robbrown451

But obviously they did pass 6th grade.

I mean, where does the standard come from? Does it have nothing to do with what the typical student in a typical school is able to accomplish? If not, it is just arbitrary and meaningless.

Obviously it doesn't eliminate all engineering. What it could do, though, is reduce costs. The idea is you could potentially achieve the same level of safety with less material or less testing.

Those things are progress in a sense, sure, but...

It's as if someone finds a way to make an alloy less prone to metal fatigue, and you just say "but you can use thicker metal, and test more." Sure, but.... well I don't see the point explaining this further to you, but I assume people reading this that don't see everything in black and white already understand.

That safety factor and testing and inspection has costs associated with it.

Basically, it is a "solved problem" by designing things stronger than they have to be, and spending more on testing and inspection than necessary.

I'm sure the cases where these things are economical are fairly few, at least today, but if everyone took your attitude no progress would happen at all.

There's a strange circularity to the title.

It's almost like saying "90% of Americans have below median literacy skills." In that one it is obviously false, since we define median as being at 50-percentile.

But this is not a lot different. To me "6th grade reading level" should mean "the reading skills of a 50-percentile 6th grader." But then the statement can't be true, unless you accept that the typical 6th grader is just as good at reading as a typical adult.

So.... how do you define "6th-grade reading level"? It seems that you are left with defining it as what you might wish it were. Which is going to vary widely.

"You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates."

Without going too political, yes, I think that an unacceptably large amount of Americans are undereducated for the task of choosing between two candidates. Recently, many candidates have been appealing to the worst instincts and using things like conspiracy theories to gain an advantage. And bad things have been happening as a result.

It's really a matter of critical thinking, not reading per se, but presumably reading can contribute to an overall better ability to use logic and reason.

Also, it isn't just down to two candidates. In the last presidential election, there were many more candidates, and they were weeded out by both primaries and just polling. Both of which rely on the voters being able to wisely choose.

In my city, there were 12 mayoral candidates, all on the ballot. The ranked choice system made it workable. (not that instant-runoff ranked choice is the best system, but it is better than the plain-old plurality used in most elections) If more people were well-read (and had the mental capabilities that tend to come with that) we'd probably have better voting systems in a lot more places.

It's not mine, so I can't help. But I know iPhone / Safari has pretty terrible support for lots of things I've done having to do with midi and WebAudio, and they don't allow Chromium to run. Not sure why people consider that ok, but such is life.

Here is a very good WebAudio implementation of DX7, so you can hear what it actually sounds like: https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/dx7

Using some Mazola on my chainsaw because I can't find or didn't buy proper oils sounds like a typical thing I'd do (that people will shame me for but I don't care)

Admittedly my chainsaw is a small cheap electric one, but still. Unsurprising to me that it turns out it is ok to use what I have on hand.

"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft."

Hmmm, can I trust you to not put your own ads onto competitors websites?

That is beyond f'd up. Will they never learn?

It looks dead. I think they chose the wrong approach in lots of ways, but it wasn't that far from a JS (and Typescript) based OS on top of Linux that is actually a good idea.

ChromeOS is kind of close to what I'd want, if you could remove Google from it. (I actually like ChromeOS, nearly perfect for my kid's computer)

Firefox OS was also kind of close, but they missed in a lot of ways.

Here are the features of some OS I wish existed:

Open source and not primarily controlled by Apple or Google or Microsoft of Facebook or whatever.

JS and Typescript are essentially native and are the primary ways of building apps, but WASM would be available if you need machine code.

The same JS engine runs in the browser as for running applications. The same rendering engine works inside the browser and to render "native" apps that do any drawing to the screen. Preferably, you could choose to run on one of several browser engines

Most apps that run as native apps can, without much extra work, run as web apps, and vice versa.

The UI isn't built on a framework that might fall in popularity. So not React or Angular or Vue or whatever. If people want to use those in their apps, they are there, but core stuff for the UI avoids relying on them.

That's all I can think of for now. Beyond "design it really, really well and make a slick feeling but non-limiting front end experience." Which is hard.

(sorry to those with unbridled hate for JS and even Typescript)

They don't. At least mine doesn't. I've cleaned up the remains, they are intact but with burned sections.

I think getting rid of them quickly outweighs germs flying off them. Regardless I don't think they are known for spreading disease.

You should maybe feel bad about how much time you are wasting squishing them, compared to using one of those electric tennis racket bug zappers. They clear a kitchen of fruit flies in minutes, while giving you a most satisfying sound as you send them to the great fruit fly beyond.

Yes, both are cladistically correct, but debatable on semantic/usage grounds.

It's not so black and white. Bug is not a scientific term (well, not in its common usage), so it has blurry boundaries. Some definitions say "insect-like", some say "small arthropod", and so on. Lobsters etc are clearly in the gray area. So "basically bugs" is pretty spot on.... it is similar to bugs in the ways that matter to the conversation.

And it isn't circular or superfluous in that conversation, since the point that they are similar to other arthropods (which we tend to not give a lot of concern to the pain they might experience), is relevant and seemed to have been missed by those passing the law.

"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods.

So I'm not seeing your zebra analogy.

> “the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm”.

So how about jellyfish (which have no brains), or for that matter plants?

It seems odd to apply boolean terms like "sentient", rather than accepting that whatever it is, it lies on a spectrum.

I wonder what is the optimal balance between being so obscure that the bad guys probably don't know it but the victims and potential rescuers do.

Well now you have.

It can still be secretly conveyed, unless those bad actors bind the victims' hands or somehow watch them every second.

And the fact that this happens means next time it will work better, since probably 100 times more people know the signal now. (I've heard it described on the radio, and it is getting repeated everywhere on the net)

I think the bigger news is that the common opinion is that TikTok is useless, and this provides a rare counterexample. :)

Sure but that kind of limits its capacity to make an impact, right?

Pretty much everyone experiences some degree of anxiety. Tons of people here in California, before recreational cannabis was legal, got a medical use permit simply by truthfully telling the teledoc they have anxiety and cannabis might help them with it. Nobody cared whether this anxiety crossed some arbitrary threshold into being a serious medical issue, or if it was just regular old "my life can be stressful, but it sure is nice to relax with a sweet bong hit."

I doubt a single person was turned away because their anxiety wasn't considered "serious" enough, and I'm personally ok with that.

I'd be happy if the same situation happened with psilocybin.

That's a big difference from having to go completely across the world to seek treatment.

Needs more filters. I'd like ones that are based on popularity, so people (for instance) can aim for a name that is neither very popular or extremely rare. So many other things that could be filtered on.

I personally would like one that allows you to pick them based on popularity in parts of the world (for instance I might want to view names that is more popular in Europe than in the US), or even one that lets you choose names with or without diacritics. (I wanted a name for my daughter that had a "heavy metal umlaut" like Zöe but the mom ruled it out, which was a good idea now that I'm not on a Mac and I realize how freaking hard it is to type that)

I can think of many other suggestions (screenshots on your main page, and pick a chill color scheme as the default), but this is a pretty cool idea, and good luck.

This is trademark, not copyright. And no I don't think this qualifies as satire at all.

I wonder when Firefox will support MIDI 2.0, since they still haven't supported MIDI 1.0. (chromium and other browser engines have had MIDI support since maybe 2014) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897

Yes, cool things can be done with MIDI in browser, some that can't easily be done outside of browsers (such as synchronizing and overlaying on top of 3rd party videos, such as from YouTube). Here's some of the stuff I've been working on, mostly targeted at my kid, but adults love it too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khU5A6Y1dk4

(this one doesn't play on youtube because contentId flags it, but the app itself overlays on 3rd party YouTube videos and it is not a problem) https://www.karmatics.com/video/pianoplydemo.mp4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1TcyDZiuyI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj2rlytbDsY

Who says it involves "phoning home"? You can use offline apps, and turn off your internet if you want. I happen to like browser based MIDI apps, but then again, I write them, so if it is "phoning home" (which it usually isn't unless I want it to) it is often to localhost. :)

Your comment could be applied to typewriters. Do you prefer the days when, if you wanted to write a book or article or something, you used a typewriter that was completely standalone? I kinda like having my "typewriter-style keyboard" connected to a computer... it opens up a ridiculous number of possibilities that you can't do with a standalone machine without a big display and a fast processor and a big hard drive. And maybe internet.... you can't exactly have Hacker News with a standalone typewriter, but you can with a keyboard that connects to a computer.

Same with a "piano-style keyboard."

You're suggesting the east coast ports for stuff shipped from China?

Cool concept but the name doesn't work so well when spoken, as it conveys something considerably lower tech.

I'm assuming it's supposed to be clever (and it is), but still.... it's gotta get tiring always having to clarify that there isn't a W.

Technically only the first verse.

And overall, it is about sex with black women, in a general sense. Two of Mick's black girlfriends each claim it is about them. I'd say the first verse is sort of a twisted sex fantasy. (and not just men indulge in rape fantasy/roleplay stuff)

Obviously, Mick can relate to the slave trader in the first verse, in the sense that he had so many women who would let him do as he pleased with them, with zero regard for their enjoyment. I'm not saying he behaved that way, but he certainly could have, every day if he wanted to.

Not really defending it, it's pretty awful to listen to. It certainly has an iconic guitar riff.

We might spend that much if we actually cleaned most of them up.

So maybe we could consider the tax isn't really about cleaning them up, but compensating the rest of us for having to look at them.

If it is a medical doctor saying that there is science that says that smoking is good for you.... I'm taking a wild guess here, but I'm pretty sure that's getting taken down. At least if it starts getting lots of views. Because it would be a dangerous lie.