me_again

I doubt that he will get off, but it seems dubious to put people in jail pre-trial on the basis that they would get away without jail time post-trial.

"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and remain absolutely sober". -Logan Pearsall Smith

Already started: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/29/beto-orourke-sam-ban... . Though I somehow doubt everyone will follow suit.

Since we seem to have started a competition about who can provide the least relevant and most pedantic correction, the sun is not a ball of fire. It is a plasma heated by nuclear fusion. There is no oxygen to support combustion.

It's a little ironic to me that even rants about how programming has gotten worse recycle the same points from 30 years ago. Read https://391.org/manifestos/1991-manifesto-futurist-programme... and spot the difference.

Look into WSUS / Windows Update Services

Perhaps unfair, but I tried "prove that all prime numbers are composite" https://galactica.org/?prompt=prove+that+all+prime+numbers+a... and got

"The theorem in number theory that states that all prime numbers are composite is an easy consequence of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic..."

Interestingly, the US doesn't have a true national power grid. https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/us-grid-regions

The practical difficulty of transporting large amounts of water long distances is even worse than electricity, so I don't think it'll ever be easy to say "Minnesota has a water surplus this year, let's just adjust the pipes to send it to Nevada".

Mark Twain supposedly said:

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'. Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

That seems possible, but satirically posting self-aggrandizing BS on Blind is like satirically posting Pepe memes on 4Chan.

Ah, the unassailable confidence required to work in one lower-level position at a company for 5 months and believe you know "How To Succeed" there.

Deprecated features are compiler warnings, not compiler errors, unless you use -Werror or the like.

It's generally engineer -> engineering manager (10 people) -> group engineering manager (100 people) -> VP -> fancy VP -> CEO.

Depth of org in a company is logN(number of employees) where N is the number of reports a manager has. At Microsoft there's order of 100K full time employees and N is about 10, so depth is about 6. This seems fairly unremarkable to me, though obviously there are other ways to do it.

MS engineer who worked on Lync. I feel like the Skype acquisition was poorly handed too, but interesting how the perceptions differ.

We were folded into the Skype org, with Tony Bates -who I maintain had no idea what he was doing- reporting to Ballmer. Fine. But he and his henchman (Mark something?) embarked on a quest to make everyone do by-the-book Scrum. That, screwing around with corelib, and the ill-omened liveid migration process meant that Skype didn't improve in any way users cared about for several years. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape changed and the only Skype feature anyone ever used - being able to call your grandma in another country for cheap or free - lost its differentiation. It was clearly over by the time my mom told me she had whatsapp.

Nobody I knew had any animus towards Skype engineers and we were entirely willing to help... but what anyone actually wanted was kind of unclear.

If you rounded up 100 regular web users and ran a usability test where they had to do this to post a comment, how many do you think would succeed?

That seems "prohibitively convoluted" to me, if nothing else.

Apple would sell exactly one kind of burger, which is great but costs $20. The wrapper is rose gold or space grey. Only Apple-certified condiments can be applied to the burgers, and a packet of ketchup is $5. Each year the faithful queue outside for the privilege of obtaining the latest burger.

But then if you are in a queue already the most efficient response is to leave and rejoin at the front. Quite soon you don't have a queue, you have a brawl.

Perhaps I'm missing something.

What I would really like is a little bit like this but not quite the same: full text search over everything I have ever seen on the computer. It would read and index the emails, web pages, word docs, etc as I open them, then later when I think "I know I saw a doc about cache oblivious algorithms", I can search for it without being distracted by 100K documents I haven't seen. Or I can find that email I read, without finding the same phrase in a bunch of junk mail I never opened.

Does anything remotely similar exist?

Today, fusion power is not workable. We have no idea if or when it will be.

"Let's carry on as-is until fusion works" is "don't worry, we'll put wings on the bus" in Doctorow's terms. By all means, let's continue fusion research. But we should also urgently work on some other angles just in case.

The stupid machines are so paranoid.

"Unexpected item in bagging area!" That's my bag to put the groceries in.

"Place item in bagging area!" I just did, your scale just sucks. Let me pick it up and put it down again...

"Unexpected item in bagging area!"

Really, f*ck these user-hostile abominations.

I think it's abnormal for executives to get compensation > entire company revenue. I'm sure it happens in other industries from time to time but it seems like a sign of misinvestment to me.

Seems like an improvement in KWh/kg could make a big difference in weight, and hence in efficiency.

A mountain goats show without egregious omissions would be about 3 days long.

They're also playing the first post-lockdown concert I will be attending :-)

I wonder if Obvious Plant fake items will one day be valuable. https://www.instagram.com/obviousplant/

They seem rare enough...

> We are not Vulcans.

Exactly. Graham gives the impression that he thinks conversations are a set of automata exchanging logical propositions. Rather makes me wonder if he's ever met a human.

I had a program once which failed every time it was 8 or 9 minutes past the hour and worked the rest of the time.

It parsed a string containing the time and sscanf treats "08" and "09" as invalid octal numbers. Argh.

I believe there is (or was) a product used by TV stations which would semi-automatically re-edit a movie to fit in a specific amount of time, mostly by removing the start of end of a cut where not much was happening on the audio or video. Assuming I'm not completely imagining that, anyone know what it's called?

If the casual statements were "I like cheese" or "tabs are better than spaces" that would not have been newsworthy. "Feminism is a disease" and "Q is legit" are rather more controversial statements.

This reminds me of Greg Egan's creepily effective SF story "Reasons to be Cheerful", which is online here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/greg-egan/Reasons-To-Be-Cheer...

How happy would you choose be if you could consciously decide how happy to be?