it had to be all ones. The idea is you can turn any character into a delete character by punching out the rest of the row on a punchcard. Were it any other character, you'd potentially have holes you needed to un-punch.

It's a different experience, but not a superior method of data transfer.

It's like the difference between a kindle, a book, and your grandfather's copy of the same book. Three very different experiences, without fidelity being part of the question at all.

I do try to use some variation of my real name where it's available. Especially in my younger years, I did notice that I acted like more of a dick in pseudonymous communities than when my name was attached, so I stick to just enough of my real name to curtail that.

I don't believe mirrors and caches affect this behaviour.

How this works is that the package index contains a stanza Phased-Update-Percentage: giving a number between 0 and 100. Then your client picks a number in the same range, and accepts an update if the repository's value is higher than the client's value.

Whether the fixed value comes from your mirror or Ubuntu's, makes no odds - You still have a fixed value on the server and a variable value on the client, so the outcome is still variable. Caching the index, or mirroring it without regenerating it, still leaves this decision to the end client.

Something else I found interesting looking into this mechanism - the seed for the rng is sourcePackage-version-machineID. So you won't "that one machine that always updates last" or "that one machine that charges head-first into phased updates", it should be randomly distributed for each version of each package.

As I understand it, either 'always' or 'never' actually solve OP's problem. (edit: was both/and - both sounds like a bad idea.)

"always include" effectively puts you in phase 0 - if an update is being phased, you're an eager beaver.

"never include" effectively puts you in phase 100 - if an update is being phased, you'll wait until the phasing is complete.

AIUI OP's problem isn't that he wants these updates on day 0, it's that he wants his environments to be consistent with each other, which either of these options would provide.

My money would have been on a byte-order mark

If not showing repeat vacuums does not improve clicks, I'd be very curious if it reduces clicks either.

It seems like what you posit is only a mystery if we take it on faith that targeting works. Once that faith is lost, you can also approach it from the angle that if showing them something we think they want is just as effective as something we know they don't want, you're actually proving that "what we think they want" isn't working either.

I mean, given "we know you've bought a vacuum cleaner" and "we think you'd like a kettle" - if ads for either are equally effective, either there's a lot more people collecting vacuums than either of us would have expected - or we're entirely wrong about the kettle. And it seems to me that our blind faith in targeted advertising leads us to wonder why people want so many vacuums.

What I'm not convinced of is that complexity is actually a necessity.

For example, what's the real difference between operating a fire department in a town on the Faroes, vs a town in the Mid-west? It seems like a fairly cookie-cutter operation where requiring more of them in total does not add complexity to each operation.

Possibly even the opposite, where the scale of the US turns into a net benefit, so you can support your own industries building and providing tenders/appliances - where the Faroes are (I assume) more likely to ship one from Germany.

So I'm not clear why taxation within a single state has to be more complex than taxation within a small nation. I'm not going to deny that it probably is, and probably will be, but I'm less comfortable with the assumption that it must be.