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rhema

Re:Sun Clock on Monday August 17, 2026 @01:53PM (#49334972)
https://editor.p5js.org/rhemalinder/full/im3tyPBDW - I made this one for myself and it's pretty similar.

I have this hard-coded to south dakota, but it looks like this and I made it a while ago. Same idea, except I turn it such that "solar noon" is at the top.

Think 12 noon is really "high noon" or solar noon? Nope, not unless you are in the center of a timezone!

I love my little dual core X99 board with Xeon E5 2673 V3. It's not power efficient, but I just leave it in my basement for local Jupyter Notebook stuff. Much faster than everything cloud-based for a reasonably price at my scale.
Re:Scorched Earth 2000 – Web on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @10:26PM (#48130413)
9 year old me got my first "hacking" experience out of this game. With the shareware version, you could not select the ultra tank that could shoot 3 bullets for a human, but you COULD if it were the computer player.

The "hack": -start a game with a normal tank VS ultra computer player as p2. -save the game (as a file). -open the game file. -read the ASCII text and just flip which player has which text.

Now, I had my ultra tank.

Re:When ChatGPT turns informant on Monday October 06, 2025 @02:19PM (#45494436)
> I tried the same questions with my own account. I was surprised at how much it was able to synthesize that wasn't completely off-base.

This makes it worse, no? I can't imagine this is not happening right now by lovers, close friends, and agencies.

Just look at past attempts such as xkeyscore. It was keyword based and included words like UNIX to target people. They don't mind being wrong!

Re:Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:29AM (#43268766)
I used their RL book for a course I taught. It's beautifully written and freely available (http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html)! I kept getting distracted by the beautiful writing that I would miss the actual content.
Re:President Elon Musk on Tuesday February 04, 2025 @12:51AM (#42928548)
Sorry, folks. This is what you get when the institutions fail to help the people they ostensibly were designed to help. There are more than 400 government agencies. No one even knows which one is responsible for what. There are artificial fiefdoms that exist because they self-perpetuate, are effective at shifting blame, and curry a perception of importance.

IMHO, Elon is an agent of chemotherapy for an obviously overgrown bureaucratic cancer. He will take it too far. It's a dirty and thankless job. However, it might be the only way to "refactor" the state without a civil war or revolution. It reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I , who rewrote laws (cut 90% of the volume) to consolidate their meaning.

I'm not cheering for it, but institutions have lost.

Re:To get more growth we need more kids on Saturday November 25, 2023 @04:48PM (#38417023)
I don't think everyone should have bunch of kids. However, if you are in a good relationship and both like having kids, think about having 5 instead of 2. My personal experience of having 5+ kids is that the difficulty mostly scales logarithmically, meaning kid 1 is a lot of work, kid 2 is a lot more work, but kid 3 more (but less more) work.

The social dynamics can really work well. Kids can be less work when they can entertain each other. Add some homeschooling, work from home, and creative projects and it makes life really fulfilling.

YMMMV, but it's a valid and reasonable way to live for some.

Found the Pentagon employee.
I always thought the GW was short for George W. Bush. Not a popular figure when XP came out.
Re:The Lofi Magic of VHS Audio on Friday May 05, 2023 @12:38PM (#35831745)
FYI, I posted this mainly for its description and illustration of the VHS format. The author of the video has very high quality explanations of technical and cultural details of instruments.
Re:Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks on Thursday April 20, 2023 @06:25PM (#35647369)
There's a truck exactly like that a block away from where I live in my rural town.
Seems pretty low for one of the most powerful people in the world.
True? How could it be anything but true. Twitter is a complex system that started when text messages were by and large SMS via a 10 number key pad on brick phones.

While Elon has rough edges, imagine his situation. It's a hostile take over where it's not just the board, but the workers themselves who have bad blood with Elon specifically. How do you manage a company when 90% of its employees are expecting and almost encouraging it to burn to the ground?

It's tricky. Imagine your coworkers were tying to sabotage you and you needed to be able to give them tasks on a large complex project. Even when goals are aligned, small differences in implementation directions can fracture teams. So, I understand where he's coming from.

Re:Saudi woman jailed for 45 years for social media posts on Saturday October 29, 2022 @12:46PM (#33385715)
She may be getting off relatively easy. If she happened to be in an embassy, it might have cost her an arm and a leg, and another arm and another leg...
Re:Apple’s new App Store tax on ads is a direct shot at Meta on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @08:10AM (#33342476)
They do have the Oculus store. It's not a competitor yet, but may be in 10 years.
Re:What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book? on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @02:01PM (#32334976)
Once in a while, I see a cluster of books in a Goodwill or Salvation Army that are very niche. Like, 20 books on flyfishing among 200 books. I bet the most interesting people to meet have odd collections of books.
Re:A CIA hacker’s revenge on Monday June 06, 2022 @11:22AM (#31641640)
> This is not dragnet mass surveillance of the kind more often associated with the National Security Agency. These are hacks, or “exploits,” designed for individual targets.

Mhmm. Pray tell what oversight should make me believe this is true?

> Snowden and Manning were not seeking to blow the whistle on any one particular policy, in the manner that Ellsberg was; theirs was a more generalized disaffection, and the troves of data that they exposed were indiscriminate

Both good whistleblowers who I do not care what ideological principles inspired them.

> Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower.

I guess you have to be a good person to be a whistleblower in the CIA. Maybe that's why they don't hire good people.

Re:Please stop disabling zoom on Thursday May 05, 2022 @11:20AM (#31274490)
My mother-in-law has severe eye problems and MS type symptoms. 16 years ago, I showed her how ctrl shift +/- could make her fonts huge. This one tip that is not obvious to most folks improved and continue to improve her quality of life _drastically_.
Why did people lose faith in the institutions? Because the institutions deserve it.

Academic findings only have so much scope. It's nuanced and the news reporters, kindergarten teachers, and scientists themselves often overclaim the impact of the findings. All of the short term incentives reward overclaiming over nuance and no one should be surprised that the zeitgeist is where it is.

Re:Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests on Thursday March 17, 2022 @05:35PM (#30716149)
Your interpretation is entirely plausible. At the same time, I found the interview to be very convincing in terms of Fravor's credibility. He mentions details about who was with him, bar scenes, and generally comes across as a professional. Historical sightings (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter ) and angelic phenomena ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over... ) are much older and at least predate the current US military objectives.

It's also totally possible that this is some kind of funding grab. That Rubio et al. are simply pawns being teased and pushed around in the name of national security to fund large and barely monitored government research and military funding. It could be some of both.

Re:Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @06:51PM (#30705164)
Not that I know of, so I take your point there. Here's a related video with some radar data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh4QngYJG4I . In the interview, Frevor does talk about the radar and instrumentation on the plane, but it's been a while since I listened to it.
Re:Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @03:45PM (#30703119)
Well, the only reason they were scrambled to begin with is that they had been tracking these objects for weeks using advanced radar. As I understand it, the radar is based on multiple resolutions. The active radar can point in the direction of objects of interest and get very very precise measurements. It's not just the video, its the radar data.

The thing that pushed me over the edge in believing these things is the long podcast interview between Commander David Fravor and Lex Fridman.

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