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forinti

6,173 karma · joined March 3, 2009

https://alquerubim.blogspot.com
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forinti··on Casio Watches of the 1980s
It really was part of the aesthetics in the 80s. I had a gorgeous red cassette player from Sanyo that had text and lines drawn all over it.

There are a few Casios that have cleaner designs.

forinti··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
> Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.

When you are used to privilege, equality looks like oppression.

forinti··on Muhammad Aqeel: Undo for Postgres, without losing the rest of your day
You might not even have the WAL from long ago.

I see this as an easier way to create a log table.

forinti··on Muhammad Aqeel: Undo for Postgres, without losing the rest of your day
This is really cool.

My org uses log tables and triggers and I wish that databases would offer something like this in a declarative manner.

forinti··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
The first CPUs were meant to power calculators.
forinti··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Trying out different multiplication algorithms is a lot of fun.

https://github.com/TobyLobster/multiply_test

forinti··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
I'm guessing that that is just the spec for the hardware, not what the machine can actually use.
forinti··on US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion
That's about the nominal GDP of Spain.
forinti··on Japanese people still aren't having sex. And nobody knows why
This reminds me of an article I once read about Pandas. A certain zoo couldn't get them to breed, so they made a Panda porno film and, I kid you not, this gave the bears ideas and they had sex.
forinti··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
All ads to minors should be banned.

An ad is a business proposal and minors cannot do business without the consent of their parents.

forinti··on A Modern Web App in C
I learnt Perl because I had to make a page with a form that would then be turned into Postscript and printed. My only options were C, which I knew well, and Perl, which I had never seen before. So I got to learning Perl. Doing it in C just seemed like too much work for the task.
forinti··on Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age
That stood out for me too. It just wouldn't be allowed. They will surely get added on later.
forinti··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
Sorry, it was just an extra bone.

Actually, I think I got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebra

forinti··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
They both looked normal and where quite beautiful cats actually.

We only found out their health issues from exams.

forinti··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.

They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.

forinti··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
I blocked my LG TV and put it behind a router so that it wouldn't sniff around my house, but this is too complicated for most people.

What we need is to ban this sort of thing outright.

forinti··on A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting
When my grandparents were born, we didn't know there were other galaxies.
forinti··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
The US proves "every accusation is a confession" and "accuse them of what you do and call them what you are".
forinti··on Two and a half years without a gallbladder
My better half had pancreatitis because of gallbladder stones and so I learnt that there's a canal that goes from the gallbladder and through the pancreas. This is not a good design. Somebody should have thought harder about this. Maybe they had a deadline or something (I need this on my desk by Saturday!).
forinti··on My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
There are tons of videos of people walking around Japan. I usually watch them while working out.
forinti··on 9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
One thing I don't understand is why people buy football jerseys with ads on them.

It's been decades since I last had a football jersey because I can't stand the idea of buying something (expensive) that has an ad on it.

forinti··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
I see so many places that could have roundabouts instead of lights. Plus, if the maximum speed inside my town was lowered to 40km/h, we could have shorter yellows. You can never reach the 60km/h limit for more than a few seconds anyway.
forinti··on What Sun got wrong
I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.
forinti··on Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits
I tried this with my kids, but I required them to also produce a one page essay on each book. They ignored the deal. One of them actually reads and likes reading, but he won't be bothered to write about what he has read (unless it's required for school).
forinti··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
There's a book called Kuru by an Australian doctor who worked in PNG and studied the disease. IIRC, it's by Michael Alpers. It's a fascinating book, and it's a mixture of adventure, medicine, and anthropology. I highly recommend it if you can find it.
forinti··on The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
Neither the West nor the USSR grew coffee, though.

The West wouldn't trade (or let developing countries under its influence do it) and I bet the USSR couldn't procure enough for itself and the DDR.

forinti··on Feeling Sad about AI
AI told him to use an alternative function which was similar but didn't have the same bug.
forinti··on Feeling Sad about AI
This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it.

I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out.

AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.

forinti··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
This sort of thing should be labelled.

Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".

forinti··on Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
This is not a case of maths giving you the Blues.
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