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toolslive

2,882 karma · joined March 28, 2012

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toolslive··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
2 things. - meter rolling backward: it's completely gone. You cannot refuse the replacement and they have ben replacing them since 2021.

- I was wrong: the asymmetry is a factor 6 iso a factor 3. :(

toolslive··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
Here in Belgium, there's "a bit" of asymmetry: the price per kWh I pay from the grid is roughly 3 times of what I get when I inject. I also have a fixed cost per year to have the right to inject. I knew this before I installed solar and have a home battery, so it only happens during summer.
toolslive··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
In Belgium, Stella is fully accepted, contrary to fe "Cristal" or "Maes". Of course, it's no "Jupiler".
toolslive··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
get a "Stella 0.0" and tell me it tastes terrible.
toolslive··on What Sun got wrong
it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"
toolslive··on New wild cat species discovered – with only one known living member
There also was the Corsican wildcat[0] which briefly was a new species and now has "uncertain taxonomic status" (whatever that may mean).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corsican_wildcat

toolslive··on Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
pattern is there: first hit a public place (market, ...), then when people are scrambling to help, hit them again. "double-tap". Seen in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, ... It's quite cynical, the topic has its own Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-tap_strike

toolslive··on Learn Programming with OCaml
your body needs exercise or you end up an obese couch potato. Your mind is similar: it needs exercise or you end up a dunce.
toolslive··on Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?
yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.
toolslive··on Visual Analysis of Binary Files
Humans are so good at pattern recognition it's uncanny. Back in the modem days, most people automatically recognised the most important phases of downloads because of the way they sounded .
toolslive··on We will need more (not fewer) scientists
Our knowledge is an inflating volume. New knowledge gets acquired at surface level, and the surface is ever growing.
toolslive··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
I have the same. I'm looking at my laptop's screen as I type this, and if I close my eyes while typing I cannot even visualise said screen. Now, I can blind-type, recognise faces, navigate aso without any problem. I can even play chess quite well (fide ~2050, 2200 blitz on chess.com), but I cannot visualise a chess board, nor can I visualise my moves or the moves of my opponent.

However, I don't "see" (pun intended) it as a problem. On the contrary, I'm not wasting cycles on irrelevant details while I'm thinking.

toolslive··on SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
the halting problem?
toolslive··on SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
One of the problems with running the application code inside the database server is that you need to make application developers use the programming language(s) you prepared for them. The other is that you need to trust them to not do crash out, or do infinite loops. Good luck moving application developers from their choice into the right choice.
toolslive··on Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
tangential: I still remember how disappointed I was in PCs being used to a C64 (which was released in 1982) The quality of the games & sound effects was just not on the same level (C64 being much more advanced)
toolslive··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
> "guardrails matter" This thing has been solved in the 70s. Basically, have a powerful type system, and a compiler that beats you into submission when you try to stray from the straight and narrow. Languages like (S/OCa)ML, Haskell and Rust will bring this to you. As a consequence, you fight the compiler, and once it submits, you have a good chance it's going to work. The compiler is also the ultimate refactoring tool here. Change the concept? Just change the type in the code and follow through by fixing the error messages the compiler spits out.
toolslive··on Nearest Pint
yup. soldiers in dire need of a drink
toolslive··on Nearest Pint
OK, I think this will be close to an all time record: Leopoldsburg (Belgium, 14k inhabitants) had more than 150 pubs in the 1980s.
toolslive··on Karpathy’s Pelican
Reading the title, I was thinking "Karpathy? I don't know this chess player." (The Pelikan is a well known chess opening, and famous chess players often have book titles like "X's Y" where X is the player, and Y is the opening)
toolslive··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
football games can have "momentum". An extra break allows for a breather and a tactical intervention from the coach. That also why we saw keepers sitting down (faking injury) in the Premier league last season. Anyway, a hydration break while it's raining is a bit of a tell it has nothing to do with the needs of the players.
toolslive··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
I was wondering what exactly what to think about the Tom Cruise speech before the final.
toolslive··on Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)
Not a one-note solo, but Miles Davis's solo on So What is really minimalistic.
toolslive··on Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)
I only skimmed the article. There's a lot of good stuff (debunking a lot of classical harmony) but they miss some important things too. There's nothing about repetition. Repetition legitimizes. Our brain is really good at pattern recognition, and as soon as it can predict something you're more than half way there to make it sound good. There's plenty of chromaticism that works because the brain "gets" the sense of direction.
toolslive··on No Spanish reading crisis?
These guys are from Galicia. Maybe that makes a difference.
toolslive··on The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]
hold on. Just realised it's not even (part of ) a vector space. It's not linear, non-euclidian and can't be mapped onto 3 dimensions. It's not even constant or always reproducible:

    Look at an object; 
    Observe colour X; then look at the wrong thing; 
    then look back and you might observe colour X' != X.
toolslive··on No Spanish reading crisis?
I have some Spanish ex-co-workers. I just verified it. They both had it on their required reading list in high-school. (one of them is in his 30s, the other in his 40s)
toolslive··on No Spanish reading crisis?
> Democracy is safe in Spain!

iirc, The Prince from Machiavelli is required reading during secondary education. That will surely awaken their political awareness.

toolslive··on The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]
Tetrachromacy !?
toolslive··on The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]
Doesn't matter: there's no RGB model that captures the colour space. That exactly the reason CIE exists.
toolslive··on The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]
Just going to sound really pedantic here, but RGB does not capture the entire colour space. In fact, it only captures about 35% of the colours the human eye can perceive.

https://www.oceanopticsbook.info/view/photometry-and-visibil...

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