beeforpork

The exact way of getting stung by a scorpion while peeing would be most interesting -- I honestly cannot imagine the exact mechanics. A bee, a wasp, OK, I can imagine. A scorpion cannot fly, so how did it get so close?

> The transistors available in modern digital CMOS processes are worse and worse for analog functions, the more recent that process is.

Does that mean that we have a future ahead of us when a 6581 can be produced again with an authentical 'bad' sound? :-)

Your post was a good, especially as a starting point of a discussion, until you started your last two sentences ('But those ...'). Those sentences are completely counter-productive, universal, generalising accusations towards people who might actually want to discuss seriously about this topic, because they honestly share the same goal of preventing a catastrophy. It is sad that discussions are often made impossible by such unnecesary prejudice about people who you may actually want to discuss with.

Fascinating! When I read the WR for Tetris was 327 lines, I realised that I was in that league, too, at the time. I never knew I was that good! I never thought about competition or even world records at that time! I remember it became boring after a few hundred lines, and I am sure I never made 800, let alone the 4988 someone else posted.

Weird...

> ... russian ... questionable quality

Caviar is the best in the world! :-)

Paranormal? Unexplained phenomena? You mean like: 'WTF?' That's exactly what I see for like every second bug in our software. Every day!

EDIT: Our software ist not that buggy!!

TL;DR: Plan ahead what to eat. Most importantly: establish a routine that you have a chance of following for months without thinking about it.

Find something to reduce energy intake that you can consistently and persistently follow. Eating a bit too much for a long time is easy, but eating too little is very difficult, because you will be hungry, so managing this is key. Establish a routing where you don't need to think too much about eating and you do not feel too hungry so easily. Plan ahead what to eat, don't delay the decision until it's time and you open the fridge. This way, you think less about this question. You need something you can do for months or even years, ideally without stress.

How to best manage this is individual, so experiment and observe yourself. Maybe there are times a day when you do not feel hungry that much: then don't eat at those times. Maybe volume of food makes you feel less hungry even if calory intake is low: then eat a lot of low calory food. Maybe you cannot do this every day, so structure your week, have some low and some normal calory days. Still control the normal days to avoid eating way too much -- it should be normal and fun to help you keep the routine.

Eat delicious and healthy and natural and fresh food -- no half-, or quarter, or reduced, or 0% sugar/fat stuff, or artificial sweetener, or whatever other crap -- this takes out all the fun of eating. And without the prospect of fun, you probably won't manage your routine for months. You should always be looking forward to your delicious food that you planned for the day.

Maybe sugar is not essential to you, so cut that down. But maybe you need chocolate, so just put it on your plan to keep it fun. Same for oil or fat. Food without fat may taste like sh*t to you. Plan with that, put some amount of delicious oil or natural fat in the delicious food you will eat. It only works if you plan ahead: only if it is on your plan you have control of the amount. You cannot evaluate this when the fridge is already open.

And excercise. Strictly speaking, a different thing, but also important.

Very interesting! I will start my future presentations with 'The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint...' :-)

But this '...has grown exponentially...' is just such BS. sigh I just cannot get used to this expression entering lay language.

On the bright side, we're lucky they did not use a 64-bit int.

Can I browse the stream of all update notifications? Can I establish filters to the full stream of changes? It was absolutely fantastic and addictive to do that in Freshmeat -- with so many projects to find and explore. And despite the volume, it could be filtered down to what could (barely) be consumed.

Yes, exactly, binary search is full of traps. And you may have missed one:

  (left + right) // 2

is better written 'left + ((right - left) // 2)'. At least on some languages, I don't know which type Python will use there.

'Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken':

https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...

(1) Doesn't that severely weaken the frame? It looks flimsy, and even if the lock part is attached back, it does not look like as strong as a welded joint.

(2) The levers introduced by the long straight tubes seem to open up a physical way in. Imagine twisting the bike off the post.

(3) Once LPL shows how to open that lock, one might want to swap it for a better one. Is that possible?

> No, you were saying it's inherently dubious without either statistical or physical evidence.

Yes, exactly, because at least counting the crabs and comparing the count with other clusters of crabs would show whether there 'is something'. Missing accuracy is not my problem, it's missing 'there is something' vs. 'there is nothing'. Without any statistical data, there is nothing to talk about, not in biology either, which is also science.

Skepticism is very important. I challenge them to count crabs on cables and compare with crab counts not on cables, and then make a case. That's all.

But I am not saying that the phenomenon does not exist. I am saying that I am lacking evidence in the article. Evidence could be statistical (if we don't know how yet) or physical (if we do know how, like, a sense was identified). But for me, pointing to a bunch of crabs on a cable and making assumptions is not enough.

Volt is not a unit of an electric field. Talking about '50 volts' is complete nonsense in a context of an electric field. Also, a magnetic field around a wire will establish if there is a moving charge inside the wire, which can be established with any voltage -- as long as there is current, which is measured in ampere. Electric charge is measured in coulomb and magnetic fields are given in tesla -- so there cannot be a connection if they talk about 'volt'.

I am not saying there isn't any link but I am saying that 'volt' is surely the wrong connection, so this should be taken with utmost caution.

This is highly, highly dubious without a physical explanation. Or with representative statistical data. Magnetic and electric fields do not interact much with biological matter, so something 'special' needs to be shown here before there is a point.

This should be treated with utmost caution without statistical and physical proof.

It is true: it's a deep pit you'll enter. But the conclusion is wrong. If you feel it's fun -- then do write your own programming language. Even if you won't finish (which is likely). But you'll think about things that are a lot of fun, and you will have more clarity about what you do not like about existing languages, and why. And you'll learn that there are things you need to solve that you did not think about before. That some things cannot be combined, and that you will have to choose.

It is a very good experience, there is a lot to learn. As long as your goal is not to get it done quickly...

> Support for calling realloc() with zero size (the behavior becomes undefined)

OMG! Please do not add more undefined behaviour!

We really need less UB, not more! What was wrong with 'implementation defined' as in C17? UB means that code that exists will now break if a new compiler decides that it can be smart. And we know how inventive this can get, right? Like removal of 'if(new_size==0) {...}' if the compiler can prove that 'new_size' went into 'realloc' before.

> From my perspective and direct experience,

But not from a scientific perspective. ... But go on, go on...

> it’s widespread porn use, which has extremely detrimental effects on your dopamine system, which leads to something you might term ‘lack of charisma, confidence and vital energy’, which leads to less people having sex due to confidence/charisma issues and lack of any drive.

Your perspective is wrong and your individual direct experience means nothing and cannot be generalised to others. If you (and your pear group) decide porn is bad for you and you don't watch it anymore, that's your perfectly fine decision -- no one forces porn on you! But do not generalise, please.

Say: 'I was an addict and porn was bad for me.' Do not say: 'porn is highly addictive and bad.'

Porn is quite unlike alcohol. More like chocolate, maybe, but don't cite me on that.

> No door is ever closed. You can do anything! I am a thirteen-year-old kid, and I can do this—if I can do it, anyone can!

If only a goal of education was to get kids to feel like this! Of course, not everyone is equally bright, but without the above attitude, they will not even try, not even try to be interested, because they think they are too dumb, which is a tragedy.

OK, I correct you: you overeact.

And, yes, of course, email addresses in local languages, why the heck not? People in the world want to use their language! And yeah, even Hebrew, Tibetan, or Mongolian (in vertical script).

That comment of yours reads to me like an lazy post of a unilingual or uniscriptal cultural imperialist who really does not care about other languages.

Your attitude makes me rather angry, because Unicode is such an amazing achievement for the world, and your comment just comes off totally ignorant of that. It should be clear that combining the world's languages into a common standard is really, really difficult and will inevitably create something that is much more complex than your beloved ASCII. And it should also be clear that in such a complex standard, you cannot (a) solve all problems the first time you try, (b) you cannot try a second time, because no-one will adopt yet another such standard.

So just read those Unicode documents in order to understand. Those people really try and there are security consideration documents, and they are extended all the time. And take those new security warnings for what they are: they are problems with a complex system. It's expected. So when they get known, react calmly and figure out whether you need to fix anything.

Well, 3D is not really 'wrong', there are still 3 space coordinates. And 1 time coordinate, which behaves a little weirdly when moving. But surely, we we can talk about what the 3D space part might look like.

> Is there evidence for the finite balloon option?

Well, we cannot know into what the universe might be embedded, so this is a visualisation of a 3D space that has no center, no edge, and is finite. Just like the surface of a sphere, a 2D manifold embedded into a 3D manifold. But that sphere shape is really meaningless, because it is an unobservable structural properly from the embedded manifold itself, i.e., that shape property is outside of our universe. For simplicity, we just imagine a hyperballoon surface.

For the finite 3D manifold part: I think that people are searching for pattern repetitions in the night sky in different directions to maybe see something. :-)

For me, it is the most satisfying option of bringing together 'finite' and 'everything moves away from us' (=expanding universe) and getting rid of 'are we in the center?' and 'how is it like close to the edge?' kind of questions.

> Of course, if that's the case some matter is on the edge and some in the center.

Yeah, this one bugged me. It cannot really be the case, why would we be in the center? Our existence is weird enough, but right in the center? And what would it be like 'near the edge'? It just makes no sense. It means the visualisation cannot be good. And again, it seems weird to need a 3D space to contain the universe -- why not just 'open' the universe and take up all that space it expands into? No, the big bang created that space, so it does not expand into something of the same properties or dimensions. But we can observe properties:

'finite' is quite certain, because whichever direction we look, the farthest away we see the remnants of 400000y after the big bang when the photons started moving normally. We seem to see the whole thing, in principle.

'everything we see moves away from us' is also certain, because whichever way we look, far away galaxies are red-shifted, i.e., they all move away from us.

The two things fit perfectly the 'balloon surface in 3D' mental model: regardless where we are on that balloon surface, we'd observe the two above phenomena. There is no center, there is no edge, and expansion is easy to visualise (blowing up the balloon).

The question is natural, but I think there is a bit more that we already 'know' (well, we concluded with some confidence) to answer this question.

(a) Just because you might be able to move in one direction forever, does not mean the space you're in is infinite. You may imagine the universe as the skin, the surface of a balloon that is expanding: the surface is finite, but still you can move in one direction on the surface forever -- you will wrap around at some point (if you're fast enough to overcome the expansion speed). Now imagine this as a 3D surface of space on a higher dimension balloon for the universe. This is quite a plausible way of imagining this intuitively (as long as you don't ask questions about the balloon space), particularly because it also makes futile the question whether we are close to the edge or close to the center, which bugged me for a while -- we are somewhere on the surface of that imagined balloon, and there might not be a center or an edge, despite being finite.

(b) The universe is expanding. In fact, it has expanded already so much that it is far larger than its age, so to say: it's 13.7Gy old, but 45Gly (IIRC) across, most likely. The universe is so large, that light that starts at the farthest spots now will never reach the Earth, because the universe expands that light away from us, so even with the best sensors and a very long time to wait, we will never see from Earth light and thus images from what is far away now. We are quite lucky, though: the oldest light that reaches us now is from the beginning of the big bang (photons started their 'normal' way of travel ~400ky after the BB, and that's what we can actually see!), so theoretically, we do see now every part of the universe at some point in the past (well, unless something obscures our view, and obviously in non-optimal resolution). But this view will fade away, and new light from those farthest places will not reach us in the future anymore (a couple of Gy from now) -- it will be getting darker and darker for us. The farthest places are already completely out of reach, we can only see their past and we will never be able to go there -- a bit like the inside of a black hole is out of reach, but, well, with the boundary around us.

(c) When moving at the speed of light, you will never ever reach the spot again that you started at, even with a wrap-around in the balloon model, because the expansion is going on, and even speeding up, so the speed of light is just too slow to keep up with the expansion.

(d) Practically, it is of course completely impossible to reach speeds close to the speed of light, for various reasons, e.g., energy needed and harmless cosmic rays becoming gamma rays, etc.etc. Different story entirely. It is good that we have stories to imagine this without the practical restrictions.

So the whole question is kinda futile. But interesting. The universe is incomprehensibly huge.

'aerosolized pig brains'

Wow! Thanks for one of the most disgusting imaginations I had in a while! :-)

A negative leap second would be a fun experiment. E.g. in Germany, the atomic radio clock signal DCF77 does have a bit to announce a positive leap second, but it has no way of announcing a negative leap second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77

Now, cheap DCF77 clocks (e.g., alarm clocks) don't care about the leap second bit anyway, but they will just adjust a few minutes later during normal resync. And they will do so just fine with a negative leap second. But some clocks, most probably those hidden in industrial systems, controllers, etc., may need to stay exact, and I am sure it's fun to find out which systems really care and will then fail and in what ways. :-)

Interestingly, the Japanese and the British atomic radio clock signals can do negative leap seconds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_from_NPL_(MSF)

For WWVB, whether negative leap seconds are supported seems to depend on whether amplitude or phase shift modulation is used.

I agree that signed is generally inferior and less often what you really need. For me, in C and C++, the main arguments for 'unsigned by default' are:

(1) integer overflow/underflow is undefined behaviour. You don't want that, it's evil. Unsigned does not have that problem (often it is still a bug if you over- or underflow -- but at least you get sane code from the compiler).

(2) size_t is unsigned and is returned by sizeof() and is the argument to memcpy(), strcpy(), etc., and with -Wconversion, you do not want to handle all the warnings when mixing this with signed loop counters or size variables.

Unfortunately, one problem with using unsigned by default in C is that ptr1-ptr2 yields ptrdiff_t, which is signed. Which is bad, in my opinion, because I usually want to find an array size or index when I subtract two pointers, so I want size_t, and in these cases, I always know which pointer is larger.

Oh well, it's C.

The recent discussion about tardigrades reminds me of Captain Tardigrade, Defender of the Multiverse.

Why is this number even on the list of SMS activities? Isn't that list compiled and issued by AT&T? Couldn't they just hide those target SMS numbers because they are, well, they could say, needed for technical implementation of SMS processing? It puzzzles me that they list these and afterwards do not tell what they really are.

As people talk about below-average programmers, here's a lesson I learned: you can finish a project even with below-average programmers. You do not rely on the best ones. Not-the-best programmers are also capable of learning, and they usually improve, and they do deliver.

Also, even the best programmer will make really stupid mistakes that may break everything.

Also, the best programmers in your team are prone to starting a fight over BS, because they tend to have a very strong opinion.

It's too simplistic to want only the best programmers in your team.

Story 1: And it's weird in so many movies when the villain forces a victim's face into the toilet for drowning. It's disgusting, of course, but over here, this would result in a bump in the head from the ceramic, but not in a wet face. Unless you flush, of course.

Story 2: On my first stay in the US, I clogged up the toilet by one normal usage. I flushed twice to force it down, but instead, it overflowed. Totally different mechanism, that!

Weird cultural differences.