rout39574

OK, it was falling with style. :)

I don't think you watched the whole show. The third stunt was taking off from a stop to jump over some vehicles. So it did gain altitude in the air alone.

And the same question was answered in the opposite sense in section 4, in which adding a colored background was deemed not to affect the data/ink ratio.

... Mumble mumble metric vs. target. Data/ink is a useful thing to keep in mind, but it's just one factor in selecting designs that communicate your data.

On the planet we have tremendous radiation shielding. The van allen belt and the atmosphere, to start with.

Hostility might be a feature for someone who is (or views themselves as) in an "in" clique. But it's poison for the long term health of the game, because it discourages most participation. The only ones attracted are those who view vitriol as a pleasant environment.

It should be possible to respond "I don't know". When you really-really don't know, it's unfair to get a 1/4 chance at right anyway, or even better if you use routine multiple-choice tactics.

I got credit for a few that I would have happily just missed.

The know your meme page on it is extensive. My distillation is:

Mogging is behaving as though you expect everyone is going to think you're great because of how you look; in particular that you think you look better than someone right next to you.

Candles are pleasant light, in a way difficult to acquire with other lighting types. That means there's a niche in which that facet is more valuable than the other technologies.

I had candles at my dinner table last Thursday, and am likely to do so date night tonight... but the bulbs I turn off to give the candles reign are LED...

You, sir, are evil. I mean that in the most complementary of manners.

Got any links to that conversation? Sounds fun.

That's what struck me, seems kind of apropos.

Try 'Beyond All Reason', a passionate FOSS recreation of the core of Total Annihilation.

It's got really decent naval combat, with a distinct feel compared to the land and air.

Inevitable:

https://xkcd.com/927/

I think it's a cultural acceptance of lower quality, happily traded for deft execution, over and over.

We're better at encapsulating lower-level complexities in e.g. bridge building than we are at software.

All the complexities of, say, martensite grain boundaries and what-not are implicit in how we use steel to reinforce concrete. But we've got enough of it in a given project that the statistical summaries are adequate. It's a member with thus strength in tension, and thus in compression, and we put a 200% safety factor in and soldier on.

And nobody can take over the ownership of leftpad and suddenly falsify all our assumptions about how steel is supposed to act when we next deploy ibeam.js ...

The most well understood and dependable components of our electronic infrastructure are the ones we cordially loathe because they're composed in shudder COBOL, or CICS transactions, or whatever.

I understand your point; but against it I lay the truism that every time a retail investor trades, value is destroyed. ;)

My own personal financial history has been more damaged by actions taken, than by forbearance and waiting. "Time in the market beats timing the market", style. So I wait for the moment when I've got Something Better To Do with the money, and then I act. And try not to second-guess later.

Ahh, we can all buy the farm together. ;)

I've been watching my investment accounts, particularly the TSLA fraction, and see-sawing between "This has got to collapse soon, I should..." and "You cannot time the market, idiot".

I'm dissatisfied with the inaction, but I can't come up with a coherent theory about how I should act... Bleah.

One of the important roles of the Palantir was that they were scrying devices. Sauron gained some influence over them warped the impressions of those who used them, by affecting what they could and couldn't see. It was part of the subtle misinformation he used to twist people into alliance with him.

Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?

If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.

Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.

He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.

And Allan Mallinson's series about Matthew Hervey adds another branch of the military. Post-napoleonic, but a fascinating trip through colonialism.

Why do you think this excessively verbose bit of LLM vomit contributes to the conversation?

It's been a LONG time since my latin. But doesn't the active vs. passive capture the distinction we're talking about in English quite well?

A reflexive action is taken passively, without thought.

A reflective action is taken actively, with careful thought.

FIGHT ON! ;)

I expect that a dozen humans coming to Calibre for the first time would articulate at least a half-dozen mutually conflicting perspectives on what would be "intuituve". I further expect that each of them would be mostly articulating "what I'm used to". If you unpack "Intuitive" it's mostly a tribal ingroup statement.

The FOSS author has a choice: they can attempt to chase whatever UX rabbits are scared up by The Market, or they can try to make it straightforward to learn their tool, despite its differences from the momentary fashion. I think the Calibre dev's done an excellent job there.

Performance art?

Not GP, but I think the objection is: the engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.

The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.

We're replete with case studies, but my favorite is Kitchen-Aid mixers which accumulated a reputation when they were the small version of Hobart mixers, and have in succeeding decades become a cheap pile of crap because the optimization does not care about quality of function so long as the appearance of quality can be maintained. And it's cheaper to look quality than it is to be so.

A close second is Singer in the '70s, which for a while decided to ship items with 100-hour motors because "Folks don't usually spend much time _actually_ sewing". Contrast with the machines built a centuryish before. We've got an early electric model which is still doing fantastic precise work. The engineer would enthuse over the superb work that went into building such a tool, and the MBA would focus on the foregone sales, the value not extracted.

Presuming good faith here, faking recordings has been harder to do, easier to detect, and less equivocal in the past than it is now.

If it takes an FX house to generate a plausible recording of me saying something I didn't say, that's a risky enterprise with a lot of witnesses.

If my enemy can do it in their basement with an hour of research, the exposure risk goes way down, and consequently the expectation you'll see it in real life goes way up.

Oh come on; "Jack the sound barrier; bring the noise."... That still rocks, or slaps, or whatever.

And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."

I think the intended parable is that an unstructured group of activists took down a much larger, much better resourced, hierarchy.

Why is "Just" superior to any other e.g. bash script with a bunch of subcommands?