usrbin

What is the purpose of cutting off the queue at a n% full? Isn't that effectively saying that the queue size is actually n% of the stated size, or am I missing detail?

Anecdotally I notice the same. I'm curious about whether it's the look of print vs. a screen, or the physical form of the text being a physical object vs. stored on a device. Do we get a similar effect from using e-ink devices?

The operative piece of the above post (to me) is "working _against_ the browser", not the existence of custom code per se. IME lots of problems with UI development have come (partly) from shoehorning tech to do something it's not meant to do, at the expense of speed, accessibility, and general usability. If the built-in thing doesn't do what you need, by all means build something that does, but it's worth keeping in mind that often the useful thing that end users actually need/want is the built-in thing.

Fair. Keeping in mind real-world consumer behavior matters to the equation.

That said I don't know that we should assume that "build for longevity" and "build for effective disposal" are mutually exclusive.

> $5,000 a year

> It's less than is spent on a single coffee maker

I really want to try this coffee maker.

> Cell phones and mobile devices in general have always been disposable items with limited expected lifespans.

I agree with your second point, but I want to push back on this first point a bit. While it seems like manufacturers benefit from devices being disposable, I don't see a strong reason why they should be.

The reality is that extending the lifespan of devices is one of the best ways to lower consumption. When it comes to changes like retiring 3G, we also have to weigh that against the environmental cost of maintaining the 3G network. Given the maintenance impact, it may end up being a net positive to retire these devices, but it's still an important cost to consider.

To be clear, we should also improve disposal and recycling, but that shouldn't be to the exclusion of reducing and reusing.

While I agree with your sentiment, I don't think that's quite what the person you're responding to meant. Rather than talking about how things should be, they're talking more about the reality of the available options as they are now.

To give a baseline: I pay for email hosting through a reputable non-Google company. It costs me about $40 a year, for both the domain name and the email hosting, and it didn't require me to have any technical knowledge to set up. Compare that with, for example, my cell phone plan (around $100 a year) and it seems pretty affordable, or at least comparable to other common bills.

I think it's helpful to think of this in terms of other utility services. People tend to agree that heat, electricity, phone, etc. should be accessible to the non-rich. But those still cost money to operate, and the cost is paid by consumers. (There can be a broader discussion around who should pay for this, but the money does come from somewhere.)

If we decided that electricity could be free, but that it would be funded through personal data collection, that you could permanently lose access at any time, and that you wouldn't be able to get outages fixed in a timely manner, that most people would prefer the current model.

The bottom line is that email is pretty important to modern life, similar to a phone. One way to ensure that your email is reliable is to pay for it.

Charging station availability is a bit of a red herring though. Like you said, it's really dependent on charging overnight/when you're not using the vehicle. Obviously the viability will vary from person to person, but considering that a huge portion of car owners don't need more than 100 miles a day, just charging at home is a viable option. For those people, EVs provide a better overall experience.

I agree we need to improve charging station availability. With a few exceptions, EVs are generally not well-suited to long-distance travel.

Audio person here. I found the post fascinating, but I wish they did more to explain what they were talking about to a layperson.

Basically, all sounds that you hear are composed of many layered sine waves of different frequencies and intensities. The graphs in the post are spectrograms, which graph those frequencies over time. The Y axis represents pitch, the X axis represents time, and the brightness at any given point represents how loud that particular frequency was at that particular time.

Most sounds, even seemingly simple ones, look very complex on a sonogram, like a smudged pen stroke. The images of different instruments below demonstrate this; these are all very complex sounds, even though we only hear it as a single note being played. The voice one is one of my favorites, because it shows just how weird and complicated everyday sounds can get.

But bird songs are different; on a sonogram, they appear as a single line. The complexity of the bird songs here comes from the fact that they're taking a single sine wave and changing the pitch over time. Where most sounds look like a complex mix of smudged paint strokes, bird songs look like a single, precise, bouncing stroke.