jbarrs

Working on a modular archiving tool that, so long as an appropriate archiving "kernel" has been written, will be able to archive files from compatible URLs without the end user needing to care which tool is used or how it's downloaded. (https://github.com/joshbarrass/UArchiver)

I'm also working on integrating this into a Telegram bot (https://github.com/joshbarrass/ArchiverBot) that will allow me to archive things to my NAS whilst on the go. UArchiver is provided with the URL and will just download the files without me needing to care how.

I've been too busy with other things to put major work into it recently, but both projects are in a functional state, just without tonnes of features or supported sites. Whilst it may not seem like much, I'm particularly pleased with the GitHub Actions pipeline I set up recently, which will automatically upload UArchiver releases to PyPi, and automatically build ArchiverBot Docker images and upload those DockerHub.

Yes I totally understand, and I don't think you've detracted from the others at all. The more resources are available, and the more accessible they are for different learners and different styles of learning, the better.

As an aside, I'd like to recommend to people the Cambridge Latin Course (https://www.cambridgescp.com/)

This was the course I followed learning Latin in school. Whilst it may be tailored more towards a school audience, much of the content of their books is available for free online, which includes lots of translation and vocabulary practice. The books and stories are all very light-hearted and fun and teach a lot about Roman history as you learn the language. This could make good supplementary learning material for anyone trying to teach themselves Latin for free.

By the end of the article I was really starting to wonder whether this was just marketing

I am not a manager, so I am merely speculating here, but I suspect measuring productivity is important in determining which employees are of most value to the company (who is pulling their weight, so to speak), particularly for example in the cases of raises/promotions or redundancies. Also, different people will have different skills and preferences, so if a team member shows a particular aptitude for a set of tasks and is generally more productive at doing those, it may be better to give more tasks of that style to that team member to boost productivity.

I feel like this largely depends on the book. A novel between $10 and $20 that you may get multiple reads out of is better than a $100 university textbook that you only need for one year. The former you can bite the bullet on, the latter becomes harder to justify.

My only gripe with this is that I'm never sure what the structure inside an archive is like until I inspect it. It's not a massive inconvenience but I don't like extracting to a new directory just to find it empty save for another directory with the same name.

According to a relative who's worked in the industry most of his life, the carbon footprint just from manufacturing and disposing of batteries for electric vehicles is not compensated by the decreased emissions. I think the lifetime is ~5 years shorter than the "carbon neutral time" of using a battery over conventional fuel. Much of the research now is to either reduce the carbon footprint of battery manufacture, or to increase the lifetime of the battery to compensate, but the batteries themselves are apparently worse for the environment than the engines they're replacing.

I'd like to give an alternative perspective on SymPy. Whilst I'm not familiar with Mathematica, and therefore cannot draw parallels between the two, I've used SymPy for a number of years and found it to be really useful. I was initially introduced to it as part of a first year programming module in a Physics degree, and it was more than sufficient for that use-case; for that use-case, it absolutely wasn't worth paying for something like Mathematica. When combined with a graphical REPL (some may use Spyder, I personally use jupyter-qtconsole) or a Jupyter Notebook, it becomes really quite useful as it incorporates LaTeX rendering to make its outputs more readable and a little less daunting. Whilst the syntax may not be optimal for the mathematical way of working, for many problems like simple rearrangements, automatic simplification, checking equivalences, etc. it is almost always the first tool I reach for. The syntax is just cosmetic, and I use Python enough that the syntax doesn't even bother me, either. It does its job well, and it's helped me solve and verify solutions for a number of mathematical problems during my degree. Admittedly, I do run into the occasional problem here and there where there are obviously better tools available, but that's the same with any gratis vs paid solution. In most cases, SymPy does a sufficiently good job.

I feel like emulation will always be catching up with the latest systems, though running some modern AAA game in a virtual machine would probably need a super beefy PC (though we could probably expect that to be available by the time that becomes necessary). Hopefully then a virtual machine can satisfy the DRM.

However, I do worry about games (or, in some cases, the DRM on some games) that require the player always be online. If the game or DRM servers are taken down in the future and the developer doesn't release a patch to remove the always online requirement, the game could end up being unplayable. If it's popular enough, people may reverse-engineer third party servers, but this can present more challenges, e.g. getting SSL certificates from a CA your device trusts; on a PC you could manually trust the certificate, but on a console you likely don't have that option.

archive.org seems to have a copy of this article

https://web.archive.org/web/20201230222606/https://www.polis...

EDIT: the other article linked is unavailable in the EU because of GDPR. Thankfully, archive.org has a copy of that article as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200721190853/https://www.bayjo...

Perhaps we could use something like this? https://github.com/TheApeMachine/cloudtube

In fairness, I can't imagine "classics" garnering anywhere near the watch times of a new show. Whilst you'll get some new viewers from the people who've heard it's a classic or those showing their kids a movie from "their time", but the majority of viewers will be those who've seen it before and want to watch it again, and given the age of some of these classics they likely already own it on DVD etc.

>Even though it goes against the basic premise of human-centered design, users have to train themselves to understand when an intelligent assistant will be useful and when it’s better to avoid using it.

I find this is one of the truest things about this article. It's very easy when you first get a new voice assistant to get carried away with the features it has available. Most are either very basic, struggling to take much additional context, or simply just gimmicks/novelties. The majority of tasks can be performed faster through a GUI when you account for the time it takes to brute force the right "natural language" expression to do the thing you need.

That's essentially just an approximation. In some problems it can be useful to model the electron as having a finite radius, but our current understanding is that particles like electrons are literally infinitesimal points. In that case it's generally more useful for us to use things like Dirac delta functions to model them more accurately.

Influencing a coin flip is certainly possible. If you can reliably flip it the same way each time it's not hard to get 5-10 heads in a row, with a little practice.