newhere420

Could this be in any way related to the strobing effects (and afterimages / discrete tracers) of LSD and other psychedelics?

(see also http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/The-Control-Interr... - not sure how much of it is just pseudoscience nonsense though)

You're kidding right? https://i.imgur.com/GapKBh1.png And I know from experience living in that area that Google Maps is lacking a great many of the local kebab shops.

"generally absolutely ridiculous"

Did you look at the map? It's nearly all things with a place name in the product name. For example, "Welsh Beef". Why is it reasonable for a consumer to buy Welsh Beef and for it to possibly have come from somewhere other than Wales?

It seems to me, more like generalising the concept of trademarks to place names rather than just company names and brand name.

Am I just misremembering, or was there a time where the only way to register a .je was direct through island networks? I used to live there, and recall the domains always being a bit of a pain.

Isn't this more of an argument that we shouldn't necessarily treat everything we observe, rather than that we should observe less?

I get that screening may not be worth the cost, but if the screening is effectively free... then it seems the problem is more in how we respond to the answers.

In the UK, debit cards can chargeback. While this is currently implemented over MasterCard/Visa network, it's the bank that performs it and there's no reason to expect that would change if something replaced the plastic.

Something similar (but not quite identical) exists for direct debits called the direct debit guarantee.

Although the vast majority of major airports are state owned, some aren't. Notably, most major airports in the UK (including Heathrow and Gatwick) are privately owned and operated.

I don't think T-Pain is trying to sneak autotune past anyone...

Is there any reason why these devices can't have a USB-C connector on one side, and a USB-A connector on the other? Being able to keep just one single token around and knowing I can always use it without an adaptor is the holy grail of these devices for me.

>>> the cost of getting by — long ago went past insane (£17,040: the cost per year of educating a four year-old child at Thomas’s school in Fulham, not including uniform).

Note that this is only if you send your child to private school, not merely "getting by". Even among the middle classes, this is not very common, especially at four years old. The nicer parts of London have some of the best state schools in the country.

Setting up accounts for the first time is a pain here, but most natives do that when they're a child. Once you already have one account, setting up subsequent accounts with other banks is much easier. Personally it has never been a problem, but I know several non-natives who had extreme difficulty.

My understanding is this is largely due to very tight regulations that have been placed on the banks to verify identity and stop money laundering. They also now rely on the banks to collect taxes and close accounts of illegal immigrants.

Lots of places ask for signatures, but I've never had anyone actually check my signature. Which is good, because like you, my signature is completely inconsistent.

Pending transactions I've never had an issue with - they usually appear on my phone within a few seconds of me tapping my card. And my banks automatically issued me contactless cards without me having to specify - but they did have an opt-out.

Android Pay was late, but is now accepted virtually everywhere across the country.

Banking apps are terrible. No argument there. Hopefully the new open digital banking legislation will fix that.

For sending money I've still always just used plain old FPS (instant) bank transfers or PayPal. PayM hasn't really been pushed enough yet...

Although I agree with the aims of the project, trying to understand it leads you down a rabbit hole of complexity that ultimately never pays off. Ontology, vocabulary, RDFa, OWL, FOAF, etc.

I assume this is a continuation of - or somehow related to - the semantic web project that W3C spent a lot of time spinning its wheels on back in the early '00s. Back in the day, I bought into the hype that this would be the next big thing, but it never gained traction. Nobody understood it. It was too meta.

Trying to do anything with semantic web specifications was like writing an academic treatise on the philosophy of meaning, and ultimately delivered no more value to users than a hacked up <table> layout.

Same experience here in the UK. Started out poor, but now just as good as Royal Mail.

Not GP, but my level was 8 nmol/L in the middle of summer. No medical explanation could be found for why I was so deficient, and I get at least 1hr sunlight every day during my daily cycle commute (UK). Symptoms were depression, tiredness and disturbed thinking.

I was prescribed vitamin D3 10,000 IU/day.

If they won't warn us, could you please warn us? - Fellow ALB user.

We're using Chrome Headless inside Docker to produce thousands of PDF reports from an Angular/D3 web app.

It works very well, but there are some gotchas with regard to the Chrome Remoting Interface.

Can we know what humans are thinking?

Try looking at the technology used by the software you enjoy using the most. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Granary Square and More London are in areas that don't tend to have that much of the issues you mentioned.

Canary Wharf is busy in the week because it's full of skyscrapers. But I live just round the corner from it, and it's dead in the evenings or at weekends unless there's a special event going on, despite the relative safety. Other public areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods tend to be a lot busier. And actually, there's a large group of young drug dealers that regularly hang out in the west area of the Canary Wharf development.

That said, the private security forces do indeed do a good job of keeping these areas safe, and free of threatening homeless people and such. Still debatable whether or not that's a thing we should be solving by privatising public spaces...

Most large appliances in Europe, even the cheap ones, will have some claim on the packaging like 5-15 year guarantee. However for the cheaper ones, once you try to actually use them beyond the EU 2 year minimum[1], you'll find there's all kinds of hidden terms and fees. 50$ callout, doesn't include labour, etc.

So in practice, consumers have been conditioned to just assume that nothing is really guaranteed to last, therefore just buy the cheapest one. With the exception of certain brands such as Miele who are very popular among people with enough money to drop on the high up front price.

You're right in that this could potentially be addressed other ways, for example with packaging regulations. If it says "15 year warranty", then it shouldn't have any hidden terms or charges.

[1] Although with the EU guarantee after 6 months it's technically your responsibility to show fault, with large non-moving appliances the usual assumption is it's probably the device's fault.

> There's just no way this will ever replicate wild herbs.

Why not? What environment or characteristic of plants grown in the wild is impossible to recreate in a controlled environment? Arguably, plants can be grown "in-season" all year round with technology like this, and be sold fresh the same day it is picked.

> Why is this artificial shit necessary? It's not.

Maybe growing food within the cities will help us to feed a dense local population, while at the same time minimising the impact on the countryside. Thus leaving the countryside natural for those who want to appreciate it.

Living in Britain, I despair at the eradication of the countryside. Natural environment has been almost exclusively replaced by farm land to grow food for our ever growing population, and we are still quite a long way from being self-sufficient.

Also, work like this will help if we want to colonise space.

> People don't appreciate the profound and beautiful foundations of "old" technologies

Are you the arbiter on what everyone else should be appreciating? Although you are free to appreciate and enjoy anything you like, other people such as myself derive deep pleasure from observing the constant onward march of technology and industry.

I agree with you, but there doesn't really seem to be any native application that occupies the same space as VS Code or Atom. VSCode is not just a text editor like vim or Notepad++, as some people here imply. As you say, it's a miniature IDE. And it's far more comprehensive than Sublime Text.

For .NET Core + TypeScript, VS Code is almost feature parity with full blown VS, while being an awful lot faster. The only thing I find particularly lacking is debugging, but even that is coming along well.

Nope, those figures were after adding up all the processes. What I have noticed in switching between platforms is that applications tend to report a far lower memory usage in Windows than on Linux or OS X.

Might just be an accounting difference. Forked process applications in particular are very difficult to account, because even their private/RSS may be COW from another process.

> Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power.

Are they though? The two applications that use the most energy on my Mac - by far - are Steam and Skype. Steam still has trouble with HiDPI and freezes when performing various UI interactions. The number of problems with Skype are uncountable.

I'm currently booted into Windows for work, looking at my current process stats, the top memory consumers are:

* Visual Studio (hodge podge of all kinds of things, 800MB)

* Chrome (215MB)

* Microsoft Intune (presumably native, 114MB)

* GitHub (.NET WPF application, 108MB)

* Explorer (native, 103MB)

* Search Indexer (native, 107MB)

* Lync (who knows, 98MB)

Meanwhile, the supposedly terrible Electron apps:

* Spotify - 58MB

* Slack - 93MB

* VS Code - 60MB

As far as interfaces go, Spotify, Slack and VS Code easily outclass GitHub, Visual Studio, Explorer and Lync in usability.

In Britain, you commonly use it in that form. For example, we might say "want to do X later?".

Perhaps it's just British?

Where is the circular reasoning? There are a fixed number of hours in the day, and I presume that becoming elite at either a mental level or a physical level, for most people, requires focus for the majority of your waking hours. My assumption may be wrong, but I don't see any circular reasoning. Note that I say that I think most people can achieve a good general level of fitness.

As far as my own issues go, I think you're speaking from the perspective of someone who has no medical issues and assuming that everyone else is similarly healthy. I have rheumatoid arthritis and hypermobile ehlers-danlos syndrome (amongst other problems). I try to keep fit, have special shoes and joint supports, do everything my physiotherapist tells me to do, and I exercise fairly intensely for at least an hour a day. But ultimately, I have physical limits that despite continual medical intervention, have proven resistant to treatment besides painkillers. In the last month alone, I've been to hospital 6 times. There's a good chance I won't be able to walk more than a few hundred metres by the time I'm 30, and currently if I try to push myself too hard, I typically end up injuring myself and needing to go to hospital.

A computer, for me, and other people like me, can be one of the most transformative purchases of our lives. On a computer, nobody knows you're disabled and you can do almost everything that an able-bodied person can. Arthritis can be a problem, but heated gloves help a lot with that.

Taken to extremes, though, there is a trade-off. Keeping generally fit is probably within the reach of most nerd-types and helpful for their mental state. However, actually being physically competitive at a high/elite level requires investing a lot of time in training, diet plans, etc. Similarly, being an elite programmer (or anything else) requires investing a huge amount of time in the craft. I imagine that people who manage to achieve both peak physical fitness and peak mental ability are rare outliers.

The stereotype of nerd as sedentary applies to me, to an extent. I think this is because, genetically, I have a number of physical problems, and also come from a poor background. For most of my youth, I was unable to achieve at a competitive level due to these problems - I have never won a single race, medal or trophy (as where I am from, they are only given out for sporting achievements). However, when I got a computer, my life changed. Suddenly I could create and achieve using nothing other than a keyboard and an internet connection. So in my case, the sedentary nature of my existence probably drove me toward computers, rather than the inverse.

I am glad you have found a way to incorporate your children into your lives in this way. And I would hope many parents attempt to do the same thing. When growing up, I cooked from a young age (about 7) simply because both of my parents worked two jobs, so if I didn't cook, I wouldn't get fed.

But I think many people lose perspective on this. There are a large number of people who, once they have finished their long hours at work, finished their >1hr commute home, washed the clothes, taken the kids to their activities, picked them up from school, cleaned the house, helped with the homework, etc. find that they do not have time to dedicate to cooking. Often, these are poorer people, they may live a long distance from a good supermarket, and simply buying fresh groceries is a challenge.

Knowing people in this situation personally, they feel extremely guilty and regretful over the fact they can't make their kids nutritious home cooked meals every day. People not in that situation often don't realise that buying a freezer full of frozen meals and a cupboard full of tinned pasta/beans is often more cost effective than trying to plan buying fresh food such that it doesn't spoil - given the inherent variability in how long fresh food tends to last. And arguably, more importantly to individuals with cashflow issues, is the stability. When you buy that frozen Mac & Cheese dinner, you know that $1 is going to feed your child for an evening. And that meal is going to cost the same next week, and the week after. It's simpler to budget that way. If you buy locally sourced, organic head of lettuce at the farmers market - it might last two days, it might last two weeks - there's not really any way of knowing.

I know many people who take great pleasure in cooking with the family at the weekend, but don't have time in the week. So from Monday to Friday, they live from prepackaged frozen food, takeouts. Innovation in this space would be welcome - but simply telling people to "make time" to cook isn't going to change anything. Making Mon-Fri cheaper and healthier might make room for higher quality food at the weekend, though.

Of course a lot of food innovation has occurred. Clearly, the silent majority are demanding convenience over health. But there is a strongly vocal segment of the population who think it should not have been - and they are very critical, and often demeaning toward those who have made different choices than themselves.

At risk of constructing a straw man, it does appear to be a widely aired view that we ought to go back to "all-natural" meals cooked from raw fresh, organic, non-GM ingredients. In my experience, vanishingly few people actually do this, because it actually is a hassle and doesn't fit well within our modern busy two working parent lifestyles. Indeed, within your own reply you treat the innovation within the food industry with disdain.

I agree that, often, food innovation has optimised for the wrong goals: strictly prioritising convenience over health, for example. But whether you like Soylent-related products or other innovations in food, it's astounding the number of people who are willing to publicly attack engineered food products simply because it's not natural enough for their preferences and lifestyle. But those same people do not care about the naturalness of all the other technology they use.

With convenience food, I believe the proverbial cat is out of the bag and there's no putting it back in. Short of a massive economic/technological disruption that gives adults in families as much free time as they used to have, it's quite unlikely we'll see a revolution in home cooking. Maybe Soylent and other engineered foods are actually healthier than living off takeouts and microwave meals - as many people do - and are worth investigating further, without overly harshly judging those who currently find themselves in situations where they can't find time to prepare home cooked meals every day.

Surely that depends on the age of the child, what you're cooking, and the size/accessibility of your kitchen?

Personally, I live with a kitchen that can't reasonably fit more than one person, and all the counters are inaccessible to children.