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Causality1on The melancholy decline of the semicolon

I wonder how much it contributed to the recent rise of present-tense fiction, which I find unpleasant to read.

Causality1on The melancholy decline of the semicolon

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

Causality1on Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

The Leatherman MUT. I've carried it clipped to my pocket every day for ten years now and it's still going strong. Carrying six two-ended driver bits, replaceable blades, and a hammer end has covered such an enormous percentage of my use cases it's unreal. Having a steel poking stick on you at all times is surprisingly useful.

Causality1on Go Where No Drone Has Gone Before

Having done some drone flying in tight quarters, I'd say the number one issue is situational awareness. That this is resistant to bumps is great, but you can achieve that with prop guards on a normal drone. What you need is a dedicated camera pointing straight up and one straight down, live at all times, in addition to your normal gimbal.

Causality1on 90% of Black Friday deals were the same price or cheaper six months before

It speaks to the truth of the original post that I set up a ton of price alerts six months ago and exactly zero of them have gone off.

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

The cover was left on. You don't believe there's a moment between the plane being turned off and still and the plane moving too fast to stop where the computer should've said "what the fuck?" like, say, half a second after turning the engine on?

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35.

Shame that in exercises the F-35 loses visual-range fights with the F-16 even when the F-16 is carrying external fuel tanks.

The issue is that it's almost universally worse than all the specialty aircraft it replaces at that specialty job. It's worse at fighting insurgents than the A-10. It's worse at dogfighting than the F-16. It's worse at air superiority than the F-18.

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/us-admits-f-35-failed-to-r...

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

I do, if it's still on the ground when it happens.

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them. Every time the F-35 turns in a miserable performance report its mission profile is changed to make it look like less of an embarrassment.

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

I think the absolute incompetence the Navy has exhibited in failures to move their ships around the Pacific without running into things is a better example.

Causality1on British F-35B crash possibly caused by 'rain cover' left on during launch

The implications, if that is the cause, are shocking. Forget about the deck crew and the pilot being blind morons. It means the flight computer for a plane that took twenty years and a trillion dollars to develop can't detect that there's a fucking cover blocking the engine.

How does a twenty thousand dollar sedan have a more robust readiness-detection system than a hundred million dollar airplane?

Causality1on Australian Rhino Project

Just a reminder the vast majority of collective nouns are essentially fake. Actual scientists have never heard most of them, let alone use them.

Causality1on Tilt-5 Was Magical

As someone whose VR headset has been collecting dust for a year, I think the key is movement. Moving in VR just sucks. Either you teleport around which is disorienting or you slide with a stick which is nauseating. All my favorite VR experiences didn't require me to move further than my play area. If someone comes up with a cheap omnidirectional treadmill or something just as good it'll blow the market wide open. Until then, almost everything is more fun on a normal screen than in VR.

Causality1on Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

They're not paid to care.

Causality1on Science upside for Starship

It's hard to blame the public for feeling that way when space projects run two decades behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget.

Causality1on 3MF file format and why it’s great (2019)

The grammarian in me has to cringe at chopping an initialism in half. It should really be 3DMF.

Causality1on Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

I like foobar2000 for its UI but it could be faster at rapidly skipping songs.

Causality1on Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

As far as I'm aware none of my music is particularly rare. I'm mostly referring to video content creators have decided no longer suits their public persona and have deleted, or was taken down by legal threats or ToS violations. Also some web pages and web comics that have gone offline without making it onto the Internet Archive. Now that I think about it much of my porn archive would also be difficult to locate copies of, though that isn't nearly as organized.

Basically if I like something I keep it forever.

Causality1on Slitaz, A 50MB Lightweight Desktop Operating System

I remember having a CD of this a long time ago. I wanted to use it on my old ThinkPads but I could never get it to boot.

Causality1on On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

Exactly my point. If all you want to do is replicate the TR-1 with four transistors, that's easy, just like making a human mind by creating a baby is easy. But making AGI with silicon, while demanding functionality completely alien to a human brain, is like making a TR-1 that can save your playlists and pause/resume the audio while still only using four transistors.

Causality1on On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

I'm curious how we're even going to manage 420,000 pixels' worth (60,000 ommatidia, approximately 7 pixels each) of input with only a few hundred transistors, let alone do vector analysis on it.

But let's say we can. Let's say we need 320 transistors, which would be 20 transistors per pixel. That's pretending 99.7% of the seven thousand synapses each neuron has are useless for our purpose, but we'll do it. A chimp brain runs all the autonomous physical processes of a humanoid body while only having 22 billion neurons. We'll also pretend, wrongly, that chimps have no mind or emotions at all and that we only need the extra human neurons to make a sapient mind.

Humans have 86 billion neurons. Subtracting 22 gives us 64 billion, times 20 transistors per neuron gives us 1.28 trillion transistors.

1.28 trillion transistors, even with a bunch of handwaving to make it easier, and even pretending we exactly understood how sapience worked in the first place.

Causality1on Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital (2009)

Digital vehicle temperature control is just infuriating. There are only two settings: blast the driver with freezing air until the rest of the car cools down, or roast the driver alive until the rest of the car warms up.

Causality1on Gay men earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at the highest rate in the US

I fail to see how pointing out a way in which men react to women makes it in any way the fault of women.

Replicating dTal's citations:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232368611_Interacti...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394231/

Causality1on On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now multiply that number by how many neurons you think it takes the human brain to generate sapience.

It doesn't really matter what your guesses are, none of the results are good news.

Causality1on Gay men earn undergraduate and graduate degrees at the highest rate in the US

There've been several studies indicating just perceiving women has a negative effect on heterosexual male academic performance. Until now I assumed men had the same effect on homosexual males. Perhaps that isn't the case?

Causality1on Microsoft Edge’s new ‘Buy now, pay later’ feature is the definition of bloatware

I agree with everything the author said, except for If you don’t want a browser that encourages unnecessary purchases, I recommend Firefox which made me nearly piss myself laughing. Mozilla can't go a month without shilling some new garbage on the Update or New Tab screen.

Causality1on Google Play permitting alternative billing systems for users in South Korea

I can back that up. Oneplus is infuriating in that they include a way for you to whitelist apps and then kill them anyway. I essentially have to plug my phone in if I want to run, say, a torrent client for more than two minutes.

Causality1on The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy

If I had a rubber stamp of [citation needed] I would wear it down to the nub on this article.

Causality1on Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations

I mean it was obvious, but scientific study confirming things "everybody knows" is science in the purest and truest sense.

Causality1on Impossible food sues to cancel earlier trademark owners

A victim complex is a common response when privileged people realize others find them insufferable.