GeorgeDewar

I totally agree with you, I think retries are overused, with the exception of operations that are known to be unreliable and can't be improved.

In my experience, errors which go away within a few seconds are quite rare, and are mainly due to flaws which are usually caught in testing.

I think a very careful cost/risk/benefit analysis should be done when adding automatic retries to things. As well as potentially causing cascading failures, it is a degraded user experience when it doesn't succeed.

As a user I would rather see an error straight away than see many seconds of spinning while something silently retries, and THEN an error.

I love this approach, but a few years ago I tried it very unsuccessfully with my Xiaomi Mi 34" ultrawide.

By very unsuccessfully, I mean that the commands to change input didn't work. I can't remember if they did nothing or crashed the monitor, but subsequent investigation led me to realise I was lucky not to brick it, as some people found certain commands cause non-recoverable issues on that monitor!

So, I suggest caution in the form of maybe checking that others have successfully used DDC commands on your particular model.

https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/issues/153

Was it on 120V in the US or a 240V country? In my 240V country that would normally make a terrific spark and a bang.

Do you remember if it blew a fuse or tripped a breaker?

That writing isn't the only "thinking" though. Some thinking can happen in the course of generating a single token, as shown by the ability to answer a question without any intermediate reasoning tokens. But as we've all learnt this is a less powerful and more error-prone mode of thinking.

So that is to say I think a small amount of secret reasoning would be possible, e.g. if the location is known or guessed from the beginning by another means and the reasoning steps are made up to justify the conclusion.

The more clearly sound the reasoning steps are, the less plausible that scenario is.

Why is this? In my country they start at 1.

This has really made insurance click for me because while I understand it intuitively, I wanted a more scientific foundation to understand its value.

I think a great illustration is an extreme case. If I have a house and just enough income to cover all my needs and wants (including retirement savings), then depending on my attitude an extra $1000 per year might have no effect at all - I have nothing I want to spend it on and nothing to save for.

But losing my home would still be devastating. So the utility value of the $1000 per year for the rest of my life is low or none, but the utility value of the previously earned money I would lose from losing my house is high.

The lane keep assist in my 2017 Leaf is awful. If I used it, anyone would take me for a drunk driver as it drifts to the edge of the lane and then corrects endlessly.

Thankfully it can be turned off, and it stays off.

At the time of writing, this search will provide a top result saying "Help is available" and giving information about your country's crisis hotline.

"1236 800", "1236 + 800", etc. also do it, but 1236800 does not. The two numbers have to be separated and in that order.

It'd be interesting to know why.

One could get into a long debate about whether "most" is literally true or not, but I think most of us should be able to agree that at least a significant proportion of people - enough to matter - either won't or can't think of this without some prompting.

I've watched many of the videos on their YouTube channel and have been blown away by all the cool stuff in that museum, and the talented people that keep it going!

It's high on my list of things to see in the US when I next get a chance to spend some time there (which could be several years away so I hope it keeps going strong).

I think for many, perhaps even most people, you're right and friendship happens organically without deliberate intent.

Some people just do not work this way - maybe it's being somewhere on the autism spectrum, but whatever the cause, some people need to take a more methodical approach to do this.

I think what this blog post shows is that such an approach really can result in true friendships.

It's a bit like online dating I suppose. That idea is abhorrent to some (or used to be - the stigma has reduced considerably over time), but when it works, there's nothing preventing the resulting relationship from being as genuine as one that started any other way.

Very true. I usually ask "is or was it ever alive", and if yes I'll then ask if it's alive today.

Edit: don't know how the similar sibling comment didn't appear to me when I was writing this, since it's from 4 hours ago and I loaded the page less than one hour ago...

I did not know about tables in Excel. Now I do and it may change my life...

I can help with number 2.

Two transactions are happening at the same time. Your "sales" revenue account is going up (Credit) by $2 and your cash asset account is going up (Debit) by the same $2. That is the first balanced transaction.

The second transaction is that your inventory asset account is going down (Credit) by $0.50 as you have less inventory now, and an expense account called "Cost of Goods Sold" is Debited by the same $0.50.

Your profit gets calculated on demand. There are two ways to do it, both yielding the same result. You can look at revenue minus expenses over a period, giving $2 sales minus $0.50 cost of goods sold = $1.50 profit for the period. Or, you can look at how your equity (assets minus liabilities) has changed over that period. In this example, no liabilities have changed and your assets (bank account) have increased by $1.50 because bank has gone up by $2 while inventory has gone down by $0.50.

If you are in the hole where you really cannot add load to your database server but want to log the queries, there is a technique called zero impact monitoring where you literally mirror the network traffic going to your database server, and use a separate server to reconstruct it into query logs. These logs identify the queries that are being run, and critically, who/what is running them.

A past workplace of mine has used this approach.

And I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie.

In the same vain, as a child of about 10 I used to use a CD-ROM drive hooked up to a PSU and headphones to listen to music in bed. It was lovely as a portable CD player would have been totally unaffordable to my family at the time.

New Zealand too, and it really is as good as it sounds. Transacting property can be done very quickly, safely and cheaply, and no title insurance is required.

The register is of course just a normal relational database.

One key to the success, though, is a large and mature body of legislation and processes to ensure that the register really is always correct.

This is very sad news indeed. For years I have longed to visit this museum.

I hope that they choose to reopen or that it can be purchased and turned into a more sustainable operation. I would gladly donate at least $1000 to such a cause if a viable proposal could be formed...

In fact, such material is already illegal to possess or trade. The official classification just clarifies that after the fact.

The law that makes this material objectionable is the same one that makes child pornography illegal, and it should be obvious that it wouldn't work very well if each video involving sex with children had to be classified as objectionable before it became illegal.

The criteria are here:

https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restric...

I think a lot of people actually depend on the contents of their hard drive a lot less these days than, say, ten years ago, because so much is stored in the cloud - photos in particular.

Unless the money came from an illicit source (I don't think the source was stated, but making a ton of money from Bitcoin's rise is perfectly legitimate), cashing out would surely be perfectly legitimate as long as one paid the right taxes, which there would hardly be a reason not to.

I'm not exactly a "free markets solve every problem" guy, but in this particular case I think we have a platform with an agreed set of rules, and when a willing exchange can happen there is really nothing wrong with it.

I see these rules as:

1. The vendor is using the platform to sell a product that's not ready for market yet. They are not willing or able to develop the product without securing the funds to do so from willing buyers. Note that the distinction between "not willing" (a company swimming in cash that doesn't want to take a risk) and "not able" (a guy with no financial means whatsoever) is blurry in many real cases (e.g. three guys in a garage that could spend their whole life savings and mortgage the house but aren't quite willing to, as the in-between case).

2. The buyers are getting a product they can't get elsewhere, at a price they are willing to pay. This implies they feel adequately compensated for the risk they know they are taking on.

3. The platform earns a fee.

A giant corporation playing by these rules seems to me to be fairly contributing to the ecosystem just like a small player. If their proposition is not on terms that buyers accept, they'll simply fail.

We now have pretty fast internet. I'm on 100mbit with unlimited data for $79/month, and could have 1Gbit for $129/month.

International speeds can occasionally be a bit slow, but the widespread use of caching and CDNs limits the impact of this. It's mostly pretty good.

A very strange thing to write as my first post, but in one of the debates Trump did indeed say he would respect the results "if I win" [1].

I think the "I'll look at it on the day" comments came a bit later.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/donald-trump-i-wi...