sudobash1

Indeed, but patent infringement too. Although the Cotton Gin was patented, Eli Whitney famously was unable to enjoy those protections. Imitations sprung up all around.

It's not just the bright colors. The color of food greatly influences our perception of it. My grandmother was a caterer for many years, and she would tell me that the main difference between a chocolate cake and a vanilla one, is that one is brown. If you colored a cake brown, people would start to perceive it a chocolate.

This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing.

I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.

I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.

Actually there is. You just have to schedule it. I keep meaning to do this with my home VOIP phone.

> Test calls confirm that your local 911 service can receive your 911 call and has the correct location information. Test calls can be scheduled by contacting your local 911 call center via its non-emergency phone number.

https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/

Just the other day I noticed that some kind soul set up http://subprocess.run to redirect to the python3 documentation.

I do get frustrated sometimes at the "omnibar" because of its inability to determine if I want to search for something or go to a url. It is especially irksome because the TLDs keep getting extended and I can't keep track anymore.

I expect that plenty of these apps are or will be mining these photos for data about their users. I know the cat is already out of the bag as far as online tracking goes, but until now, tracking every meal & snack someone eats has been impossible (except perhaps for the most consummate doordash user).

And the companies most interested in the data would be the large food corporations who bear a lot of responsibility for getting us into this obesity crisis in the first place.

This article is not about diabetes; it is about AI. Call me a skeptic, but I cannot believe that AI will be an effective defense against an onslaught of unhealthy foods.

Even if this AI could provide a useful service, I am sure there would be major conflicts of interest. If a corporation has a large user-base sending them pictures of every meal, they are definitely going to be mining and selling that data. And the major food companies (who largely got us into this health mess) will hone their targeted advertising.

A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.

If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more.

Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.

> I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.

It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.

This thread is more interesting to me than the article itself. I am the complete opposite. I always have a pen in my pocket along with a really small (2"x3") notebook, and I absolutely use it all the time.

Personally, I find pen and a memo pad much handier than a phone. There is no unlocking, searching, or loading. And I can write much faster than tap a little screen keyboard. Even more importantly, on my memo pad there are no notifications to completely sidetrack my lizard brain.

But aside from the practical, it is also just such a nice change of pace to use analog technologies when I can. I use my computer and write software all day. It's good to get a break sometimes.

There is an important case for comments that neither of them touched on. Sometimes you are dealing with bugs or counterintuitive processes beyond your control.

For example, I am writing some driver software for a USB device right now. It is so easy to get the device into a bad state, even when staying within the documented protocol. Every time I implement a workaround, or figure out exactly how the device expects a message to appear, I put in a comment to document it. Otherwise, when (inevitably) the code needs to have features added, or refactoring, I will completely forget why I wrote it that way.

The prime number example is a self-contained, deterministic algorithm. While I did find it far easier to parse with comments, I could still spend the time to understand it without them. In my USB device driver, no amount of review without comments would tell another person why I wrote the sequence of commands a certain way, or what timings are important.

The only way around that would be with stupid method names like `requestSerialNumberButDontCallThisAfterSettingDisplayData` or `sendDisplayDataButDontCallTwiceWithin100Ms`.

> I was not able to find an electronic copy on the Internet, which is surprising given the author's prominence.

I'm not sure if Stephenson is specifically looking for a PDF scan, but I found an online copy reasonably easily:

https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A07698.0001.001

Apparently aluminum ribbons can be used the other way too with some success. I recently came across a ribbon speaker: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Tinfoil-Ribbon-Speaker/

I remember coaster brakes fondly. As an American kid, all of my bikes had them. What was great about them was that you can engage them so suddenly and forcefully that you instantly lock the rear wheel. If you did that on wet asphalt at high speed and jerk the bike just right, you could spin the bike around 180 degrees or more. It was a great day when I (accidentally) found that out. You can also do that somewhat on dry pavement, but your rear wheel is going to have a reduced lifespan.

I think that coaster breaks (and maybe steel frames) are better suited to kids who want to be rough with their bike. My wheels were never very true, and they would have rubbed awfully with rim breaks. (Disk breaks were unheard of on kids bikes then, and I think are still pretty rare now.) The main downside is that if you loose the chain, you loose all breaking power. That happened once to me, but thankfully there was a nice dirt ditch close at hand.

I just realized that after hitting post. Edited my comment.

Should have (2017)

I noticed that when it said at the start:

> five giant F-1 rocket engines—still the most powerful ever built

This is no longer the case. The SpaceX Starship has the Saturn V beat nowdays.

(Edit: I suppose the F-1 rocket engines still have the Raptor 2 engines beat, so the article is still correct. The Starship just has more engines than the Saturn V for more thrust)

Actually, you can. If you run:

    foo 2>&1 >&- | grep ...

then you will grep only the stderr. The stdout will be discarded.

Alternatively, if you only want to grep to see the stderr, but you still want to see stdout, you can swap stderr and stdout like this:

    foo 3>&2 2>&1 1>&3 | grep ...

And in many shells, you can easily split the stdout and stderr into two separate pipelines like this:

    foo > >(grep stdout) 2> >(grep stderr)

It generally isn't possible for grep to "slurp up" the error output because stderr does not get passed through pipes (by default). This is shell behavior and grep cannot do anything about it.

As a side note, some shells have started implementing a shorthand for `foo 2>&1 | grep` which is `foo |& grep`.

Awk is turing complete. You could do the challenges only in Awk if you wanted.

There are no pictures of the frogs in this article. For pictures (of thawed and frozen frogs) you can see: https://shakerlakes.org/frozen-frogs/

When using it over Email, all of the normal email headers are there on full display. The subject line, recipients, etc... Everything except the body is exposed.

That seems a very cynical view, and it doesn't ring true to me. Anecdotally, I know of multiple business that were built up by one person, and then practically gifted to the employees. Some people really care about the business, customers, and employees.

Minor nitpick: the terminal prints the character OR'ed with 0x40 (not AND'ed).

I have written a lot of software for myself or some close associates that is really only for our purposes (or sometimes just for our amusement). Certainly I could trivially distribute the software to whomever I wished, but it wouldn't be useful, appreciate it, or perhaps even run outside of the environment I wrote it for.

For instance I have some lovingly crafted bash scripts, that feel somewhat artisan. They keep my home server humming along, applying updates, making regular backups, and reporting status. The scrips are very tailored to my use and would not easily integrate elsewhere.

I could have used off the shelf software for much of this (ala "IKEA"), I'm sure, but I am a tinkerer, hobbyist, and, if I flatter myself, an artisan.

I'd say that isn't true. The Linux version number is somewhat arbitrary, and does not denote incompatibility. And from the view of userspace, the Linux ABI is rather backwards compatible.

Also, WSL1 and some BSDs are examples of Linux compatibility.

I have not tried it, but this person has claimed to have improved his formulation of iron gall ink to no longer eat away at paper: https://simplifier.neocities.org/irongall

Ot of curiosity, how does this work? If a site is over https, then the only information I would think the ISP would have is the subscriber downloaded from randompiratesite.xyz what seems to be a single X GiB file. They could see that the size roughly corresponds to FooBar.mp4 on that site (plus some HTTP headers). But this seems pretty unreliable. (Like what if someone was using a download manager to get multiple large files at once, using multiple download streams per file?)

I'm sure that you can get in plenty of trouble for downloading a ton of data from randompiratesite.xyz or whatever, but how the ISP determine the number of movies they've seen you download?

If you want the answers, you can find them here: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2957 (great site for when you don't get an xkcd joke). But, really, give it a try on your own first.

I think that this is predicated upon a reasonably well informed and educated public. And my estimation is that the general populous is not informed enough on cryptography to be in a position to shame Ticketmaster engineers.

Also, my impression is that there is already copious amounts of public shaming. Some social media sites seem largely devoted to that. And unfortunately, I don't think most people fully deserve the verdict that they get in the court of public opinion.

I have always heard this pronunciation in American English when referring to the vice.