shstalwart

Interesting. Pretty sure __I__ would crash with that many tabs open.

I run firefox on linux on two computers. Works great, no tweaking/building required.

There will always be a trinket to keep you on the plantation.

And then there are all of us, so enamored by tech, that we promote the destruction of serendipity in the stacks every step of the way because serendipity isn't searchable. Or something.

For me, it's only partially a technical problem. If I need to really study something, I always print it out or buy the book. Honestly, I don't really understand why, but I'd guess that my comprehension and patience are at least double when reading a hardcopy.

Another advantage for me of physical books (etc) is that you have something like "tactile memory." What I mean by this is that very often, I can find where something was mentioned basically by how the book feels when its opened (e.g., how thick the pages are in each hand). A similar thing happens with shelves of books.

This is pretty hard to replicate with better tech.

This happened to my grandmother a few years ago, with somebody claiming to be me. Purportedly, I had broken my arm in Spain, and needed money for surgery. Fortunately, she had the good sense to call my parents and find out if I was actually in Spain.

Going on two years with fastmail, I get zero spam. I'd say its good enough.

Agreed. Writing with AUCTex plus helm-bibtex is like a dream. I like org-mode but I find it a too limiting for actually writing papers in.

An alternative point of says they are platform which is censored.

> I believe you cannot simply run Linux any laptop. You have to buy a laptop specifically for Linux.

No you don't. Ive had debian on a lenovo laptop for five years with none of the issues you speak of. Printing and scanning work great (dell and brother printers). It boots fine after a hard power off. No update has ever fubard anything. I have no more trouble hooking up to a projector than anybody else (my boss has a mac and complains about hooking up to projectors).

I've also run linux without issue on prior laptops from toshiba, acer and sony and some off brand thing from 10 years ago. I have a brother who runs linux on a dell laptop just fine (and has for years). A co-worker runs linux on a newish sony laptop. I guess I'm just living in the perfect intersection of hardware that just magically always works with linux. Or maybe, linux just works.

It's really not that hard. I'd used gmail since early 2000s and it took me one long afternoon a couple years ago to switch basically everything to fastmail. Probably helped that everything I cared about was already a record in keepass though.

I really like Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right. It's all conceptual (i.e., proofs), and doesn't focus on computation at all.

Not really. Normal people have basically no interest Himalayan salt.

Not everybody believes ethics is a set of rules set forth by some committee.

Not really. It's pretty evident at this point that most publications are basically worthless.

> ...and monitor choices, you...

So... more telemetry. This user says no thanks.

I don't really understand why people think cars are so expensive. Sure, they can be, but that's true of anything. In 20 years, I've never owned a car worth more $4000. Hardly seems like a huge investment. I have friends with bicycles worth more than my current vehicle.

The bug is that plugins can't be manually enable. Nobody is working to fix that.

Completely agree. Using firefox feels more and more like using an iThing.

True. But they also increasingly stand for things I completely disagree with. Namely, deciding which software is approved for me to run on my computer. The way I see it, extensions shouldn't need to be "approved" anyway.

Luckily, I can still type "make install" without debian informing me that "random_dangerous_untrusted_code_from_interwebs" is not approved.

Yes.

People like to say that "modern" science has moved past Popper. In my opinion, this is because it allows them to attach the gravitas of Science [0] to whatever their pet topic is, even when that topic does not admit falsification.

This is not to suggest that we should not inquire on these topics, but rather that they should fall under some other umbrella besides Science.

[0] Or whatever is left of it at this point.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree then. I too have coded up a lot algorithms from academic papers. In my mind,

yk = C * xk + D * uk

is a lot clearer than

position_at_time_k = output_matrix * state_at_time_k + feedthrough_matrix * input_at_time_k.

The first is an idiom. The second is not.

Interesting. I've come to basically the opposite conclusion and find case insensitivity to be counter intuitive. "Foo" and "foo" are not the same set of ascii characters; why should they map to the same thing?

"The code produced by people in academia" is about as specific a target as asking about the diet of people in Portland. It ranges from a strict regimen of Taco Bell to pesca-pescatarian.

In mathematical code, single letter variables are often the clearest. "Descriptive" names only obfuscate the meaning further, because the meaning is in the math.

Is whataboutism the modern incarnation of ad hominem?

Personally, I would classify these objections about Balsillie's arguments as ad hominem attacks. If the point he makes is logically coherent, what does his personal motivation it matter?

> If a tool is misused, it's generally because it's hard to use correctly.

Citation needed.

Tools get misused all the time. If I use a flat bladed screw driver as a pry bar/chisel/whatever, that doesn't mean the flat bladed screw driver is hard to use.

Personally, I vastly prefer autotools, both as a user and developer. When I got to the point I needed some kind of build system, I found autotools much easier to learn than cmake.

As user, I find the experience with autotools to be much nicer as well. For whatever reason, the interface just seems more intuitive. I mean, ./configure --help will tell you basically all you need to know. An underappreciated bonus is that you don't have to install more stuff just to __build__ some program you might not even want. I've run into more than one project that required a specific version of cmake, which as luck would have it, was not the version packaged with my distro. This leaves you either building another cmake first or finding a tool/library that isn't so persnickety.

Given the choice between trying a project that uses CMake or or autools, I'll choose the autotools based project every time.

If I'm going to do more than scan the introduction, I always print a paper. My comprehensive is significantly higher than reading on a screen.