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marzell

483 karma · joined January 1, 2016

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marzell··on NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers
Also there are other variants and tricks around this for other colors as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
marzell··on Vietnam bans unskippable ads
"correting" lol
marzell··on The past was not that cute
There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities actually had generally better health and far more free time than farmers and agrarian society.

Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but required basically working all day to make it work and survive less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often had significant more free time.

marzell··on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)
Yeah at that point I think we'd be better off if everything was just UTC and dealt with locally
marzell··on Left to Right Programming
You absolutely can in many engines, for instance in Snowflake... with the small exception that in all supporting engines you actually need to use HAVING instead of WHERE in your second example (because it compares an aggregation, otherwise WHERE is fine).

You can also use "correlated column aliases" (I can't recall the proper name) i.e.

    SELECT
        id AS foo,
        foo || '_1' as foo_n,
        right(foo_n, 1) as foo_ordinal
    FROM MyTable
    WHERE foo = 1;
Again, if this isn't all part of SQL standards, the reality is that a lot of engines have semi-standard (sometimes very proprietary too) ways of handling these now common patterns. For real-world use cases, the standards are unfortunately becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think it would be better in the long term to use standards, but if they can't keep up with actual usage then they will just get ignored.
marzell··on Left to Right Programming
> Per the SQL standard, you can't use column aliases in WHERE clauses, because the selection (again, relational algebra) occurs before the projection.

Except this works in most major vendor SQL implementations. And they all support relation aliases in SELECT... Seems the standards have long fell behind actual implementations.

marzell··on Dust from car brakes more harmful than exhaust, study finds
Some factors I think are involved, but I don't see mentioned - EVs produce more readily available torque in general, and also tire choice heavily factors in EV range (low rolling resistance), which has a negative impact on tread life
marzell··on How corn syrup took over America
We make corn that isn't even considered a food, legally. We subsidize that using a lot of tax dollars, to the absurd point that we pay farmers to NOT grow corn and leave fields empty. Everyone is paying for way more corn than is needed through taxes, while people claim this keeps costs low (it's more, you are just paying it in taxes). And then we come up with excuses to use more of it, like corn syrup and ethanol. This is absolutely absurd.
marzell··on Query Apple's FindMy network with Python
Long before the richest man on earth bought Twitter to be his personal megaphone to help him prepare to become president in order to boost all his personal endeavors, the letter X has been used as a sort of contraction to replace common morphemes like "cross", "trans" etc, in places where the physical representation "x" likens to a cross or crossing of some sort, or in reference to the Greek letter Chi. Must we change our use of language to support this guy, too?

Xtian Xmas xfer tx/rx xor...

marzell··on Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs
I believe the "thinking out loud" is fundamentally part of the process of "text completion" which is what it is doing. Certainly we can (and do) break things apart and add layers that could be used to effectively do this by adding more steps and processing time. But ultimately in a single turn, the entire conversation up to that point (including instructions you may have added telling it to not think out loud) is the input, and the output will reflect that.
marzell··on Today Microsoft Banned My Country Iran from Minecraft
I'm not arguing your point, but this is the general state of gaming today. A significant portion of "single player only" games require you to be online, contain "online" content, and access to the game can/will be effectively removed when servers/services go offline.
marzell··on Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments
The second point, yeah that's relevant.

On the first point, just give each person n-1 shards, each missing a different one. Then any 2 can decrypt. Or configure it for however many participants there are and they minimum number needed to encrypt.

marzell··on Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments
What's the practical benefit over just sharding a decryption key and handing out multiple shards to each person?
marzell··on My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
for something a bit more robust, check out DuckDB. It's a library you can embed, use it to run SQL on local files as well as connect to databases, do joins, analytics, etc.
marzell··on AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server (2010)
Same. It took me years to even figure out I could just buy programming books from the store. But progs like Magenta and AOHell, plus the F1 help/documentation built into vb and the like, set me on the path.
marzell··on Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online?
I was unaware that Game Neverending was the origin of Flickr. Interesting as Glitch[0] was also the origin of Slack. Seems to be an interesting theme in Stoot's career.

[0] https://www.glitchthegame.com/

marzell··on Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof
If we aren't already living in a simulation, then we've begun a feedback loop so that in the near future, we very well may be.
marzell··on Paul Graham AI Essay Writer
Well I asked for discussion about Smurfette as a sex symbol, and instead I got an article about She-Ra, sexualization of cartoons, and interesting discourse about Pixar and being able to do things in animation that you can't do otherwise [0]. Still it was pretty good even though it didn't mention Smurfs.

[0]https://www.paulgrahamai.com/recPKFXrH5aI6KUks

marzell··on IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free
|what is contributing to what portion of your tax bill

Do you have an example of what other products provide for this? Does IRS Free File do better in this regard?

marzell··on Endless Horse
infinity is not a number.
marzell··on ‘Luddite’ Teens
What I think many people would argue about Dostoyevsky is that it is easy to read at a surface level, but invites critical thinking to reveal layers of subtext and deeper meaning. Maybe you don't agree, which is fine, but I'd suggest this is why some people may associate it with high reading comprehension.
marzell··on A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class
This smells like a scenario where the teacher isn't looking for the "right" answer, speaking broadly or objectively.

Instead, I suspect there is a particular concept or perspective they have been trying to impress on their students recently, and in this case they are expecting the answer that most demonstrates they have paid attention to the recent lessons.

I could be wrong of course.

marzell··on Blip: A tool for seeing your internet latency
Mine looks exactly the same, and I can't prevent it from redirecting to https.
marzell··on Reality is just a game now
Were you mislead somehow?
marzell··on Purring is a love language no human can speak
I find that an exhalar uvular trill can be similarly effective
marzell··on Thunderbolt, Displayport and Docks
I feel like now, even though there may be varying levels of compatibility/capability, at least more devices physically plug into the same cables with at least basic functionality. IMO it's better than having different physical ports that are completely incompatible.

Additionally, I've never had any problems with USB-C cables physically failing without extensive abuse. I cannot say the same for on-brand Apple charging cables.

marzell··on Handpicked No-Signup Tools
Even just in the first example of removing a background, it is very intuitive how to do it using the website listed. But GIMP, for all it's improvements in recent years, does not make it nearly as intuitive, fast, and easy for a brand-new user to remove a background. And being presented with that UI would be intimidating for a lot of users compared to using a single-purpose website with a specific workflow.
marzell··on Tell HN: My new free note taking tool
What does Step 3 mean here? What is meant by "..."? Are you talking about the Explorer menu in Github? Or the dotfile package manager (ellipsis)?
marzell··on Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_rose
marzell··on Iceland stops using Moderna Covid-19 vaccine
I'm reading between the lines here, but I'm speculating this is the situation:

-Iceland has high vaccination rates, including many people who already got both doses of Moderna vaccines several months ago

-It is too early for standard booster shots with Moderna based on medical guidelines

-Many people were originally vaccinated with other brands (J&J/Jannsen, Pfizer) which have been shown to be less effective than Moderna long-term

-Therefore, many people are "cross-vaccinating" by trying to supplement their existing vaccination with Moderna, which they view as superior

-Because of this, most/all Moderna vaccination shots performed in the last 2 months are from people with other vaccines originally -- in other words, they are only being given in ways that are not within current medical guidelines, and in a manner that has not been sufficiently studied for safety and efficacy.

If this is close enough to represent the situation, then I can see why they might decide the best move overall for public health is to halt use of Moderna, at least for now. Maybe with tighter controls, or over the coming months when there will be higher demand for prescribed Moderna boosters, then it will make sense to bring it back.

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