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roel_v

12,049 karma · joined January 21, 2010

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roel_v··on Malware on My Android Phone
Yes, on my Samsung the camera app is great, and it gets better all the time. I know people like to crap on Samsung but they do some great things in some regards.
roel_v··on The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance
It's an overarching term for people OD'ing on maple syrup and those being trampled by moose.
roel_v··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
shrug. It's largely opinion-based, I guess. My pet peeve (which also illustrates my point, but again, in an opinion-based way): there is no documented, 'officially supported' way to get the path of the current script in R. That is not a problem for amateur programmers who don't think about things like robustness, distribution etc, and it's needlessly complicated and bolted on in SAS, too. But it's still silly and indicative of R's typical use cases. Excel is reliable and well documented too, and I still wouldn't call even complicated workbooks 'software engineering'.

And CRAN... well... let's just say that people used to point to CPAN as a strength of Perl, too... All that sort of archives, after the first few years which comprise mostly of contributors with deep knowledge and who can produce high quality libraries, turn into dumping grounds for trivial half-assed 'libraries' under the guise of 'community contributions'. Example: try to do trivial compound interest simulations in R. So basic that it's barealy worth calling 'finance'. There are (at least) three packages on CRAN that claim to do this, except that (depending on which variable in the equation you want to solve for) they all provide only part of the solution, in mostly incompatible ways. And this is because very few of the people putting code into CRAN know how to... well... write good code. This is not an indictment of those people; many of them are much more intelligent than a bunch of us combined. It's just that for them coding is a byproduct, and with good intentions they share what has been useful for them, it just leads to a situation of 'in the land of the blind one eye is king'.

roel_v··on WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
Right, I used that procedure once, it's completely inadequate. It relies on having access to the old phone, knowing how to get files off it (and onto a new phone; both of which probably assume you know how to navigate the filesystem), and you basically need to follow documentation to do it, it's completely undiscoverable (maybe that last part has changed).

All of which is completely unacceptable in 2021 for a product meant for a large audience. Messaging is integral to people's lives, to the point where people keep 10+ year old phones because they have messages on them from people that passed away and they can't figure out how to move the messages across or to a new system. As much as it pains me to say, there just aren't any production quality alternatives to WhatsApp that can take over. And don't even get me started on Element/Matrix...

roel_v··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
On Unixy systems, spaces are uncommon because so little software can deal with them, so that people are trained from the very beginning to treat spaces like the plague. I do it too - I've been burned by treatment of spaces in shitty 0.x level software so many times (25+ years ago) that I now have an intuitive aversion of anything with spaces.

Spaces in filenames are a reality though, especially on Windows (where the home directory itself used to have spaces in it, and also where many home directories on corporate networks are on network drives and start with \\), and any software that can't deal with those kinds of paths has just not been exposed to much (if any) real world use. That was the point I was trying to make - software that can't handle anything but the most bog-standard path names in its core configuration is 'hey guys look at what I hacked up yesterday evening' quality at best. (yes yes it is possible to imagine exceptions, like software that is decades old and ported across platforms; I'm talking about something new that is meant to solve a general problem).

roel_v··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
While this specific project does have a github page, the R world is 'complete amateur, avoid avoid avoid'. It's not really a 'programming language' in the way software engineers would see it. It's more a loose collection of stats functionality that is tied together with text interfactes in a way that somewhat looks like programming to the uninitiated. I mean, batch scripting is technically 'programming', and Excel (even without VBA) is technically Turing complete, but neither of those would be considered 'programming' by software engineers, at least not under an intuitive understanding of what 'programming' is. (by that I mean, it's easy to be pedantic and argue that R and batch files and Excel files are 'programming' because of [xyz] where [xyz] will probably involve real 'definitions' and selection criteria etc; but despite those tools being useful, you can't do real software engineering in them, which you sometimes want/need).
roel_v··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
Of course, and so do I. But nobody ever even encountering the situation and/or bothering to report it, that's a whole different matter.
roel_v··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
Apart from all the other considerations and problems with various types of package management, consider this:

"Update January 6th, 2021 A reader alerted me to a bug with the current groundhog (version 1.1.0) where you cannot set the groundhog library to be a folder containing spaces in the name."

So we are talking about software here that somehow made it to version 1.1 *without anyone ever using a directory with spaces in it with it". This can be interpreted in two ways: either very few people have spaces in their paths, or very few people have actually ever even tried (not even really used, I'm only talking about the most basic trial use) this package. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I know where I'd put my money...

roel_v··on WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
"Signal has gotten better" is the new "Linux on the desktop". When I move to a new phone with Signal, is there already an (easy) mechanism to take along all my messages from my old phone? Last time I checked, there wasn't, and this is a core requirement, even if most people don't quite realize it when they start using Signal.
roel_v··on Microsoft job posting suggests a major user interface update expected in 2021
"desktop search that works"

Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.

To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.

roel_v··on I wish I never bought Bitcoin
Did I miss it or did the author not say how much he made on his trades? I think bitcoin is nonsense but without knowing how much he made, this reads like "do as I say, not as I do"...
roel_v··on Show HN: Raspberry Pi 400 with a $2 IPS 240x240 micro display
I ordered a few by accident from AliExpress and they showed up yesterday. I don't know for the life of me what to do with them. I was thinking maybe as a temperature/humidity monitor thing, but it would have to be mains powered because I don't think there's a way to make a device like this diy'able (with arduino and dht22 level components) and make it run off a battery for more than a few months. So any suggestions are good.
roel_v··on What’s the best non-smart TV sold today?
I have a Samsung from 2014 or so and Netflix, Youtube still work great (used every day) and there are dozens of other apps available for all sorts of purposes. My wife uses the national news one several times a werk. And yes I also have a chromecast but the ux of requiring your phone to play something on the tv is vastly inferior to just using the tv. I'm not quite sure what all.the whining about smart tvs is about, maybe it really is bad when using budget tvs, but for mine it has worked great for years (so does the dlna client on it btw; it's a bit spartan but works just fine, and we've watched a lot of content through it).
roel_v··on Covid: France rewards frontline immigrant workers with citizenship
Serving in the Foreign Legion is not like 'being in the military' in other places...
roel_v··on Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
If you want to go bargain basement yes. If not, get an XPS or a Thinkpad (of the 'pro' series) and you'll have great hardware. Of course there will always be someone who finds something to complain about, but overall, these are fantastic machines.

Thing is, people complaim about there not being high quality gear, but when someone then makes it, they balk at the price. Yes people, a great laptop will cost you $3000.

roel_v··on Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
The premise of this article is nonsense. Get a Logitech Brio and a Blue Yeti boom mic and you'll be so far ahead of the average Zoomer that people will make comments on how good your picture looks and sound sounds. If you want to take it up a notch still, mix it all through OBS and use a stream deck to control screen share transitions. You'll look like a wizard after some practise.
roel_v··on 3D printing boats is becoming standard practice
Is there anyone with a metallurgy background reading this? It's easy to melt aluminium at home, what are the properties of a billet cast with primitive tools vs in a factory? Like, is it more brittle, or does it have cavities etc? What circumstances does a factory control better for to get a better product?
roel_v··on On the Graying of Gnome
Oh, Gnome... I was a really into it in the late 1990's. Haven't used it for many years, except the occasional time I set up a Raspberry Pi and plug it into a monitor. For the sake of nostalgia I follwed a few of the links in the post and it took me all of 3 click to find this page (current top post in Gnome Discord) : https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-desktop-icons/4949/13 which was a painful reminder of why I gave up on 'Linux on the desktop' and pretty much 'open source for end users' overall.
roel_v··on GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
I can use them in the sense that I'm allowed to, but the compiler that I use can't compile FLIBS nor most of the libraries in your link; and the ones it could compile, I had to adapt, requiring understanding of what a 'hash table' is beyond just 'it's a key to value mapping'. I didn't want to make my post all about my Fortran problems, but I still think knowing the basics of fundamental data structures is foundational knowledge.
roel_v··on Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
"I didn't claim they were."

I know you didn't, but (without wanting to put words into your mouth), the more abstract claim was that there is some sort of technology path from growing salads to growing other crops, which (I'm claiming) there isn't, or at least not to a significant degree. The things you mention are already solved, have been for many years; it has been a specialty and major export product of our country for decades (as you indubitably know).

"Bulk foods (more properly called staple foods)"

I didn't use that word on purpose. What I roughly wanted to say was "root crops, grains, tree crops, basically anything that isn't herbs or salads", but that wouldn't be accurate either (carrots are root crops but not a staple and can to some degree be grown in substrates). But probably it's a distinction without a difference, in this context. I think it's fair, for the sake of the discussion, to talk about "leafy greens" vs "non leafy greens", even though "but tomatoes" etc.

"Bulk foods do just fine in regular soil where ever they are being grown, and do so reasonably efficiently."

No they do not, at least under other circumstances than precisely the ones we want to get away from, with indiscriminate use of nitrates and pesticides. I happen to have a yield model for various crops in the EU here open on my other monitor, that I've been working with for several months now. Agriculture as we do it today in the western EU cannot be done efficiently without intensive farming methods. Without fertilizer, yields are a factor of 2 to 4 lower. That is an absolutely game changing difference.

"A vertical farm does not compete with in soil agriculture in open air, it competes with greenhouses."

Well I'm not sure any more what we're arguing here. The OP's point was "Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else." Which, to some degree, holds for greenhouses (depending on definitions). The food production problems we have is not that we don't have enough area for greenhouses, or that we can't grow enough leafy greens; greenhouses are so efficient that we're not constrained by land for the demand we have for food that can be grown in them. What we need is more space efficient production of high calorie foods, in ways that don't degrade the environment in the ways and to the extent current methods do. Neither vertical farms nor greenhouses (I mean, 'vertical farm' is just a marketing word for 'multi story greenhouse') will be of any use for that.

But maybe your point is something entirely different and relates to the OP in a different way, in which case our whole discussion is moot.

roel_v··on Europe's Biggest Vertical Farm Will Be Powered by Wind and Planted by Robots
Other crops are not just scaled up versions of salads. Bulk foods (wheat, potatoes, sugar beets, cassava, rice) cannot be grown efficiently in such vertical farms, at any scale, with current technology. Having lots of multi-story greenhouses does not contribute to developing the sort of radical innovative tech that would be required for staple foods.
roel_v··on GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
Having spent much of my time in Fortan 90 the last couple of months - I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on this one. You know all these people saying "when will I ever have to write mu own hash table?" Well, when you start working in Fortran.
roel_v··on Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex
"The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint."

shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word".

"I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason,"

You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all.

Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.

roel_v··on Camouflaged Military Bunkers of Switzerland (2015)
Oh I've often thought about what it must be like to live in there in the case of an actual war. There were 3 or 4 rooms with bunk beds, 20 or 30 sleeping spots in each; one common room, not much bigger than each if the bedrooms; the kitchen, and bathroom/washing area. It would be horrible being locked up with 100 others in there for months on end.
roel_v··on Camouflaged Military Bunkers of Switzerland (2015)
Oh these are cool. When I was a teen, I stayed in one during a trek in the Alps; and then again (in another one) a few years later when I was a youth camp counselor myself. I was cooking dinner in the kitchen of the one we were staying at, and the supervisor came in, and casually told us "see that trap door you're standing on? If this bunker would actually be used during war, that's where any dead bodies would be stored in." Made for great "scary stories" around the campfire.
roel_v··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
Eh, at first I thought so too, but then it turned out my neighbours nan once accidentally hacked the US Navy that way, so after that I didn't feel all that special any more :(
roel_v··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
Or wuftpd. I once accidentally dropped my keyboard, and it turned out that the keypresses that generated were a remote root exploit for wuftpd.
roel_v··on The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
Ah that's useful, thank you.
roel_v··on The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
Yeah I was looking at that one earlier - are there holes on it to mount it to a wall? I can't quite tell from any of the pictures I can find.
roel_v··on The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
If only they had a version that leaves the gpio pins accessible...
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