hyperman1

In the 1970’s the Belgian deficit ran from 66 to 100+ percent of the BNP. Every governement since had serious trouble getting the deficit manageable. We never really got it unde control, and the intrest is hurting us. Afaik we got to 104% because we had to when joining the euro, which was our best. We are now at 109% again, and even that is hurting us hard.

Dave Duncan, A handfull of men.

It is the second series in the same world, and all the people have grown up. The kids became parents and think like responsible adults. It talks in an adult way about quite a few horrific events, without overdoing it. It gave child me an idea about what the difference actually was.

Apart from that, it had an interesting magic system.

In Europe, there is this stereotype about how southern countries produce more extrovert reactions, and northern countries create silent, calm people. Untill you piss them off, then you get exactly the kind of reaction Linus produces. I think the world got used to the USA corporate blandness, and gets surprised when people just don't fit in that culture.

I expect the participants in this discussion to grumble for a few days, then continue working amically together.

I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.

Link to release notes/changes: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/release-19.html#RELEASE-1...

My work laptop, an Ubuntu, runs MS Defender since a few days. I can say that it seems to work. It takes 400Mb RAM. I haven't seen a big slowdown yet but didn't do anything too heavy on it. It manages to clean up the eicar test virus.

This is a pleasant surprise, as an older job had McAfee on windows, and it was basically unusable. We lost most monday mornings on a weekly security scan, and everything touching a zip file forced you to take a 15 minute break. I learned to hate virus scanners.

I don't know about any other linux virus scanners, but I must admit it a pleasant surprise (even if a working laptop should just be table stakes).

Mathematically correct is not enough.

Java's byte code verification algorithm had a proof. This was important for running untrusted java in the browser. If it said the byte code was ok, it was.

Turns out, nobody made a proof for the verifier actually finishing. So it could return true, or false, or run longer than the universe has time. So around Java 6(?), someone wrote some bytecode that basically took forever to validate, DOSing the validator. Sun had to change the file format and add extra information to get the guarantees back.

It made me wonder, however: SI instead of AI brands you a follower of Trump. Does Grokking/Drinking instead of Understanding mark you as a follower of Heinlein?

I'd much rather follow Heinlein's free thinking instead of Trump's dictatorialism, and Heinlein never requested followers, but there is a similar mechanism going on nevertheless.

This sounds like a human trying to reason about quantum mechanics. We als simplify to newtonian for day to day tasks.

If Wero grandfathers in the existing iDeal flow, no cellphone is required. Just a bank card and a small gadget provided by your bank. Belgian Bancontact already works like that since the '80s. I never use my cellphone for payments.

I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.

I found a bag full of bricks on a trash sale, for €10. It turned out to contain 90% of a 7745 train, and a lot of other train stuff. The seller rescued it from a container, where a family was cleaning out a deceased's house. They only pulled out 1 of the LEGO bags in the container, on a whim, not wanting to drag more. The seller tought I was an idiot who overpaid. I tought I was lucky to find my childhood dream train.

It happens.

Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.

I had a tandy of that era, with i think 64K ram. The incompatibilities were big enough that almost nothing could run.

I'd say: Shortages after the world wars, combined with the teething problems of new technology made customers acutely aware and capable of repairability. That lesson is now forgotten.

It also wasn't universally true. E.g. the story of Mad Munz creating TVs that worked only for 90% of the customers (who had good enough reception and needed less signal cleanup). His idea was to capture 90% of the market with a cheaper product, while shafting 10% of the consumers and shamelessly send them to other vendors when they reported their troubles and he already had their money.

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/madman-mun...

80186 Was not IBM PC compatible. It had e.g. a PIC, DMA and timer built-in, and these were incompatible with the chips in a 8086 based IBM PC.

There were a few new instructions, too, mostly closing holes. You could left or right shift with a constant, while the 8086 had only 1 or the CX register. I think mul also gained a constant.

The fact that Intel released a CPU that could not be put in a PC probably indicates how low they estimated the survivability of the PC.

We had an apartment building complex where the inhabitants were fighting the owners over the elevators. The owners claimed the elevators did not always break down. The inhabitants challenged them for a game: go from bottom to top and step out once on every floor. Somehow the local press got invited. Of course, one owner and the press guy got stuck for half an hour, the resulting newspaper article had was written by a very pissed off reporter, and the elevator got finally replaced.

I want Tesla top management getting a similar challenge: Get this broken down tesla off the road. Meanwhile, some first responders do the same to a normal car.

I got an IT consultant looking at our Linux laptops, and his opinion was that the Belgian implementation of the CRA basically made Microsoft security tools obligatory: No other product survives auditors and your company will have to carry the burden of compliance itself. So if we roll that out, and MS now makes Edge the only browser supported, it also becomes obligatory, end users be damned. MS knows how to play legislators very well.

Around here, public toilets have roll holders containing 2 rolls. 2nd is unreachable, but when the 1st is empty, it falls out and 2nd drops in its place. Janitors just fill the 2nd roll if missing.

I am hoping this is normal around the world and nobody throws away slightly used rolls.

A corporation can own another corporation. So if you set up a loop of corporations owning other corporations, and the loop spans multiple countries, you can end up with a corporation ultimately owning itself. I vaguely remember IKEA trying to get this structure.

Cool. Didn't know that. Maybe, after all the intermarriaging of royal lines, we should just call them european royal houses.

The king is already mostly ceremonial. He seems mainly a stabilization factor for the country when both halves get a bout of separatism once more: He is the ultimate person every major politician talks to when nobody wants to talk to each other. The king does have some extra rights, but not too much, and the alternative seems worse.

King Albert 2 didn't want to become king but nobody else with enough capability was available. So it's not just a fun job.

But yes, the discussion to king or not pops up once in a while, and the general response seems to be we got much bigger problems.

It's German, not British. When Belgium was founded, the fear was it would immediately try to join France. So when a French noble was offered the throne, he actually said no, quite a blemish for the young nation. A surplus German noble was crowned, which was palatable to the English as it balanced things out a bit.

Every popular language has a cultural part to it. Java was famous for its enterprisey verbose code, even if nothing in the language requires it. PHP tends the opposite way, writing organically grown underengineered messes, even if the language allows for reasonable code. Cobol has its 10 000 line single program functions.

When you choose a language, you chose to hire the programmers for it. They will have read the same blogs, seen the same examples, made the same architectural choices.

Long term, when you choose node, you get zillions of tiny dependencies.

I'm not a drawing person. I wish I could draw a lot better. I used to try once in a while, and the results were universally bad.

So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.

If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.

You have to read the news from someone, and each one has its own bias. State news has a well known failure mode as propaganda. But commercial news turns out to have its own failure mode, where emotion inducing content has bigger gains for lower cost.

The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.

The reason of copyright has always been to protect the current powers. To promote usefull arts has always been a whitewash. Here's e.g. wikipedia on that topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

  ... works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers ...

"To protect the children, ...."

If this happens without clicking I agree, the software is not covered under any EULA and you're allowed to do whatever you want, right?

Seconded. I talk to my cats, to the software I'm troubleshooting, to my tools, sometimes even to my dishwasher while filling it. Presumably none of them cares, but every reaction is a training, so I want to train in the right direction.

My mom walked into a table and absent mindedly said sorry. Some salesman noticed. She said she talked to everything. He responded: As long as the table doesn't answer, everything is allright.