deepspace

Actually, that depends on the type of bar. At a Donnelly Group bar, absolutely.

But at the older not-quite-dive bars, often attached to a motel and frequented by truckers, good conversation between strangers can still be had.

Unfortunately, those bars are disappearing rapidly. 25 years ago, I lived across the street from one, and there were another two nearby. Maybe five or six in my neighbourhood. Now there is only one left, and it is struggling to stay open.

FTA: "However, scaling up is not something Leuthold and his team will be concerning themselves with".

As an engineer, the words "devil" and "details" come to mind.

I keep harping on Visual Studio, but I learned programming with Borland Turbo Pascal (and later Turbo C/C++) on a 4.77MHz machine with 512k memory. It was orders of magnitude more responsive than VS on my current 16 core 3.5GHz 128GB machine.

The only exceptions are: 1) the actual build, which is faster on the modern machine, but only for a large number of source files and 2) reading and writing files - a floppy disk cannot beat an nvme drive of course.

Have they fixed the stability issues yet? When I last looked at ESP32-CAM a couple of years ago, it was so unstable as to be unusable. Have newer versions of software and/or hardware made an improvement?

Or displaying 1/2 a character in the Visual Studio editor.

This clip by Ian McKellan talking about acting Macbeth was an eye-opener for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8

It shows what a genius and consummate professional McKellan is, and demonstrates the effort he puts into preparing for acting.

Calling it a pig is an understatement. It is unbearably slow. I have no idea how they managed to make a native app so slow.

Yes, Visual Studio is unbearably slow for me, even with tiny projects, whereas VSC seems snappy, even with larger projects.

I also use CLion, and it is quite slow for a few minutes after startup (though never as slow as VS), but then becomes fast as it finishes indexing or something.

I could never see the appeal of VFF. Just drop the shoes and go barefoot. Your soles will get used to it very soon. And when the weather gets too cold for that, it is likely too cold for VFF too.

> You need a pair of shoes at every exit

How many exits do you have? Most houses have only one front entrance. All other exits lead to the deck or garden, where people just go barefoot.

> In USA and Canada Not in Canada. I have never visited a home in Canada where the practice is NOT to take your shoes off in the mud room.

Yes, Eric S Raymond. He was well known in the late 90s / early 00s for taking credit for all kinds of things that he did not really contribute to.

I believe that he turned 100% conspiracy theorist in recent years. He famously blames Alan Turing for his own judicial punishment and suicide.

I was definitely getting ESR vibes when reading the Twitter thread, and was not surprised to see my suspicions confirmed here.

The RCMP in Canada are also not above using disadvantaged people to manufacture terrorism cases: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/new-podcast-exposes-sta...

> its really not that complicated either

I am used to reading complicated technical specifications, and my eyes were glazing over midway through reading your comment.

I do not see how an ecosystem where the groups you can join depends on the instance you join is much better than just having every group hosting a phpBB forum somewhere.

The value in reddit was that it provided a 'single pane of glass' for all your interests.

I used OrCad at university in the 80s. The UI was unintuitive even back then, when there were very few other GUI applications to compare it with. I guess the people who used it a lot back then got used to the UI and developed muscle memory for it. One of my classmates works at Apple, and it is certainly the case for him.

The Instant Pot’s only remarkable feature is the low price.

Korean brand Cukoo preceded Instant Pot, and will exist for a long time still. Their automatic pressure cookers are better in every way.

Yes, I frequent subs like r/Electronics, r/Arduino and r/ElectricalEngineering.

While I sympathize with newbies, the incessant “My First Blinking LED” posts get old really fast. Especially when said LED DOESN’T blink, and they post a Fritzing thing instead of a circuit diagram.

Does anyone know if the IKEA sensor detects cigarette smoke? Or, if not, is there any cheap sensor available to detect smoking (and vaping, if feasible)?

I agree. We had a similar non-mainstream encyclopedia set (not F&W) when I was growing up. I was a voracious reader and, at some point, read them all back to back.

That did not provide me with in-depth knowledge about anything, but even today I have a wide general knowledge, and I am interested in many subjects, some very obscure, which I credit to that encyclopedia.

More importantly, the encyclopedia gave me an overview of human knowledge and helped me to figure out what I was most interested in. The articles about radio, radar, computers and such always fascinated me and, I think, steered me into a career in engineering.

As a layman, I thought that this kind of resolution had been achieved with STMs decades ago. I wish the article explained the advantages of using X-rays.

I would be happy if the stupid thing stopped capitalizing every occurrence of "and", and stopped replacing "is" with "I'd". Those two alone turn swype-typing from a convenience into a frustrating slog.

The author's attitude reminds me of one of the best software articles ever, "Cash Cow in the Tar Pit" (https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/1996/03/s3041/13rR...).

The reason a "legacy" system seems so clunky and over-engineered and hard to modify and has so much corner case handling is: real-world experience and bug-fixes. When you throw that old cow in the tar pit and start developing your shiny new application, you throw all those years of hard-earned experience away with it. By the time your application works as well as the old one, it will be just as ugly.

FWIW, I have been running HA in a qemu VM on a NUC for years, and it is one of the most stable pieces of software I use. It supports every device I can throw at it, and the automations, while clunky, are easy to manage, as long as you keep KISS in mind.

In my first year, our chemistry and physics professors both authored their own textbooks for their courses. It was in the days before copyleft and open source, but the physics prof ran a print shop in his backyard, hand-bound the textbooks and sold them to us at cost (which was about 10% of similar published books).

The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.

> jobs that are solely about creativity, like copywriting

But the point is that the kind of copywriting that CAN be replaced by ChatGPT is just as repetitive and non-creative than those other jobs.

> What is the overwhelming movement that has silenced them and cowed all these free people?

Media consolidation. A massive percentage of the media in democracies has been bought up by organizations who benefit from the suppression of free speech. No leader who wants to keep getting elected dares go against the wishes of these oligarchs.

For me, specifically, Forbes destroyed the line between bad actors and above board players.

Back when sites started to detect ad-blockers, Forbes asked users to disable their blockers, for the usual reasons. Trusting them, beings respectable breed source, I and others whitelisted Forbes, and promptly got hit by malware distributed by ads on their site.

Because Forbes could not be bothered to screen the ads on their site, I now relentlessly block ads just like the author of the article.

We had a recent example in Canada of how any attempt at restricting such a law would go.

- The government proposes a law to regulate content on the internet, ostensibly targeted at Netflix and similar services.

- Critics point out that the law would apply to small-time content creators too, and could destroy their ability to compete.

- The government pinky-swears that they would never apply the law to individuals.

- A member of the opposition proposes an amendment to explicitly exclude individuals from the law.

- The government rejects the proposal and passes the bill as originally drafted.

Another vote for Merlin. It has been rock-solid for me for many years, while allowing me to get rid of annoyances with the stock firmware.

Spot on. I was so excited to see the form factor, and then my excitement was deflated as soon as I noticed the component details.

Note to any hardware hackers out there: I would buy the crap out of a unit in this form factor with an ESP32, LiPo charging, and proper deep-sleep oriented circuit design (I have seen too many circuits with cheap voltage regulators leaking many tens of μA).