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stinos

5,971 karma · joined July 26, 2012

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stinos··on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries
Another thing they don't seem to mention is environmental impact (if there even is any worth mentioning, not sure).
stinos··on Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated
True, but note that the principles you mention (shields down, joy, encourage moderation) apply to other drugs as well to a certain degree.
stinos··on Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated
> The point I'm trying to make is that society can't make progress towards unifying alcohol into a category with fetanyl -- because society will continue to use alcohol in socially acceptable functions.

Yes I get that point. But that doesn't mean rather simple 'semantic' measures could be taken to make it more obvious alcohol is not exactly healthy. Instead of 'person was under influence of alcohol and cocaine' or 'drugs including alohol', instead of just 'drugs and alcohol'.

stinos··on Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated
This is just the explanation of why it's "drugs and alcohol", and OP probably is well aware of that. The point is there's an argument to be made that even though history shaped this distinction it's harmful in some ways and progress should be made towards removing this partcular distinction and make it one based on science, e.g. a more fair classification based on toxicity/negative effects.
stinos··on Lua beats MicroPython for embedded devs
it's not an embeddable runtime like Lua

While it's true you can't have multiple MicroPython interpreters running concurrently (or at least not easily; it's not that the design makes this impossible, it's just that all in all MicroPython is fairly young and development focus has been put elsewhere), it is possible to embed MicroPython. Not completely out of the box, needs some glue code etc. See for example https://github.com/micropython/micropython/tree/master/ports....

stinos··on Lua beats MicroPython for embedded devs
The whole article gives me a 'I know LUA and have been using it for years, I also tried MicroPython for a couple of hours, so now I'm ready to draw conclusions' vibe. With some 'Python vs C' on top of it. Not everything written about MicroPython is factually incorrect, but some of the things are so over the top to the point that it becomes ridiculous. Just one example:

MicroPython can be equally readable, but in practice, many projects end up with blurred layers between system code and scripting. That creates a maintenance burden as projects grow.

Yeah, right. Even if this is the case (I find it hard to belive the author has really seen 'many' sort of professional MicroPython projects), where's the proof the language used was the deciding factor in that. And not the project management for instance. Or simply the dev's architecturing abilities.

stinos··on The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long
In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
stinos··on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore
Heh, wanted to make a comment saying this isn't 'super' recent knowlegde because I vividly remember Jean M. Auel using it in her first novels written in the 80's, and basically all the technical stuff she wrote was researched, ony to find out [1] indeed opens with a quote from said novels.
stinos··on LibRedirect – Redirects popular sites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends
I did, seemed to fall in the same category of sometimes working, sometimes not. I'v been trying various alternatives on/off for the past 5 years or so but unfortunately nothing really ever sticks.
stinos··on New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms
The authors argue that piperacillin, which has already been FDA-approved as a safe treatment for pneumonia, could also be a candidate for preemptive interventions for those potentially exposed to Lyme (with a known deer tick bite).

This strikes me as somehwat odd: as far as I'm aware there are worldwide issues with overuse of anitbiotics leading to various bacteria becoming resistent (and a quick serach seems to indicate this is also the case for piperacillin), but here they're saying that it would be ok for a probabaly large amount of people (as in: millions annualy?) to get antibiotics preemptively? Or is the reasoning that the does is low enough that it's fine?

I mean, it's not uncommon for me and people I know to get a bite multiple times a year. It's better when taking precautions and know what to avoid, but still, sometimes you just have to be in tick-ridden areas and it's impractical to check yourself every hour.

stinos··on A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
The entire article presumes that novelty is a degradation -- yet offers no evidence for it

Isn't the point rather that the novelty itself isn't the degradation, but the disappearance of the other native species as they get replaced by other species which already exist elsewhere, thereby decreasing overal number of individual species should the native ones go extinct? You could then argue that less species isn't a degradation because on a huge timescale that might not matter. However on a more 'current' timescale, I'm not sure how else to treat the man-made huge biodiversity loss other than a degradation.

stinos··on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
Yeah spot on, this was definitley it. I now remember reading this probably right after it came out and being somewhat proud to be able to tick most stuff of the list without ever being told directly to do so. But the 'Can you make a build in one step?' was not one of them so I figured that since the rest of the list made so much sense, I'd better get started on that one as well. I also really like that most of this list is practical, low-level advice. No 'use tech X' or 'agile ftw', just basic stuff which automatically happens anyway if you'd opt to use tech X or agile - should those be the right tools for the job, but which would cause more friction if not.
stinos··on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
This. I don't know which guru came up with it but this is the 'one-click build' principle. If youcan't do that, you have a problem.

So if even remotely possible we write all CI as a single 'one-click' script which can do it all by itself. Makes developing/testing the whole CI easy. Makes changing between CI implementations easy. Can solve really nasty issues (think: CI is down, need to send update to customer) easily because if you want a release you just build it locally.

The only thing it won't automaticaly do out of the box is being fast, because obviously this script also needs to setup most of the build environment. So depending on the exact implementation there's variation in the split between what constitutes setting up a build environment and running the CI script. As in: for some tools our CI scripts will do 'everything' so starting from a minimal OS install. Whereas others expect an OS with build tools and possibly some dependencies already available.

stinos··on Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
> a large coop

It's large compared to the average, but the longer we've had chickens the more we're convinced they thrive better when given appropriate space (anecdata about average age of our chickens vs all other people with chickens we know), leading me to think something like yours is still too small even for 2 chickens.

For us the minimum is now such that there's at least some of the gras/moss left throughout the year instead of the puddle of mud we used to get. Plus I'm not gonne lie: seeing their (and their ancestors) behavior 'in the wild' it feels morally/ethically better as well. Especially the younger ones are keen explorers: easy to see when let ranging free - they'll go in a radius of like 100m around their nest, but not much further than that. Apart from that one mandatory weirdo obviously.

stinos··on Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep
Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems

It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization to also be good in understanding systems.

Those people, in turn, are the ones doing this research.

Although common, it's not quite so that only people with a pure medical background do neuroscience.

All in all, having met quite some people in the field, the things you're hinting at never occurred to mee as an actual problem. My guess is because the people who actually have issues get weeded out very soon. Like: before even finishing their PhD. It's not an easy field.

stinos··on It's called a dance floor
even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on

It's not just the sound system that is the issue, in fact, it's usually the least of the problems. Speaker placement + listening room are the main problem. Quarter decent would do as well. Anything which isn't complete crap and has separate speakers, which could easily be found 2nd hand for cheap when we were young, is sufficient to bring out most of what is in songs like Vogue (it was after all also produced to be played on average systems). But that requires that instead of the "let's just place 2 speakers next to the amp and we're done" some basic care is taken wrt speaker placement in relation to room shape.

I figured this out by accident when I was about 10, having spent all my savings (like 50$ or so) on a 2nd hand old (think 70's) amp + speakers: I couldn't wait to play something on my system so unloaded it from my dad's car, outside in the garden, soldered a cable to go from my walkman to whatever input the thing had, turned the thing on and was blown away. Like listening to new songs. Simply because I happened to place them roughly the way I saw on pics in magazines, and eleminated any reflections because I was in the garden. So even though by todays' standards the raw reproduction capabilities i.e. frequency response of the system was very subpar, simply making the stereo work roughly correctly and having some bass with it, makes a huge difference. Hence after moving the system into my bedroom there was again disappointment because it was not quite as good anymore. Though after some experimenting it was still waaaaaay better and more resolving than anything I heard before (except headphones maybe, but that's a different thing wrt stereo imaging and bass), including my more wealthy family's rather expensive systems simply because they were all just dumped in a room.

stinos··on Why strength training? A programmer's perspective
what am I missing?

Nothing really, I think it's just a personality trait.

I have tried picking up pretty much every single form excercise the article mentions plus some more, and I just couldn't bring myself to keep on doing it. I even tried of really forcing myself and it made me feel more miserable. Now I essentially gave up and stopped trying to change myself in that area. Though I'm aware that it's not impossible that getting older might somehow put me mentally in a different state which doesn't make every repetitive excercise feel like an incredible chore.

Instead I just keep on doing what I like, but since I'm getting older I do in a slightly different way than I used to, to mimimize risk: excercise which requires technique, skill, creativity. Be it frisbee, skating, bmx, bouldering, ... A good session of those keeps my spirits up for several days. And it keeps the body in shape. But I do think twice before attempting things above my level, and usually just don't, and will back off in case something starts to feel wrong. Recovering from injuries takes waaay longer when you're 40+ than when you're 20 and it's just not worth it anymore for me. To be clear: sure, strength training has some skill to it, but let's be realistic here: it's not exactly in the same ballpark as what one needs for bouldering for instance.

Also nowadays bouldering is my main excercise and the thing is that unlike the OP I have a very good experience with it when it comes to health: I don't have pain, plus I have the impression that unlike typical strength training and basic yoga/pilates/... routines climbing at a somewhat decent level will make you use a ton of mostly upper body muscles you don't use otherwise (ok, you can do that with strength training but you're going to have to do quite a lot of different things to hit them all). And that seems to make the body more resilient against injuries. Anecdotal though.

Anyway, and now to the point: I'm convinced that as far as your body goes it's possible to make climbing akin to the mentioned 'boring tech' but without actually being boring. Do it long enough and become super aware about the moves, and there's no unknown failure mode.

stinos··on NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth
I think OP is asking: if there's a static magnetic field but conductive stuff (say, the oceans) moves through it, doesn that not induce an electric field?
stinos··on Map of the World's Emotional Temperature
I had the same feeling. Some of the results also made me wonder whether the reported feelings are actual feelings or lies. Which in turn made me wonder whether the view I have about certain countries is close to reality or not. Because in the end for most countries I've never been there nor actively looked up a lot of information about them, meaning all I think I know about it stems from media. Now, the sources I check are probably pretty objective (though as usual leaning towards only reporting the bad news and never the good news), but still, likely not sufficient to paint a complete picture of a certain country/culture.
stinos··on Can we stop the decline of monarch butterflies and other pollinators?
We'd also be 'fine' as in 'surviving' without music and other arts and any other creative/emotionally uplifting/mentally challenging thing. Which happens to be something actively sought-after by humanity.
stinos··on Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
> Not at all, it has C++ complexity level, if one wants to master it at all levels.

Would be interesting to hear what levels you think those are because as someone who has been learning and writing C++ and Python for over 20 years now, I'd say there's no level of Python which comes even close to the complexity of C++ at a comparative level.

> getting something from e.g. Python 1.6 to run on 3.12 is an exercise in trial and error, or unexpected surprises at some moment at runtime.

Fair enough. But then again: that's irrelevant for any new project written since about the start of the last decade. And to continue the C++ comparison: whereas Python 1 -> 2 -> 3 imo solved some real issues, the consecutive C++ standards never did this resulting in something which is, yes, backwards comptible (roughly - try getting 30-40 year old code getting to compile with /std:c++latest and /Wall - or look at all those tiny behavior changes between the last couple of standard iterations) but also seriously plagued by that as it holds back innovation. Modern C++ minus a lot of the old UB-prone stuff would definitely be better and less complex than what we have now.

stinos··on PowerToys Run: extensible quick launcher for power users
Depends on what you do/need I guess. Overall I'd rate the ones I use rather usefule. I use Run and FancyZones every single day. To the point that it's annoying to not have them when I'm on another computer. The others which I have enabled (because I use them often enough) are e.g Text Extractor, Color Picker, Screen Ruler.
stinos··on Beating NumPy matrix multiplication in 150 lines of C
> Python is the right thing to compare to here, because it is easily the most popular way to perform these computations in the modern day. Specifically using numpy.

By that reasoning, wouldn't it make more sense to wrap their C code and maybe even make it operate on numpy's array representation, so it can be called from Python?

stinos··on Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
I do not recommend C++ CLI.

Can you elaborate on why?

I looked at various ways for interop between C# and C++ over the years, and overall found C++/CLI to be the best overall for our particular application types: it's a separate layer bewteen a C++ backend (which is also used in other non-gui applications), with a windows-only WPF desktop application on top. Mainly because the C++/CLI code itself is simple, readable and fairly effortless to write and maintain. A bit repetitive at times though, but that's going to be the case for any such layer AFAIK. Integration on the C# is seamless, with code completion etc, and C# interfaces can be implemented in C++/CLI directly for instance. The initial setup takes some work but with conversion between common types implemented (ability to e.g. IEnumerable<ManagedT> <-> std::vector<NativeT> or std::iterator<NativeT> etc) it's all pleasant and good.

or check this library of mine https://github.com/Const-me/ComLightInterop/

Gotta say this looks neat, but it's exactly the type of code I'd rather not write: UUIDs, bunch of macros, unclear mapping between return types (HRESULT vs bool), having to declare same interfaces both in C++ and C#, ...

stinos··on The enduring mystery of how water freezes
Also related, the rather counterintuitive theory / myth that hot water freezes faster than cold water.

It comes up every winter here when it starts freezing and people want to leave out water for the birds. I can't help to urge people to just try it instead of simply believing it. I.e., it's not that I don't believe it's impossible under certain specific circumstances, but having tried it myself a number of times and the result always being that the cold water freezes first, it's pretty clear to me that it's a bit silly to just dismiss using warm water.

stinos··on Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily

All the time, and I learned to not care a lot, even like some; for instance there's a lot of (mostly abstract, surrealism) art which does all the things wrong on that front but which is extremely enjoyable to me. Same weird way with music: exact 4/4 stuff is mostly boring, often even annoying, but give me funky off-beat stuff, chaos and noise and it brings a smile to my face.

There's only one thing which I can't shake off and that's lines which are meant to be, but aren't eaxcatly, parallel or right angles. Can keep staring at those. Especially when they are like very close to being correct but look like they're off (for like 1mm over 1m). Not the first time I actually get up and take a ruler to verify.

stinos··on How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?
This, and the linked article, show the photo sensor halfway the monitor. Nothing wrong with that for comparing measurements, but for quite a lot (possibly the majority) of typical monitors out there that actually means for a refresh of 60Hz putting the sensor at the top of the screen will give you about 8mSec faster and at the bottom 8mSec slower measurements because pixels / lines thereof are driven top to bottom. Like a CRT basically. So if you're getting into the details (just like where to put the threshold on the photo sensor signal to decide when the pixel is on) that should probably be mentioned. Also because 8mSec is quite the deal when looking at the numbers in tha article :)

Likewise just saying 'monitor x' is 30mSec slower than 'monitor y' can be a bit of a stretch; it's more like 'I measured this to be xxmSec slower on my setup with settings X and Y and Z'. I.e. should also check if the monitor isn't applying some funny 'enhancement' adding latency with no perceivable effect but which can be turned off, whether when switching monitors your graphics card and/or its driver didn't try to be helpful and magically switched to some profile where it tries to apply enhancements, corrections, scaling and whatnot which add latency. All without a word of warning from said devices usually, but these are just a couple of the things I've seen.

stinos··on A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl (2011)
No one puts on a vinyl record to play one song.

Pretty much every DJ out there begs to differ :) I get your point though, and do also like to listen to whole albums (be it on vinyl or cd or PC), sometimes. Other times I prefer to create the playlist on the spot in function of my mood, i.e. select one track after the other. 'DJ' if you will, except I don't usually do proper mixing as that can take away part of the 'just listening' experience.

stinos··on The Corvette that Windows zip folders bought
So how does that play out when I work as a contractor for multiple companies which have some overlap?
stinos··on The lifespan of large appliances is shrinking
Is there a good source of data on this?

This. It's not that I don't believe the article per se, but it doesn't come much further than 'technician says' which I find hard to consider as evidence for various reasons. Moreover, and that's the major flaw imo, it talks about 'appliances' as one big group as if all are alike and all brands and price ranges behave the same, and gives examples like fridges with icemakers which is a thing which is fairly new in e.g. Europe and I wouldn't buy anyway because I have no need for it.

Would be interesting to see how a plain fridge holds up, how long current 'normal' diswashers and washing machines etc last compared to the past, and that split up per brand/model group/price category. Also because anecdotally I haven't encountered issues, but that could just as well be because my expectation is different or I just had luck or I just happened to buy the right thing. I mean, I have several examples, but just to name one: my expensive cordless drill is now about 17 years old and I got a new battery for it recently making it again as powerful as it used to be. It has had zero issues and I renovated 2 houses with it. Is that expected? Did I just get lucky? I don't know, but price divided by hours of usage this thing costs close to nothing yet works great and for what I'd consider a pretty long time.

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