frankus

The whole "6am sunrise and 6pm sunset every day of the year" thing at the equator is kind of mind blowing.

Another maybe counterintuitive fact is that (to a reasonable approximation) everywhere on earth gets the same number of hours of daylight over the course of a year.

Stepping back, would granting a time-limited exclusive license to the output of generative AI "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

In other words is there important AI art that society would be missing out on because the originator deemed it not worth the effort without some protection against unauthorized copies being made?

In that case there's going to be a pre-existing work-for-hire agreement where the camera operator assigns copyright to the studio.

I've had the opposite problem: both of my parents' (in their 80s) fingerprints have faded to the point that Touch ID no longer works reliably.

One obvious (but probably obsolete) use of this would be a radio tuner where the strength of the detent is proportional to the strength of the radio signal.

One of the ideas I was toying with a few years ago was a machine-readable nutrition label, but self-contained rather than involving a database lookup (there just aren't that many bits of entropy in a nutrition facts table, so it's practical to just encode it in a reasonable-size 2D barcode).

I thought they could be useful for e.g. boxed lunches at a conference, or printed on a "mom and pop" restaurant menu, or in a cookbook, where maintaining a central database isn't really practical (aside from avoiding tracking).

It would also be easy to encode things like "Vegan" or "meat-free" or "contains nuts" which could be helpful to blind/low-vision folks or people who don't want to read through a 50-ingredient list to find out something contains shrimp extract or whatever.

I only got as far as setting up a domain (https://nut.codes) and a couple of aborted attempts at prototyping (https://github.com/nut-codes).

If you buy tea from Starbucks in North America you're getting a nylon teabag. Maybe I should be more paranoid about microplastics but I avoid them because I can't just toss them in the compost like I can with paper- or silk-based ones.

One of the wild things about car energy use is that the waste heat alone from driving one car at 70 mph (at 25 mpg) is enough to heat 10 smallish houses on a freezing cold day (25k BTU/hr).

(Roughly 110 km/hr, 10 l/100km, and 7.5 kW)

A more enlightening statistic, but obviously harder to collect, would be what percentage of missed life-years could be attributed to MAID. I suspect it would be a much smaller percentage.

It's also worth noting that for every MAID horror story in this article, there is probably at least one horror story about a needlessly painful and drawn-out death that could have been avoided if MAID had been legal.

An earlier effort along similar lines can be seen at https://www.halfbakery.com

I first encountered it in Elecia White's book Making Embedded Systems, but the attribution is anonymous and whom it's attributed to may have heard it elsewhere.

"As part of the calibration, the speed of sound is also a parameter which is optimized to obtain the best model of the system, which allows this whole procedure to act as a ridiculously overengineered thermometer."

Reminds me of the electronics adage: "all sensors are temperature sensors, some measure other things as well."

There's no shortage of crappy modern audio hardware, but compared to like a bedside clock-radio, or an 80s economy car, a decent bluetooth speaker is actually an upgrade, and something like a HomePod (that costs around $115 in 1988 dollars) is revolutionary.

Which is not to say you couldn't find a Hi-Fi system from that era that would put a HomePod to shame, but it was the sort of thing only rich people and music geeks would have access to.

As a young Gen Xer it's fun to go back and listen to radio hits I heard growing up (on mostly terrible sound systems playing radio or cassette tapes) using modern audio hardware. There's a lot of depth in many tracks that I couldn't really appreciate at the time, because even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on.

The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.

But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.

[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.

FWIW you can also pick a value of b to make a + b end in a zero, which keeps b at 5 or less.

Our math prof (who moonlighted as a "mathemagician") taught us a trick for two-digit squares:

For e.g. 23 x 23, subtract three from the first number, add three to the second, and then add 3² to the product. So 20 x 26 + 9, the idea being that multiplying by a multiple of 10 is easier to do mentally.

The other issue is that once you're turning the wheel more than about 90 degrees your hands are no longer on the controls and at 180 degrees the sides are swapped (and upside down) so it can be disorienting.

Another interesting coincidence (or perhaps a decades-long dad-joke troll perpetrated by German-speaking scientists) is that 1 hertz is roughly equal to the frequency at which a human heart (“Herz” in german, with a nearly indistinguishable pronunciation to “Hertz”) beats.

I’ve often thought this kind “do what I mean” control could expand to a lot of machines where currently it takes potentially years to develop an intuition around how moving various levers/pedals actually results in things moving physically in space the way that you intend.

A few years ago I rented a mini excavator whose levers are directly connected to hydraulic valves that control the motion of the bucket in a weird polar coordinate space. It’s extremely tricky as a beginner to even e.g. make the bottom of a trench level, and it seems like just a bit of intelligence would make this trivial. Even a bit of force feedback would do wonders for controllability.

I think I speak for most people when I say I want my music "discovery" playlist to be something like "mostly stuff that sounds like stuff I've indicated that I like" with a small amount of "not sure I'll like it, but suprise me". It sounds like OP is looking for the ability to turn up the "surprise me" factor at the expense of maybe having to skip a few more songs that just aren't clicking with them. So maybe something like a "temperature" knob is in order?

My web dev experience is old enough to vote by now, so the answer might be obvious, but how does this work with localization? Would you have a copy of the JSX snippet for each locale? In that case I can see some benefit from separating strings from structure.

I have a sit-stand desk from Costco with capacitive height controls set under the glass top off to the right. The problem is not so much accidental human touches, but setting anything slightly conductive on the switch will trigger the height control, including things like computer mice and ceramic coffee mugs (as long as they have some liquid in them), exactly the sorts of things that a right-handed person might want to set on the right corner of the desktop.

The desk is otherwise great and was really inexpensive for what it is but it's a super frustrating design decision.

What makes the multiplier even more wild is when you consider the proceeds are probably being used (by the front-line thieves) to buy drugs whose cost is something like 10x–100x higher than the cost of production.

Many (including me) would consider it unethical but I understand the temptation to cut out several layers of middlemen and just have the government hand out drugs.

I'm trying to recall the name of the app that does this, but one of the travel-tracking apps uses Apple's push notification system (which the network treats as "messaging") to send e.g. gate changes to subscribing devices through this "messaging only" network.

The APNS payload is a JSON blob that's limited to 4KB, with a few required pieces of information but mostly free-form, so it's definitely in the scope of e.g. a (text-only) blog post split over a few messages.

Periodic reminder that many emacs-like keybindings exist in almost every text field in macOS: Ctrl A, E, P, N, K, Y, T, and probably others I'm forgetting (start of line, end of line, previous line, next line, kill (delete everything to the end of the line and put it in a special pasteboard), yank (paste from that special pasteboard) and transpose characters).

Edit: more complete list here: https://jblevins.org/log/kbd

Edit 2: can't believe I forgot Ctrl-D, which is forward delete.

What's weird is IIHS (a non-government nonprofit) is publishing articles like this [1] and yet AFAIK doesn't incorporate pedestrian safety into its new-car ratings. One would think insurance companies would also be interested in the safety of the people whom their insured collide with.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/designers-must-make-vehicle...

This. Every society in every era has a large amount of necessary work and some amount of interesting work and a minuscule amount of glamorous work.

The fact that those categories happen to overlap for a lucky few makes for a great commencement speech, but IME it's the extreme exception.

The good news is that there's really never been a better time to be a dabbler. Lots of tech things that used to have a huge barrier to entry are accessible at a hobbyist level now.

I'm not sure if taking e.g. Paxlovid as pre-exposure prophylaxis has been studied, but my guess is that the side effects from the drug are worse in the long run than the disease itself (especially if the seriousness can be blunted via vaccination).

Since people don't spontaneously recover from HIV infection, and the PrEP drugs have relatively few side-effects, the tradeoff is more favorable.

I remember a coworker telling me about a project that had mysterious battery drain after shipping.

It turns out the microcontroller was doing read-modify-write on a port that had an LED connected, and in bright sunlight the LED input would be high, and then stay high after the write. It was fixed with a firmware update that set the LED bit based on whatever logic determined if it should be on on every write.