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clark_dent

Re:Demographic "Doomsday" Misses the Mark on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:38AM (#50166240)
Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet, or because they can't afford the time and resources to adequately raise them.

I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.

Re:Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:17AM (#50104936)
The issue is how the MLS (multiple listing service) allows listing of condos/apartments/etc. Since each unit has no actual land to itself, they're allowed to list the total land that the complex sits on for each unit. There's also basically no oversight or correction on what gets listed, so listing agents have no reason to be accurate or perspicacious.

Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.

Re:DOGE overstated savings, government watchdog says on Friday August 07, 2026 @09:16AM (#49209924)
A good proportion of the older generations still disdain or mock Germany as nazis-in-waiting. There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down the line.
A whole lot of Americans water their lawns consistently for months on end.

Keep in mind that a lot of Americans outside of urban areas also get their water from their own private wells, making water use effectively moot.

Re:Epidurals Are a Miracle Technology on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:47AM (#48644942)
I think this is going to depend strongly on population. Average age of the mother, width of the pelvic canal, and similar are going to vary widely with culture, race and country.
Re:What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000 on Thursday June 18, 2026 @12:08PM (#48587561)
Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world.

It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.

Re:The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @03:40PM (#48575744)
This one almost feels like the AI got stuck in a perseverating loop of "He <blank> the <blank>." <repeat>

This is followed up by a sprinkling of every possible punctuative shakeup: bold, em-dash, semicolon, colon, quote, etc.

Re:Driving in America Is Headlight Hell on Thursday June 11, 2026 @11:38AM (#48491856)
I think the gigantic prevalence of huge or lifted trucks is a bigger influence, especially given the tendency to mod them out (poorly) with aftermarket lights.

Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.

Exactly like the old one!
Re:Encephalitis on Thursday June 04, 2026 @11:50AM (#48400434)
Biomedical research in the US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two. This was my field for the past 20 years, so I'm fairly familiar.

It requires enormous capital investment and a very, very long time to turn out meaningful results, so it's only available to those with corporate-depth pockets or government subsidies. It also requires a broad and deep skill set.

With the FDA, USDA, NIH, CDC and DoEd all being gutted, the subsidies are gone. Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.

Re:No way to parse integers in C on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @11:58AM (#48209868)
Could you humor a coding noob--how do you deal with utterly insane inputs like that?
> Higher latitudes have colder climates.

Not reliably, not continually, and much less often when you dump enough energy into the atmosphere to disrupt major wind patterns.

British Columbia hitting 121°F/49.6°C at 50°N latitude would sort of suggest your generalization doesn't hold true anymore.

How many millions of police officers do you think there are?

How many of those do you think have open and available records for their use of surveillance tech?

Re:The World's Most Complex Machine on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @10:01AM (#47934736)
Complexity doesn't necessarily mean it's suboptimal. Lithography and nanofab are usually doing a whole range of disparate and wildly exotic processes with extreme vacuum, plasmas, electron guns; any number of crazy and dangerous process gases like H2, HF, or silane; and occasionally raw materials like iridium and rhodium. And that's all without the actual lithography. When your margin for error is measured in single atoms and your number of features per die outnumber the planet's population 2:1, physical laws start to stand in the way of simplification.

The one 'machine' encompasses more disciplines than most universities offer. It's really a whole bleeding edge factory compressed into a room.

Re:NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist on Monday April 20, 2026 @08:51AM (#47833557)
It didn't, but the advent of spellcheck and autocorrect has made everyone completely give up on proper grammar or word selection as long as no squiggly line appears.
Well, no. Some common plastics like polycarbonate aren't biodegradable, and will basically never break down without application of significant heat/water/enzymatic activity/etc. For some of these, the half-life could be a great deal more even than 10s of millenia:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635#:~:te....

Re:Using an 8K TV as a Monitor on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @11:37AM (#41996279)
12" viewing distance?! It sounds like you should be spending more at the optometrist and less at Best Buy. I cannot even imagine sitting that close to a screen--don't you have to turn your head just to see both sides of a document?
Re:Using an 8K TV as a Monitor on Wednesday October 30, 2024 @11:30AM (#41996162)
TVs generally have more input lag, poorer color fidelity, and except at the high end like 8k the pixel size is often inappropriate for viewing close up.

There's less of a gulf now than in the past, but TVs are generally made for media watching at a distance.

Why in the name of all that is unholy would you ever think that?

The people in charge of pay and hiring will never, ever, ever set things up such that they're considered less important or are paid less.

Re: on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @02:02PM (#40370300)
The link is completely incorrect, it points to the submission form for /r/technology.