dreamcompiler

> at 43 percent a lightning strike will cause the entire atmosphere to ignite since it is so high in flammable oxygen

Good article except oxygen is not flammable. Oxygen is the stuff that makes other stuff flammable.

And here I thought there was nothing I would ever suggest we rename after Trump.

I got a used M2 Air a year ago and it's the best Apple laptop I've ever owned. And I've owned dozens.

Plus it runs Asahi linux on the metal.

Yeah it was my cat. One bite and the screen turned black. He was a kitten at the time. Kittens chew on everything.

That happened to my MBP without OLED. Fortunately I had Applecare.

He has a lot of company.

I used to think this was a universal law but then there's Warren Buffett, who's rich but doesn't seem stupid. Of course he's not a tech billionaire.

And then there's Mark Cuban, who is a tech billionaire but who also still seems to have a working brain.

You know how on a computer screen you can just drag any corner of a window to resize it? I had a dream once where I had a phone that worked that way. Want a bigger screen? Just drag one of the corners of the phone. Shove all the corners together and drop it in your pocket.

I used the hell out of that phone all night. Then I woke up and spent about an hour trying to figure out how to build one. I think I could do it in one dimension (i.e. make the phone wider) by rolling the screen around a tiny roller in the edge of the case, and having the case telescope. But that won't work in two dimensions at once. I never figured out how to do it in two dimensions.

When somebody builds one of these, I'll buy one.

Look at this thing. Now tell me how long you think it would last under an assault of, say, three modern $50k military drones controlled by trained Ukrainian operators.

My guess: 35 seconds.

How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.

LLMs seem to be very good at detecting vulnerabilities caused by using C and other forms of human stupidity.

So yes.

My paramedic colleagues were using fentanyl decades before you heard of it in a recreational context.

This might be a job for fentanyl. Carefully monitored in a hospital setting of course.

I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.

Exactly. Grain dust is very dangerous because a small spark can make it explode, but the spark is absolutely necessary. If you leave a pile of oily rags in your garage and wait a few hours, your house could burn down. No spark needed.

Human spontaneous combustion is a silly myth. Other kinds like oily rags and apparently fishmeal are very real.

Radar detectors are not illegal in Oklahoma.

Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.

Likewise commercial aircraft.

One of those myths too many programmers believe: All street addresses can accept US mail. Not necessarily the issue in this comment, but when somebody gives you both a shipping address and a mailing address and you send mail to the shipping address, the fault is yours if it doesn't arrive.

The Finder on MacOS breaks when it has to deal with more than about 10,000 of anything. The MacOS Finder is chock full of O[n] and perhaps even O[n^2] algorithms that have been there, unfixed, since System 7. Back in 1996, a user with more than 100 files in a folder was unusual, so those algorithms worked fine. Nowadays not so much.

Proof: Copy 10k files from one hard drive to another with the Finder (not the same drive; you have to prevent COW). Now do the same thing with e.g. cp or rsync on the command line.

Cache is not fast because it's physically close to the core. Well okay, closeness does matter but it doesn't matter as much as the fact that cache is static, i.e. it's (effectively) made of flip-flops.

If you build a computer with DRAM 10 cm away from the CPU and static RAM 50 cm away, access times for the static RAM will still be much lower than access times for the DRAM.

Why don't we just build all RAM as static? Because it's more expensive per bit, it uses more energy, and it requires a great deal more silicon area.

If you get your teeth whitened at the dentist, it's likely your dentist has a whitening machine that has a subscription model too.

This is why people go to chiropractors.

Correction: My car spies on me and its cruise control no longer works because it slams on the brakes in the middle of the highway whenever it sees a mirage. My dishwasher broke because it got an unasked-for software upgrade.

Things worked better before we started putting bad software in everything. As a software engineer, I know what good software looks like. The fact that almost all software is now bad -- including the software that drives AI and the software that AI generates -- makes me want to flip the table. We know how to write better software and the general public should hang us if we continue to refuse to deliver it.

Yes. The point of the airfoil shape is to make flying more efficient, i.e. the engine would need to generate much more power if the wings were flat slabs, but the plane could still fly given a big enough engine.*

*Assuming the "big engine" wasn't so heavy that it made flight impossible because of its weight.

What's old is new again.

https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readi...

I still find it breathtaking that anybody ever thought it was a good idea to develop a web server in a single-threaded language. And apparently huge numbers of people still do.

Apple did the same thing. In the early days of OSX much of Darwin was open-sourced. Now, not so much.

If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.