frederikvs

Yes, disabling promotional notifications is an option - except if the app developer applies the dark pattern described in the article. But even when it works, the app developer just goes on their merry way, annoying other people too. I believe it's better to send a signal, and educate developers about what we as users want.

If an app gives me spammy promotional notifications, it either A) gets uninstalled (if I don't particularly care about the app), B) gets a 1-star review with a clear comment about the notifications, or C) all of the above.

The app I use to pay for parking spots suddenly gave me a notification once, apparently to try and get me to park my car more often or something. I gave it a one-star review, never saw one of those notifications again :-) (Which reminds me, I should revise that review.)

Yes, e.g. if you look at "rebreather" diving equipment, it's essentially a backpack life support system, including CO2 scrubber.

It looks like Monoethanolamine (MEA) can be reused after a regeneration cycle. Of course, you will need somewhere to dump the CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanolamine#Gas_stream_scrubb...

Perhaps it makes more sense to have a few big vans over one big truck, when it comes to manoeuvrability in small spaces. A big van is more manoeuvrable than a full-sized truck can ever be, even with multi-wheel steering - you still have a honking big box that can't bend.

I don't think remembering rm is the issue. It's remembering all the options in all their variations. Take the ps command. I tend to use it as "ps aux" - but I have no idea what the a, the u, or the x stand for individually. I know other people who use "ps -ef". (Also note the difference : the aux doesn't require a dash, and if you accidentally put it in, it doesn't do what you want it to do.)

As another example : the -v option. In most tools this means "verbose". In some tools, but not all, you can pass it multiple times to increase the level of verbosity. But then there are a few tools, e.g. top, where -v seems to mean "version" [0]. Or take the -h option. On many tools it stands for "help". But on tools like ls or sort, it stands for "human-readable".

To me personally this is not an issue - I know by heart a few combinations of options that I use frequently, and I know where to find out the details of those, as well as other options I use less frequently. But I can see how it would be easier for people to pick it up if those things were just a little more standardised.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/top

I stand corrected, thank you!

To clarify, I misremembered Factfulness. The book actually talks about "developed" versus "developing". In my memory I jumbled that up with "third world".

Tangent, but it turns out terms like "third world" are no longer accurate. If memory serves, this is explained in the book Factfulness. A highly recommended read, by the way.

A few decades ago, there was a group of wealthy countries, a group of poor countries, and a large gap between them. Back then it made sense to see them as 2 separate groups, first world and third. Right now however, they're no longer separate groups - there's a continuous spectrum. A growing number of countries have been crawling out of poverty.

Some countries are rich, some are poor, and some are in between. They're no longer separate groups.

(This of course does not mean that there isn't a poverty problem in the world. Just that "third world" no longer accurately describes the situation.)

In my experience, the question "Why not just do X?" can have 2 intentions and interpretations.

One meaning is "Obviously X is the better solution, and you're dumb for not doing X". The other meaning is "Naively, X would seem to be a solution, but I assume you have good reasons for not doing X. Could you please elaborate why you didn't do X, so I can learn something?"

I can't speak for other people, but when I ask a question like that, my intention is to learn something. However, many people seem to interpret it in the "you're dumb" way. I've also trained myself to receive that kind of questions in the kindest way possible - i.e. in the "learn something" interpretation. It tends to lead to much more civil conversations and less drama.

Look at it this way : if mr. Pleacher hadn't written the Carnation company "why don't you use a 1:1 ratio?", you and I wouldn't have learned these interesting things about cat food canning.

So my advice : when somebody asks "why don't you just do X", assume they understand you have good reasons, and want to learn. On the other hand, when asking a question like that, realise most people won't have that interpretation. Make it clear you understand there are probably good reasons, and you'd just like to understand them.

SpaceX's first stage lands itself, either on a droneship or on a landing pad near the launch site. The payload fairings splash down in the ocean, and get fished up for reuse. The second stage is not recovered.

Rocket lab just has a different approach to the same problem.

The interesting thing about this technology, is that it's a way to bypass the rocket equation - in theory at least. There are a lot of practical objections, not the least of which is the fact that they've had to add so much heat shielding that it cancels out the gains of not needing to take so much propellant. But maybe they can work around that at some point.

The practical problems make me skeptical, but the potential advantages make me hopeful. To all the skeptics out there : remember that people were also skeptical when SpaceX said they wanted to land their rockets, yet here we are.

“People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - George Bernard Shaw

Cats can't be bothered to evolve opposable thumbs. They have human staff to take care of anything that requires an opposable thumb, why would they bother doing it themselves?

See also : the Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

There is a similar folk belief to determine where to build a house. If you have a plot of land, have a herd of sheep graze there. The spot they choose to sleep is where you should build your house.

This of course assumes that you have a large enough plot of land, and no zoning laws telling you where you can and can't build.

For some people, a $1000+ phone comes with bragging rights. The charger? Not so much.

I'd wager that's one reason some people buy the expensive phone and the cheap charger. The other is simply that most people can't tell the difference between chargers - they both charge, right?

Not really : Peltier-based devices like this add (some) resistance to the heat flow. This added resistance means the air conditioner (or any heat pump, e.g. a fridge) gets less efficient. I think the energy captured by the device will always be lower than the extra energy needed for the heat pump.

A device like this is not useful in a system where you are actively pumping heat around.

In e.g. a monarchy, the head of state is the king or queen. In many monarchies these days, this person tends to have very little actual power.

The leader of a country is the person leading it, e.g. a president, prime minister, or similar.

Sometimes the term head of government is also used, which I think is usually the same as the leader of the country.

I suspect a large part of it is caused by facial expressions and how the people pose. Having your picture taken was very serious business, so no smiles were allowed. Show your most serious, regal pose.

If you look at the "Happiest man in China" photo, it doesn't look like an old photo - it looks like a modern photo of somebody dressed up in old time clothes. There is no hard evidence, but many people believe that the man just wasn't aware of how people were expected to pose for a picture.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/story-behind...

Search the web for "macropad", you should find what you need. If you go for something QMK-based, you can program it any way you want.

or it went down by another 20%, everybody at first thinking there's something wrong with their internet connection.

I've arranged for my employer to sponsor a few small projects via Patreon. We chose some projects that we found especially useful, but that are small enough that our donation could make a difference.

I think I read somewhere that they were planning to open up the specs of those modular ports. That may alleviate some of the points you bring up. (Can't find the source right now though.)

In what way do they limit the USB-C they pass through?

For those looking to build a simple GUI, another option is Gooey [0]. It takes your arparse declarations and builds a simple GUI based on that.

Gooey is probably easier to set up, but PySimpleGUI looks like it's more flexible and powerful. Look at your own battle and choose your weapons accordingly :-)

[0] https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

You may want to properly attribute that quote - it's from George Bernard Shaw.

Interesting side note : the people who built the Lunokhod moon rover were later called in to help with the Chernobyl cleanup. They had experience with remote-controlled radiation-hardened rovers.

There's an interesting documentary on Curiositystream about the Lunokhod program too.

Could you elaborate on how dissolved limestone does not emit CO2? Limestone is CaCO3. The calcium gets dissolved, ready to be used by your process. The Oxygen, I don't care much whether it stays in the water or goes into the atmosphere. Where does the carbon go, if not into CO2?

If I understand correctly, you extract both Calcium and CO2 from ocean water, and use this as input for making cement. The ocean will absorb the CO2 from the air, and that's a win. Where does the Calcium in the oceans come from?

If your process is scaled up massively, will the oceans run out of Calcium? Or will they absorb Calcium from somewhere? What would that Calcium source be?

In our setup, we have a class that does the heavy lifting. The file where that class lives ends with :

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        fire.Fire(JobManager)

which turns it into an instant CLI.

Then we have a separate gui.py file, which contains the Gooey code. This includes the class mentioned above, and builds a minimalistic GUI around it. This does need some argparse-based code, but in the GUI we only expose a small subset of the full power, so we only need a little bit of argparse-code.

P.S. I'm not certain this is the best way to approach things, but it's the way we use it, and we're happy with it so far.

Actually, I misspoke slightly when I said it turns the GUI into a CLI. Rather, it turns the same underlying class into a GUI.

So we have one file which contains the class with all the functions we want to expose (in our case, the class is named JobManager). At the end, it goes

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        fire.Fire(JobManager)

which takes care of all the CLI access we could want.

Then we have a second file for the GUI, which has a main-function that does some argparse stuff. The GUI interface is simplified from the CLI interface, so it's not that much work to write the argparse code for that. Simplified, it looks a little like this :

    @Gooey(default_size=(1000, 600))
    def main():
        parser = GooeyParser(description="jobGUI")
        # argparser code
        args = parser.parse_args()
    
        JobManager(args.name, args.whatever)
    
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main()

Gooey is a brilliant bit of software.

We use it in combination with Python Fire [0] to easily convert python code to something that users can interact with. Python fire converts our python code into a CLI without all the manual parameter parsing, and Gooey turns the CLI into a simple GUI.

[0] https://github.com/google/python-fire