dcminter

Archer and ScienceFair are familiar brands. I haven't heard of the other ones - though it probably just means I didn't buy any of those products.

Ah yes, the people in my community who will try to defraud me with insurance "deals" definitely much preferable.

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What flavour of hackathon and what does "done right" constitute for you?

Learning to dance a social partner dance (not a choreographed dance). There are interesting analogies with grammar and syntax in how some of dancing works.

Most unexpected benefit (perhaps predictable to an outsider, but I didn't see it coming) was getting married and moving to Sweden :)

To be fair, that really is about a startup, though that's an amusingly oddball way to categorise it, not to mention a niche category of business! Wouldn't have occurred to me to suggest it, but I quite like the thought now someone has. 1984.

I must say it hadn't aged all that well when we saw it fairly recently. Not horrible, just a bit slow paced and not quite as funny as I remembered it being.

Startup.com (2001) - documentary about a dot com era startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com

Define economical :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Spider_Silk_Cape

I taught myself BASIC on a ZX81 (from the manual) at a tender age, and even I think this book is pretty niche. Amazing! I'm tempted...

Replying to myself as we reached the thread limit. Slightly bad form, but I doubt there are many (any) others listening in the thread:

>> You did. Quote "It may annoy you,". But nevermind.

You misinterpret. It may annoy you. It may not. A cat may look at a king.

>> I think you also believe this, we only disagree in which grammatical forms. Or are you arguing that "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?" is grammatically correct?

I'm arguing that the question is meaningless. Some will sound correct to my ear. Some will not. Some will sound correct to nobody. None of them are "wrong" because there is no authority beyond convention to dictate which is "correct" - and conventions differ between different users of language.

I would never say "on accident" but it would be fatuous to say that it was "wrong" just because I don't use it when millions do.

> ...only disagree on where the line is.

I don't really agree that there's a line. If one person uses an unconventional construction is it wrong? Not really, though they may be hard to understand. Or not. Half the art of great usage of the language is coming up with unconventional forms.

> No bad feelings anyway. Nice chat.

None felt, none intended. Likewise.

Who said you were annoyed? I'm just pointing out that English is a democratic language, has no centralised institute defining correctness, and drawing borders around areas of it is completely pointless.

You're entitled to believe that some grammatical forms are "wrong" and I'm entitled to have no respect for that opinion.

I, for example, strongly dislike the change of meaning of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested", but have no illusion that there's some absolute truth of His Majesty's Royal English Language to prop up my ego.

In practice, where such institutes do exist, they trail after the language bringing the rules into alignment with it, or are utterly ignored by all but the most officious.

There is no English Grammar Institute to tell us what is right and wrong, so English grammar is necessarily descriptive and not prescriptive.

It may annoy you, and you may be convinced that you are right and others are "wrong" but if a substantial body of people use English in a way that you dislike then it's just tough shit I'm afraid.

> But then "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?".

Because nobody actually talks like that, that's why.

You don't speak Elizabethan English, or Regency English, or late Saxon, or Old English, but you presumably don't think those are "wrong" - why do you think Estuary English is wrong; could it be gasp because you're in a different linguistic group? /me clutches pearls...

FYI it's a somewhat regional or (in the UK) class stratified grammar distinction.

While nobody would say "fewer sand", "less" is in practice often used by native English speakers for both count and non-count nouns so it's not really wrong so much as it is revealing.

I have the dumbest reason I'm sure. As a mostly Java guy for years and years and a C++ guy before that, I happened to be looking around to see if there was a language out there where immutability (final) was the default for variables. That was it, nothing more. Found Rust and liked the ideas, but didn't do anything very much with it - though I even went to one of the early (2016) Rust conferences - and have slowly done more and more with it on personal projects.

It's been interesting seeing how coding agents take to it - candidly they're much better at Rust than me :)

Handcoded projects are mostly a bunch of trivial conversion tools⁰ that I don't bother to share, but I have a little dictionary tool¹ and a UI for my webcam² that went up on my Github. From Agent-coded stuff I have a container manager³ and a VM (QEMU) manager⁴ that I found useful and figured why not share them. All for Linux as I'm a happy Linux user for both business and pleasure.

I haven't found much use for Rust professionally, but it's definitely my language of choice when hand-coding stuff for fun and I seem to get better results with it for agent coding on complex backend and UI stuff too.

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⁰ For example one of them took some text and an outline truetype font as input and then spat out the GCode to drive my 3D printer with a pen strapped to the print head to "hand" draw text. I screwed something up somewhere, though and always had to hand edit some stuff before it was usable - not interesting for anyone without my own very DIY setup.

¹ https://github.com/dcminter/rs-define

² https://github.com/dcminter/zoomies

³ https://github.com/dcminter/lave-station

⁴ https://github.com/dcminter/vm-manager

Blocked for me in Sweden though, seems unlikely they'd have one nordic but not another.

Projection by the look of it.

Yes, I said I tried this when I was a kid.

My point is that while you can see the full subject you get it from the exact same point of view as that part of the hologram before it was chopped up.

If you couldn't see part of the subject from part of the intact plate you won't be able to after either.

The phrasing you used, "two copies of the hologram" is very misleading in the same way that my Usborne book was.

Chopping a hologram in half gives you two copies of the hologram in exactly the same sense that chopping a photo in half gives you two copies of the photo.

In both cases what you can see from that part of the plate/print is the same before and after you chop it up.

It's not even compliance. You're required to make consent and decline require equal effort. A large percentage of them make it much easier to consent.

Not to mention the large number of "legitimate interest" exceptions that are absolutely not justifiable.

The main problem with the legislation is its lack of teeth and enforcement.

There was one in London in Covent Garden market around the same era (perhaps a small chain, or perhaps just a similar name).

One image that I remember being particularly impressed by was a model of a radio telescope dish. You could look around the dish and see all the support gantry. The contrast between the smooth dish face and the structure on the other side made the 3D nature very dramatic.

On the counter they had a nice mirror illusion¹ of a floating "help" button - not a plate hologram but a really nice effect and you can still get these. They tend to be cheap plastic and dust and scratches affect them over time, but it's still a really nice effect if you've not seen it before.

¹ https://sandradodd.com/airpig.html

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> it would make more sense to me to be a/a

Yep, but I think it's intended to be a visual mnemonic. å looks like a tiny 'o' over the top of an 'a' even though that's not the letter combination it originated with.

> it's maddening finding the {[]}-_+=@ chars...

The series of RSI inducing vulcan neck pinches required to write C-like languages on a Nordic Mac layout drives me a bit mad, but I do have it in my body memory now when needs must!

I toy with the idea of designing my own 40%-ish keyboard just so I only have myself to blame for bad layout :)

It's definitely a matter of what you're familiar with. As a Linux user I'm able to use the "Compose Character" key (I map the right-hand Ctrl key to it) and then use that to write diacritics just as I used to in my university computer lab in the '90s on DEC VT220 terminals!

It's quite a good system: you press compose-character and then two letters to be combined. E.g. CC/o/" gives ö and CC/a/o gives å and so on. If you don't know the exact combination, you can usually guess within one or two attempts e.g. just now trying to get ç I guessed CC/c/s (š) and then CC/c/c (č) before getting it right with CC/c/,

Apropos of Swedish keyboards, though, when a Mac is inflicted on me, the horrible contortions necessary to get all the usual programming bracket symbols ({[]}) are infuriating. They're a lot less annoying on a Swedish PC keyboard.

The other poster seems to have got on the wrong end of the stick about something, but I don't think it's that.

> DEC exhibition closed 10 months or so ago

Damnit.

Mostly sneering, if I'm honest. I love learning new stuff, but I'm not optimistic you can help there.