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lgeorget

897 karma · joined September 14, 2017

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lgeorget··on Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)
Personnally, I watch 3Blue1Brown's videos because I find them very enlightening. They're are also very nice to watch and listen to, the production quality is very high. I don't pretend learning a lot of maths by simply watching them but I like watching them anyway for what they are: videos about maths problems and maths concepts.
lgeorget··on Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer
It's the LTS5 from Dragino, a LoRa touchscreen: https://docs.dragino.com/docs/LoRaWAN-End-Node/lora-modules-.... And for the record, I'm extremely happy with all their other products, which are all open-firmware, open-hardware, etc. and excellent quality. Plus they're super responsive. It's just this particular product which has this weird issue.
lgeorget··on Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer
I lost a good two hours the other day on an insufficiently documented device, looking for a way to flash a new firmware onto it.

dmesg was absolutely silent about it when I plugged in or out my C-C USB cable although the device switched on when I was using a simple charger instead. I opened it up to see if there was a special switch or something to put it in firmware flashing mode, to no avail. The little documentation I had only mentioned using one of the USB port.

In the end, out of ideas, I switched cables (even though I knew my cable was perfectly fine). As soon as I plugged in a A-C USB cables, everything worked immediately...

lgeorget··on A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
To predict anything on the ground, you have to predict air temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction etc. for the entire troposphere. The output of the models in altitude are as relevant to the meteorologists as the output on the ground for manual expert analysis.
lgeorget··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
A few years ago, a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia caused the entire European grid to drift away from 50.000Hz down to 49.996Hz. Millions of microwave clocks across the continent ended up 6 minutes late: https://hackaday.com/2018/03/09/europe-loses-six-minutes-due....
lgeorget··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
I was about to comment that exactly. If you computer is never switched off, your encryption is permanently bypassed.
lgeorget··on Knoppix
That's a blast from the past. I remember repairing my main install from a minimal Knoppix on my 1GB USB drive... Good old times.
lgeorget··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
Lightning is electricity that goes through hundreds of meters or even kilometers of air (supposedly a good electrical insulator) to reach the ground, it's not above travelling through electrical lines the opposite way they're intended to be used.
lgeorget··on Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...
Assuming they are independent events, OP is not more nor less likely to win the lottery now that before running in the collision. I actually have more question if you claim the events in question are NOT independent!
lgeorget··on Ask HN: Why Databases Instead of Filesystem?
That's orthogonal to the discussion, I think, you can also mount and access remote filesystems from any program as if it was a local filesystem.
lgeorget··on Ask HN: Why Databases Instead of Filesystem?
More of a sidenote than an answer but a database system can be faster than using the disk directly: https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html#approx.

It turns out having a defined abstraction like a database makes things faster than having to rely on a rawer interface like filesystems because you can then reduce the number of system calls and context switches necessary. If you wanted to optimize that in your own code rather than relying on a database, you'd end up reinventing a database system of sorts, when (probably) better solutions already exist.

lgeorget··on Am I German or Autistic?
Yeah that's also how I work: be strict to yourself, indulgent to other, I feel this is the best strategy to get along. Obviously, the downside is the tragedy of the commons: the few bad people abusing the leniency of the rest and getting away with it, like people showing up late because "they hate waiting".
lgeorget··on Am I German or Autistic?
I'm also neither. But I'm also very good at lying to myself, so who knows? (not me)
lgeorget··on What does " 2>&1 " mean?
It reminds me of this answer I made some years ago: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/138046

The question was how to remember it's "2>&1" and not "2&>1". If you think of "&1" as the address/destination of, the syntax is quite natural.

lgeorget··on Topological Naming Problem
I learned about it the hard way, ahah. Now I create intermediary planes for all distances and I extrude planes always with respect to those.
lgeorget··on A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
I have my best ideas and illuminations for the day when I brush my teeth in the morning. Somehow, that's when I can think best.
lgeorget··on LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra
How does enclosing the lamp in reflective material help with the energy efficiency? Isn't the infrared radiation emitted anyway? Doesn't that make the lamp overheat?
lgeorget··on Rouille – Rust Programming, in French
Yes it's so strange, like bad and unreadable pseudocode.

I could see myself coding in Latin though: https://github.com/pianoman911/ferrugo. Something about the prepositions tickles my brain the right way.

lgeorget··on Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it
I guess one charitable way to look at it is that after a crash, external people could get access to the car and its memory, which could potentially expose private data about the owner/driver. And besides private data, if data about the car condition was leaked to the public, it could be made to say anything depending on who presents it and how, so it's safer for the investigation if only appointed experts in the field have access to it.

This is not unlike what happens for flight data recorders after a crash. The raw data is not made public right away, if ever.

lgeorget··on Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie
I know that's not your point and I'm not saying this to cherry-pick your argument but in case that's particularly relevant to you, Debian Trixie ships with Kicad 9 : https://packages.debian.org/trixie/kicad. If you're stuck with an earlier version, maybe you have a dependency blocking your updates.
lgeorget··on Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie'
Well... it just works, so it's fine. I remember a time when I was a student where I would change distribution every six months: Fedora, Debian, Archlinux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc. but I finally landed on Debian and stayed there as I grew older.

In the stable distribution, packages tend to be a little dated obviously, but at least it is _stable_. And you can go with the _testing_ distribution for more up-to-date packages.

Also, as a sysadmin, I like having it on my computer to develop and test scripts without having to SSH in a dedicated environment (I still have to eventually but only for the final tests).

lgeorget··on Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean
The Tuvalu Islands are disappearing under water to the point that the population has to plan their emigration, that's one catastrophe.
lgeorget··on Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US
Between USA and western Europe? Is there a difference?
lgeorget··on A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up
The main difference, and it matters a lot, is that all the surfaces are flat.
lgeorget··on Can your terminal do emojis? How big?
I like them when they're used as bullet points in lists for instance. Just like we've always used small icons of phones and envelopes in contact information boxes/business cards to identify the fields at a glance.
lgeorget··on From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.

In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.

lgeorget··on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
Several variants of simplified English have been designed for the purpose of being understood by learners or people with only basic command of English as a foreign language. Wikipedia has a version in Simple English for instance: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia.
lgeorget··on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
Nice one but "'cos" does not go by the rule, I feel. You can use "for" at the same spot but, well, it has a tone you did not go for in your text.
lgeorget··on But what if I want a faster horse?
> Are they doing something different, or is it just that their customers have to choose them repeatedly?

I guess it's market-related. Your remarks remind me of Behringer. They make products for the music and audio enthusiasts. They have decent quality products at a very fair price that have been around for 10+ years now (like the X32 mixer) and apart from that, they churn out new products all the time (especially remakes of vintage synthesisers) to keep their users coming back and check out what's new.

lgeorget··on DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught
Well, to be fair... I (a human) had to look it up online the first time I played as well. I was repeatedly clicking on the same tree for an entire minute before that. I even tried several different trees just in case.
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