themeiguoren

I backup my iPhone to my hard drive monthly. I really don’t think there’s a pressing need to have a live backup on your phone. On average, if I lose data, it’s only 15 days worth. If you’re this paranoid about security then back up every week.

The mobile app requires you to enable notifications to turn on smile donations on in-app purchases. Talk about a dark pattern.

I remember a take-home physics test in high school where there was a pendulum problem and I spent a full day trying to prove that x’’= ax is generally met by a trigonometric function. I eventually gave up, and was very surprised when I got full marks for saying to simply assume it (though the rest of the test suffered by my being stuck for so long). Besides the exponential formulation of sin and cos, I’m honestly not sure if that’s a unique answer to this day. Does anyone know?

They also ‘refund’ the rating hit you took from losing to the cheater. I think it works pretty well.

The answer is Bluetooth dongles. I’ve got a Bluetooth to aux adapter in my car, and it works a treat. I much prefer it to when I had my (original) SE hooked up with a physical aux cord, since it doesn’t wear out from fiddling with it and it automatically turns on and connects when I start my car.

Paper grocery bags give off gas when they rot, whereas the (smaller) amount of energy in a plastic grocery bag is carbon locked in a controlled landfill. I think there’s a strong argument for plastic bags being more environmentally friendly.

I deleted the app because it was too much of a skinners box for me, but it worked well. The mobile site on iOS works well, and I literally never get popup prompts or blockers guiding me towards the app. Perhaps those people aren’t logged in? On desktop I use the redesign happily - the biggest complaint I’ve heard from power users is that it’s not as information dense, but that’s super easily fixed by changing the default layout from ‘card’ to ‘classic’ or ‘compact’. I suspect those people skipped the popup walkthrough that explained this when the transition happened, because I’ve run across many bitter people who used the old site a lot and didn’t know you could change the new one away from the massive cards. IMO that’s pretty ironic.

Reddit’s current UIs get a lot of hate, but I’ve been using the site at least weekly for the last 11 years and I really don’t get the complaints. The old site was ugly (albeit familiar), and the new skin doesn’t subtract from the functionality in any way besides a few obscure subreddits with wild styling. If that has helped bring people to my niche interest subs, that’s a huge win in my book.

Yeah, as a controls engineer I’ve worked on systems where the main requirement was not gain or phase margin, but a root sum square of the two. Nichols plots drive home the idea that it’s not really the margin at two discrete points that matter, but the close approach to the critical point.

Your data should always be stored in 3 locations:

1) Your primary computer 2) An external hard drive you keep at home 3) The cloud (Dropbox, google drive, etc)

This protects you from device failures, cloud failures/lapse of service, theft, and accidents at home (fires, floods). I personally keep the physical hard drive disconnected from the computer and in a safe, which should protect from power surges and weird edge cases like solar storms. And then I have a recurring calendar reminder set to back up my phone and computer to it every month. If my livelihood depended on that data (or if the stuff I most cared about like photos weren’t also on my phone) I’d do it more frequently.

So what about those young healthy people that interact with no one who’s at risk? I’m in my mid 20’s, and the best upper bound I’ve seen on risk of death for someone my age who is otherwise healthy is 0.05%. Not nothing, but comparable to 2 years of driving and well within the level of risk we give people agency to make decisions about every day. I’ve been through lockdown and I know what that huge hit to quality of life means to me, and the risk of covid is worth it to not have to live that way again.

My fear is solely that I pass it to someone at higher risk, and to that end I’m working from home, masking up, and there isn’t a single person in my life over the age of 40. But I’m also not holding back on seeing friends my age, and yes even throwing parties. We’re all in the same boat, and if they’re also out and about then they’ve made the decision that they’re comfortable with that level of risk themselves. I don’t think it’s a crazy one, and so I’m not going to make it for them.

If someone was going to steal company info for a competitor, they’d do it before they gave notice that they were leaving. And they wouldn’t tell their current employer where they were going.

This might catch extraordinarily stupid people from conducting industrial espionage, but really I see it as the company encouraging people to not give any notice at all (which, remember, is just a courtesy) when they quit. It’s shortsighted on the company’s part.

I can see how it’d be a decent tool for plotting up a bunch of raw telemetry streams, but as someone who had to write a moderately complicate program in LabView once, I’m astonished they’ve scaled it up that far and very glad it’s not me who had to do it. It’s a real PITA to work with.

If your fancy computer model doesn’t approximately equal your back of the envelope calculation, that’s generally a knock against the computer model rather than the napkin math. Exceptions exist, but for a system as linear as this you should be able to separate out gravity and look at it on its own no problem.

Not software, but along the lines of cool engineering stories one of my favorites is this one about fixing 230 kV, many-hundred-amp, 10 mile long coax cable in Southern California.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

And the reason you’d leave it out is because a PI controller is guaranteed to be stable with positive gains. Throw the D term in there and you have to start checking pole positions to make sure your system doesn’t blow up.

As a controls engineer, I’ve pointed people towards that series of posts more than once. Great explanations.

I find it pretty funny that Bloomberg himself is hidden on that list.

I understand the goal is not pretty pictures. But you're not using a hammer to remove random white noise from all your observations, you're using a scalpel to mask out completely predictable errors for very short periods of time. My amateur astronomer link was not meant as a scientific how-to, but as an illustration that even simple hammer-y methods work to mask out satellite trails.

There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.

This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.

Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.

An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.

I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.

From a first-principles perspective, it's baffling to me why this would ever be a serious problem. We know the ephemerides of all objects in Earth orbit, and they are traveling at a fast enough angular speed to not linger in an observational spot. We're not working with long-exposure film here - we can manipulate pixels over time. On a technical level it should be trivial to mask out the pixels where satellites are located at each moment. I think 1% is far too high a guesstimate, but say that artificial satellites end up covering 1% of the full night sky (for context the moon takes up under 0.001% of the sky's area). That still leaves you with 99% observability - hardly an effect on the amount of data you can bring in, especially compared to such problems as clouds.

Dead-simple algorithms to erase satellite trails are available for hobbyists right now: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foun...

And more complex ones for professional astronomers should still be super simple to implement compared to many of the algorithms astronomers have to wrangle with.

The idea is that the repair vehicle needs to have it open in order to fix it, but IMO it’s some BS.

Citation? That’s the first I’ve heard of it and that’s a pretty big accusation.

And to be clear, that port is for charging-in only, not data.

I don’t think this is the right takeaway - the examples all had marketing as the second skill because the author wanted them to be people that the reader would recognize. This means that they needed people with a public persona, which lends to self marketing being the shared skill. A person with a skill set that doesn’t include marketing could be just as successful, but you as a reader aren’t going to connect to the example of the author’s second cousin Sam.

I want to build executables that I can pass around without also sending an entire environment. Crazy that’s not a native feature.

How many headphones do you have? I’d be surprised if it was more than 2. Just keep the single permanently on the end of the headphone’s aux cord and that solves all your issues in this comment.

I still use an SE but I really don’t get this complaint against upgrading. Just keep the dongle permanently on the end of your headphone cable, and use one that splits out to a lightening charger as well. I’m seeing one for under 10 bucks on Amazon. Really a non-issue.

The answer, unless you want to check the price of commodities each morning, is to recycle glass and bottles anyway and let the recycler decide if it’s economically efficient to send it to the landfill or to reprocessing.

Many services offer credit monitoring for free, eg credit cards, CreditKarma. You don’t need to be paying for it to be eligible for the cash payout.

Yep, I did a 2to3 conversion recently and it got the whole project 95% of the way there. A 3to2 would be in theory almost as simple to do for most projects.

Your suspicion is right, as far as manufacturing goes.

The real boon of this discovery is in designing lenses. For example, the authors have already used it to design a single-lens telescope for the first time [1]. I don't know much about the forefront of optics, but at least in my field having analytical models that you quickly iterate on and use to prime intuition are extremely useful.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11129