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Artlav

929 karma · joined May 13, 2016

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Artlav··on Worst Case
Solar storms don't work like that. It's not the movie-like electronics blow up left and right thing. It's quasi-DC currents in the ground thing.

What that means is that the power grid is designed for AC currents, and now there will be DC currents flowing through it, induced by the flexing of the Earth's magnetic field under the storm. That is very likely to saturate the cores in large scale transformers, causing them to blow up.

No more power grid. And these are not things you have spares for or can ship from China. You need to make new ones, in a country with spotty power and complete supply chain breakdown.

So your electronics would be fine, just out of power. Faraday cages are for the nuclear bomb type EMP events.

Artlav··on Luxury Linux Smartphones
That's where external thermal interface comes in. If docking your phone involves attaching external cooler, then power is no longer an issue.
Artlav··on Luxury Linux Smartphones
I'm kinda surprised they go for privacy aspects and customizability.

Android is Linux enough for most use cases, and the big problem is just having root access to it and an ability to customize.

A pure linux phone would just be a pointless annoyance, at least until someone makes a phone with external thermal interface.

Artlav··on The endless browser wars
I find this seriously confusing too. None of these sound like major, or even all that useful, features, and yet they talk about "considering whether there is any value in a crippled version of Chromium".

What makes it crippled?

Artlav··on Tesla’s charging stations left other manufacturers in the dust
> In apartments/flats you are usually parking in a dedicated parking lot

More like all over the nearby streets, but i get the idea.

Artlav··on Tesla’s charging stations left other manufacturers in the dust
So... that's just "gas station on every corner" model taken to it's extreme, no?
Artlav··on Tesla’s charging stations left other manufacturers in the dust
Which will be the job for the same people that put up buildings on block corners, rather than something you do yourself.
Artlav··on Tesla’s charging stations left other manufacturers in the dust
Makes it double sad that Chevy Volt got discontinued and no similar designs were made.
Artlav··on Tesla’s charging stations left other manufacturers in the dust
Hm, the US tend to have "home" defined as a stand along house with a garage/land plot, which makes it possible to have a charger at home.

In most of the world city people live in flats/apartments, where you can't really do that.

So i don't see how you can avoid "gas station on every corner" model.

Artlav··on LZ4 – Extremely fast compression
Predictability, no? Sometimes you want to know how large your data really is if it was to get onto an uncompressed filesystem.
Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
Sure. And it makes a clang as it falls.

Can't quite play tetris, however - i start to lose track of the pieces once there are like 5-10 of them.

Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
It's been a while since i've been around that community, and recently i wondered what developed between 2013-ish and now.

More specifically, has the recent rise and push for recognition of plurality originated from tulpa communities? [1], for example. A lot of the terminology is different from what i remember, so i wondered if it's an evolution or a parallel development.

[1] https://morethanone.info/

Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
And responsibility. For some people that feels like an anchor tied to their neck.
Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
Hm, not at the speed of reading. Takes a bit of slowing down to get some.

A complication is that a lot of these are from elementary school geometry books, so i tend to just remember the answer before getting a chance to look at it.

Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
> But I do wonder how much of it is about different uses of words by different people.

There are qualitative differences, however. I think a better question would be not how vivid the imagined shape is, but how connected and contextual it is.

Someone might imagine a 6 red star and stop at that, someone might imagine a 3 star, but with the whole Kremlin tower attached on a snowy night with distant car sounds.

Testable things i found are looking for reactions. Imagine yourself at the beach, standing half immersed in the sea, enjoying the view, then something grabs your leg underwater.

-Did you flinch, or was these just words? Some people would, since they are contextually immersed in the scene.

-Can you answer side questions, like how calm the sea was, were you looking towards the land or the horizon, were there any birds in the sky, and so on? Some people can, because they were visualizing the scene, some people won't unless prompted, since they were constructing the scene.

In the similar vein, do you project your imagination over the world around you? People who do tend to not comprehend how you can lose things, like forgetting where you parked your car.

Artlav··on Can you treat loneliness by creating an imaginary friend?
It can also have an opposite effect.

For me, trying to make a tulpa 10 years ago ended up amplifying my loneliness, as well as placing it front-and-center, impossible to ignore.

In retrospect that was a good thing, since it prompted me into dealing with a lot of issues as well as discovering some i wasn't explicitly aware of. Trying to create an imaginary person you unconsciously wish you were born as could really sharpen and highlight everything that is different.

But it might as well have ended worse.

Artlav··on A review of endianness bugs in Qt, and how they were fixed
And that's another reason - gone are the days when code was written in machine language by people looking at bytes, and with it gone the only reason to keep these bytes in human-readable form.

It's the same kind of thing as computers and calculators switching from decimal hardware to binary hardware 100 years ago.

Artlav··on Ask HN: Do you use an Ad/Content blockers?
Unfiltered internet is too annoying to use. Got a Pi-hole equivalent for whole network filtering, and uBlock Origin for the browser.
Artlav··on On Coding, Ego and Attention
Seems wrong to me too, but for a different reason - i would expect a better school to not only attract smarter students, but to also be harder. So it should balance out to the same curve.
Artlav··on Apple Threatens to Remove App 'Hey' from App Store over No In-App Subscriptions
> video game consoles

Huh? I used to make DIY games as late as early 00s, for GBA, Sega Dreamcast and PS1.

Is that no longer possible with modern consoles?

Artlav··on 3K, 60fps, 130ms: achieving it with Rust
> Many people reading this are too young to remember analog local phone calls, and how the lag from cell phones changed conversations

Is there somewhere to read about the changes in question?

I'm old enough to remember extensive use of analog landlines, and can't really think of any difference to a cellphone other than audio quality.

Artlav··on Apple Threatens to Remove App 'Hey' from App Store over No In-App Subscriptions
Even more baffling is that i can't just install a program i wrote myself on a device i own without having to get it signed and have that signature renewed once a week.

Like, what's the point of having a non-programmable computer?

Artlav··on Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
I'm really confused by this. Don't debuggers come embedded into any IDE worth using?

How could someone start programming this century without access to one?

Artlav··on Can virtual reality help get you through lockdown?
A side question - does Oculus Quest need accounts and internet to use?

I still can't get over Oculus Rift needing an account and an internet connection just to install drivers.

Artlav··on Ask HN: Can you recommend me a lightweight journaling tool
A text file?

I tend to just write stuff grouped by category into a text file, with timestamp tags (today is 180717). Nothing i tried was more comfortable and portable than that.

Standard search function of text editors take care of tags and searching. Picking a text editor is great customization.

Artlav··on Ask HN: How do you focus at work?
As someone who grew up next to a highway in a place with constantly-on TVs, i don't notice most kinds of noise, so i can't offer any advice on that front.

What was a distraction in my case was internet browsing. This got solved by having a dedicated tablet for all sorts of non-essential browsing, and the work computers never having anything but work-related links.

You'd think that's not going to matter, but the little bit of friction that created was enough.

Artlav··on What are the most important concepts in programming?
Layers of patterns.

The whole point of programming is to take something complex and break it down into simple arithmetics and logic that a computer can digest.

So you build simple, isolated expressions that do one slightly more complex thing using slightly less complex things, then use these expressions to build slightly more complex things, and so on recursively, all the way up to having a "do the thing" button in an app.

Having these isolated, modular, layers of testable implementations is what makes code that can survive the test of time.

Artlav··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
They are all probably too rich to understand the concept of paying for mobile data.
Artlav··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
I bet it won't block all the damn "download our shitty app instead of using the fully functional website we have" full screen popups...
Artlav··on Uber is officially a cab firm, says European court
I just can't imagine that random people who play what is essentially a glorified computer game would be reliable enough to show up at 4AM and get me to the airport safely.

Or provide a reliable service in any other emergency or inconvenient situation - you don't use a taxi to go to the grocery store or to commute to work, you use it in emergencies.

I can see how an app to call a taxi and track rides is a good thing, but i can't see how having random people provide the actual rides is a good idea.

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