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throwaway542134

24 karma · joined July 30, 2019

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throwaway542134··on LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
>Downtown has the best transport access in the entire city

The only problem is that most people don't have a reason to go there. The streets are usually empty aside from the homeless encampments.

The only reasons I've ever had to go to DTLA was to attend a conference and some games at the Staples Center. It's a cultural and recreational wasteland compared to the rest of the city.

throwaway542134··on LA getting serious about lifting parking requirements in downtown
I think this is just low cost/effort to reduce a particular problem. DTLA is the most walkable and accessible to public transit place in the city, the only issue is there's nothing there worth walking to besides the Staples Center.

The real area of focus for reducing traffic and vehicle usage should be the San Fernando Valley corridors (Sepulveda/405, the 5, and the 101 to San Gabriel Valley). Iirc from a recent report on KPCC there's like 600k daily commuters between the valley and the southland, and another 700k between the valley and San Gabriel Valley.

We have one metro stop in the SFV, which serves the 3 million residents. It's no wonder it's surrounded by a massive parking lot, and most commuters don't use it anyway.

throwaway542134··on Arabic Mathematics: Forgotten Brilliance? (1999)
iirc the title translates to something like "the Study|Art|Practice of balancing and restoring." I recall "al jabr" means "of/relating to balancing"

This source[1] states it as

>the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like

[1] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/algebra

throwaway542134··on Google Voice is killing SMS voicemail transcripts and Chrome Extension texting
So was hangouts.
throwaway542134··on Toshiba Introduces New Tiny NVMe SSD Form Factor
I don't think the connector is the problem but the devices you connect to. RPis are notorious for having a poor lifespan due to reading/writing from the SD cards, but I think that's mostly due to the cost tier of a $30 computer.
throwaway542134··on Major Update of Vector Class Library
Am I missing something? The CPU dispatching in this library is done at runtime too... I thought FMV only has a penalty on the first call?
throwaway542134··on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service
I think the point is more that there's nuance in preventing speech (like censorship) and punishing the actions as a result of speech. I get that some would call those the same thing.

In the context of 8chan, I think there's a difference between allowing people to say whatever they want online and punishing the people that use that freedom to incite violence.

The part where it gets blurry to me is the hateful rhetoric that doesn't directly call for violence, but the only logical conclusion of the position is genocidal or otherwise racial violence. Talking about "invaders" or "American cities under foreign occupation" for example.

throwaway542134··on Major Update of Vector Class Library
> ∙ CPU dispatching to utilize higher instruction sets when available

What's the advantage of hand rolled CPU dispatching over compiler intrinsincs like function multiversioning in GCC/Clang?

throwaway542134··on Major Update of Vector Class Library
If you don't actually need higher level math functions or it's prohibitive to implement something at the higher level. For example if you have an operation where you know the sparse-ness(?) of a matrix at compile time but the values of the matrix can change, you may want to implement the matrix multiplications by hand using SIMD ops.
throwaway542134··on DM48 Digital Chromatic Harmonica
Everyone should record a video of themselves reading text aloud, while playing the audio back at a 5-20ms delay into their headphones. It's hilarious!

Same thing happens when you play an instrument.

throwaway542134··on Why we ground electrical systems (2015)
When you talk about "electricity" you need to distinguish between "current" and "charge carrier." Current is the amount of charge that flows through a point per second. The charge carriers are the electrically charged particles that actually move. Where current goes is a matter of what we're trying to do with a circuit, where charge carriers go is why we need ground.

What a voltage does is pull or push the charge carriers. When lots of them flow, you have a current. Conductors, like a wire or ground rod, are full of free electrons to act like charge carriers (kind of like a pipe filled with water, the voltage is a pump that moves it).

The duality of pulling/pushing charge carriers is why we need a circuit. In order to push charge carriers, we need something to pull them from (a source) and somewhere to dump them (a sink). When we have no source and no sink, charge carriers have nowhere to come from and nowhere to go.

Ground is a convenient source/sink for charge carriers because it's roughly uniform in charge and huge, so pulling tons of charge carriers from it doesn't impact it greatly.

And it's not that charge carriers are always flowing back to earth, but back to their source. That's why ground is sometimes called a "return path." To move a charge carrier, you need to give it potential. It will lose that potential and return to the point of lowest potential difference from its origin - which is its origin.

But that said, for things like AC power, the charge carriers aren't actually moving very far at all and have a net displacement of 0. They vibrate adjacent charge carriers, and we convert that vibration into unidirectional (DC) voltages that can push/pull from local sources/sinks, be it the literal earth (mostly for safety ground) or a small plane of copper on a PCB.

throwaway542134··on Why we ground electrical systems (2015)
I've always preferred to think of it as pumping water from the bottom of a (practically infinite) reservoir and dumping it at the top of a mountain then doing some work as it flows downhill, back to the reservoir.

It provides a nice visual for why current always makes it back to ground, just like water always flow downhill. It also removes the tendency to anthropomorphize electrical current and say things like it "seeks out" ground. When something falls from the sky we don't say it's trying to find the ground!

throwaway542134··on Homomorphic encryption
Worth mentioning that ballot stuffing is a problem with the people counting the votes/running the polls, not the voters. So it would be more accurate to say that the problem is preventing the entity that organizes the vote from accessing discrete votes.
throwaway542134··on Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre
This page has a good overview:

http://www.tsusinvasives.org/home/database/paulownia-tomento...

>...its ability to sprout prolifically from adventitious buds on stems and roots allows it to survive fire, cutting and even bulldozing in construction areas; making it difficult to remove from established areas.

>...

> Cutting or girdling trees with power or manual saws are effective at preventing seed production, but an herbicide treatment is necessary following cutting since Paulownia readily re-sprouts. Hand pulling may be effective for young seedlings. Plants should be pulled as soon as they are large enough to grasp. Seedlings are best pulled after a rain when the soil is loose. The entire root must be removed since broken fragments may re-sprout. Cutting or pulling is the preferred mechanical treatments of the Paulownia tormentosa; do not use fire because this species is able to survive fire and then quickly proliferates and out-competes native tree species post-fire.

throwaway542134··on How to stop Apple from listening to your Siri recordings
If I pay $100 for a product to listen to my vocal queries and respond, and you listen to improve the product's ability to respond, fine.

If you use it to track subsonic audio watermarks to detect what advertisements I see on my TV or find out what products and services I'm interested in, screw off.

Every engineer who pushes code to synergize advertisement business with their consumer audio product business should be ashamed of themselves. It's unethical and should be illegal.

I want the products I buy to do what I think they do. Not hide tracking used to improve other products from the business that I don't pay for.

throwaway542134··on The Lost Art of Lacing Cable (2018)
This actually seems like a really interesting problem to me.

I don't think there's one pretty solution here. You'd have to break it down a bit.

- Do the patients go to the machine, or machine to the patient? Wireless makes sense for the latter, not the former.

- What's the failure mode? An alarm/alert to the nurse station, or death? Wireless makes sense for the former, I think.

- Are there any machines at every bedside? Do all of them need to be used at once? Detachable/modular cabling might make sense here.

- Are the cables different? Or can you come up with a "standard" cable/connector for most of the gear?

The audio world solved the "cables being knocked out" problem a long time ago with locking connectors (not screw-ins, so they're still quick connect) like Speak-On and XLR. The former is much more formidable.

throwaway542134··on Slim Binaries (1997)
It's called dead code elimination/optimization and compilers can do it without LTO, with LTO you can can get more savings but ymmv.
throwaway542134··on Apple Reports Declining Profits and Slowing Growth Again
The fourth amendment covers search and seizure by the government, not the willful disclosure of information to a company by a user.

But I get what you mean. Even without getting into my inherent distrust of facial recognition systems and the security/privacy implications of creating the infrastructure for it to work reliably, biometrics are usernames. They shouldn't be used as passwords.

throwaway542134··on Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30
As a user, there's absolutely no way I'm going to give you a real name and email address if you roll your own authentication. I probably won't use your service at all.