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sweettea

1,313 karma · joined July 14, 2010

sweettea@dorminy.me
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sweettea··on Why a spritz of water before grinding coffee yields better results
A high quality grinder also minimally heats the beans as they grind - heat can change the volatility of the oils, resulting in changed flavor (and usually not for the better)
sweettea··on How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale
Ads act as a recommendation engine, helping people find solutions to their problems sometimes before they ever realize there is a solution.
sweettea··on How Meta patches Linux at hyperscale
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ILTqn1EYIXQ is the original talk, which says it takes 4 days to deploy a KLP to the whole fleet.
sweettea··on Writing and linting Python at scale
https://discuss.python.org/t/a-fast-free-threading-python/27...

In which Meta promises 3 engineer-years for enhancing python.

sweettea··on What the Hell Happened to Effective Altruism
They believed the FDA causes great harm by gatekeeping potentially tremendously lifesaving but risky treatments.

For instance, some worked to develop a covid vax within a few weeks of COVID emerging, and distribute knowledge of how to build and self-dose with this home covid vax. This would help save livs, probably, at the cost of potentially being dangerous, but each individual could choose whether they were willing to take that risk.

sweettea··on If you buy a Cybertruck, Tesla says you can't sell it for a year
This isnt new; I got a Mercedes van this year and had a 1-year no-sale clause in my purchase contract.
sweettea··on I designed my own keyboard layout. Was it worth it?
Jonas' keyboard layout is so awesome and incredibly inspirational for my own journey -- probably the single most read documents that I've spent time with this year.
sweettea··on The vital art of talking to strangers (2021)
I have never experienced talking to a stranger at a bar - one goes with ones friends, and gets to know them better, but nobody known to nobody ever gets added to the conversation.
sweettea··on $HOME, not so sweet $HOME
But XDG specifically decides what can go in my $HOME for me too -- .config etc. If I want .chromium, .0ad, etc. instead of .config, I'm SOL.
sweettea··on Emacs is my new window manager
But Sway makes you use Wayland instead of the eminently stable and usable X11.
sweettea··on 55 GiB/s FizzBuzz (2021)
Ah, but for 8 of the values, you need to print the number, which changes each iteration.
sweettea··on Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland
So what you're saying is that Apple is infringing on this Swiss company's trademark and must be forced to change their logo before logos with apples are irreversibly associated with Apple instead of the Swiss company?
sweettea··on Scripts for Btrfs Maintenance
If there is no discard work to do, a fstrim on btrfs will do nothing. Discard=async, the new default, should be enough to trim deleted data without using fstrim. But nothing bad happens by using both.
sweettea··on Europe’s Longest Bicycling Tunnel Opens in Norway
Indeed, if we assume cyclists use the tunnel 100 days a year going both ways through it, thats saving each one nearly 60+ hours a year. If each one's time is worth $20, that is over a thousand dollars per cyclist per year - it only takes 9k cyclists to make the savings outweigh the costs in five years.
sweettea··on How to Make a Hotbed for the Earliest Sowings (2020)
Diocletian retired from emperoring to his pride and joy, growing cabbages, and refused folks' urgings to take the throne again.
sweettea··on A 1.5GB string
The formula for number of needed servers seems like a fine approximation; I'm very confused how you could use the pigeonhole principle. Perhaps to say that if you have N servers, one of them has at least total_users/N users? But assuming you have a decent methodology for balancing users across servers, and can rebalance to use a new server when added, this has basically the same effects as the formula given so I'm clearly missing why you pointed this out.
sweettea··on A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
Expected value is already what most forecasts show. Expected value conveys information poorly in some common cases, like thunderstorms in the summer. It is very different to hear there's a 20% chance of a thunderstorm, dropping an inch of rain, vs. a 100% chance of .2" rain - the former needs a backup plan to deal with rain, the latter needs to plan for rain. Hence I prefer the text forecasts from the NWS, which list an amount possible, plus more in thunderstorms, rather than a bare number.

Meanwhile the 'probability' listed in forecasts is also well defined as an expected value - it's (probability of X% rain coverage) * (X %), over all X. (Rain is defined as > .01")

sweettea··on I was banned because of a security flaw in Facebook’s password recovery system
Imagine how much scammers would use such a service with stolen credit card info.
sweettea··on S.F. apartment rents fell again
Can you elaborate on how this is starting to happen in a limited manner?
sweettea··on Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media
It's not a matter of not trusting the child to go for a walk unsupervised -- it's not trusting CPS to consider it acceptable.
sweettea··on Genders.wtf
By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism.
sweettea··on The first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers
No -- they laid off a broad swath across the board -- I know folks with 10 years experience who were laid off, although it did seem the layoffs were tilted toward more recent hires.

(I didn't get laid off)

sweettea··on Acorn, our open source precision farming rover
As an recently ex small regenerative farmer, seeding is a well understood process - tools like the Jang or four-row seeder make it fast and easy. What really peeved me was the repetitive, uncreative aspects, primarily the cultivation - I can't think of many less exciting things than walking up and down beds of crops too small to have a closed canopy dragging a cultivation hoe as close to the rows as feasible. Its one thing when the plants are big enough for some variation; but by then theyve shaded out the weeds and its not needed.

I would love a tool like this, even if it required setting up some sort of track, which could run a standard seeder on a precise path and then habitually run a standard cultivating hoe within a quarterinch of the rows it seeded without me thinking about it. I could never rig up something suitable on a BCS toolbar, its bed clearance wasnt enough. Being able to not interact with a crop beyond irrigation maintenace, filling seed hoppers, and harvesting/bed flipping would be amazing.

sweettea··on Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times
Tacitus was certainly not a Christian source, writing around 120 AD, and wrote of Christus:

"Christus, from whom the name [of 'Christian'] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular." [1]

One could cast doubt upon Tacitus, but he is one of the primary chroniclers of Rome, and much more of what we know of Rome would be in doubt also.

[1]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annals_(Tacitus)/Book_15#...

sweettea··on Facebook increased satisfaction and usage by sending fewer notifications
There is a 'Most Recent' option for several years which provides chronological newsfeed: https://m.facebook.com/help/218728138156311/how-do-i-see-the... . It isn't well known, for sure.
sweettea··on Wild mammals are making a comeback in Europe
Your initial argument was that farmers should want the development, "do you really like that stupid cow?" -- and my attempted point was that yes, the farmers do in fact like that stupid cow. All the benefits you propose of the increased tourism and 5 million dollars pale in many farmers' minds to the downside of having more tourists, who clog up the roads, complain about their farming practices, drive up land prices, and want to build developments. Farming is a lifestyle well suited to loners and cow farming in particular is well suited to very remote areas; thus added tourism, making it a less remote area, decreases the local farmer's reason for existing there.

To reply to your new point, an important part of democracy is the right of self-determination, and people get very upset when faraway majorities impose their wills despite the local majority disagreeing. Consider Catalonia, or other independence movements throughout history, or any number of instances of imperialism throughout history: should a national majority be able to force a local majority to give up their way of life / national independence / raison d'etre? That's how local residents who've been there for 20, 30, 60 years feel about outsiders coming in to diversify the economy or introduce wolves to eat their lambs -- why are the outsiders coming in and imposing their negatives on their apparently perfectly good way of life?

sweettea··on Wild mammals are making a comeback in Europe
Yes. The farmer chose to live way out there far from people, and would appreciate the dang tourists going away.
sweettea··on Lionel Messi Is Impossible (2014)
Messi's captured the hearts of the casual World Cup fan unlike anyone else. I don't know a whole lot about soccer -- more or less all I know is that the World Cup happens every few years, is played by national teams, and Messi makes impossible plays. What I do know is all because of Messi, whose wholesome relatability and exceptional ability brings casual viewers like me; I generally avoid sports because the players are hard to relate to or have personal flaws, but I love Messi's strong family roots. I would propose that merely for being a truly exceptional face of the sport he's the GOAT.

Maybe Maradona was that way in his day -- I'm barely aware that he was a good player of yesteryear -- but his drug problems (and the fact that his heyday was so long ago) make him much less relatable or exciting to investigate as a inspiration.

sweettea··on Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly
I struggle to see why supporting OpenStreetMap wouldnt be a better course of action. OSM already has lots of good data; is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data? Hard to tell from their press release or really even the article.
sweettea··on Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client
Absorb is amazing! Even if you don't take up Sapling, there's a 'git absorb' plugin which I have found absolutely invaluable: https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb
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