wantoncl

Live in the south.

I have tons of it in my yard, and I'm genetically incapable of recognizing it by sight. I've gotten it 3 or 4 times in the past 10 years, and it's really annoying. I have some other type of vine, it's maybe kudzu but I'm not sure, that has completely enveloped trees, fences, climbing up my house. It's certainly intertwining with poison ivy and all the other plants and could very well pick up the oil from it.

There's an old movie called The Day of The Triffids, about walking/ambulatory plants, and you could shoot a remake of that in my yard and probably not need special effects. Kudzu can grow so fast you can almost see it in real time.

For various definitions of "practical", I remember a quote from Frederick Forsyth, to wit: "No one has ever hacked my typewriter, nor will they." I think he was using some manual thing as well, and possibly from back in the day when he was a correspondent working in Africa in the '60s. (his quote is maybe 10 years old)

I'm old enough to appreciate a device that does one thing and does it really well, has almost no dependencies (just paper and ribbons, and if it's a cloth ribbon, you can re-ink it even more cheaply), doesn't need electricity, built like a tank, and can be remarkably portable, and is the epitome of a distraction-free writing environment. Even the most ruggedized laptop probably can't take a bullet and keep on working.

You would then have to add mechanical devices, which would likely be heavier (requiring even more support structure strength), that would have to move hundreds or thousands of tons of building mass, and with high precision, and then return it to the initial position, while canceling the inertial forces to prevent it from ping-ponging and making it worse. I only have basic engineering knowledge but I can almost hear one of my professors screaming, 34 years later. :)

Many tall buildings have a tuned mass damper near the top that helps to dampen oscillations. It doesn't require any active mechanical devices. Taipei 101 has it out in the open, you can easily find videos of it during earthquakes.

Don't know if SQLite has a feature or extension for that, but MS SQL Server has one:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/b...

Not sure how much use it gets though, I never hear anyone talk about it, including Microsoft folks.

PDF: http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf

From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17468920

More imagery:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Hilariously, I was trying to enable the minimal JS needed to view that page, and UMatrix DID THE EXACT SAME THING, it shifted down a site I wanted to block under my mouse button. :)

For all you dystopian fiction writers:

the end of all humanity, caused by lazy loading JavaScript.

It shouldn't take more than a weekend, and the "Terrifyingly realistic!" reviews will write themselves.

Bletchley Park has a commemorative plaque for the Polish mathematicians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#/media/File:Bp-...

If you are the slightest bit interested in codebreaking, visiting Bletchley Park is an absolute delight. I cannot recommend it highly enough. The tech is still impressive today, and even more impressive is the human side of it. The huts are still there (mostly) and a few have be renovated so you can tour them. There's also the National Museum of Computing right next door with a replica Colossus machine.

You can watch a number of demos and tours on Youtube, but seeing a Bombe machine decrypt your own Enigma encoded message in person is pretty impressive.

GuanoWatcher

Hi Bill!

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

I read something a while ago, a veteran who said something to the effect of: "all war would end immediately if the perpetrators had to smell it."

I think he had liberated a concentration camp. I wish I had remembered it better.

I think that this informed a lot of the fury towards the ordinary German population, that they could allow something like that to happen, or that they would ever just get used to it and go on with their lives. I'm probably conflating that with a scene from Band of Brothers, or some other written work.

I see what you did there. :)

You even managed a double-entendre in 2 completely different realms. Well done.

Tacit Blue is at the U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright Paterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. Absolute gem of a museum, also free admission last time I went (2019). Plus the XB-70, plus an X-15, PLUS an F-12 or YF-12 (can't remember which), and a stealth fighter, and....just awesome stuff. I haven't even mentioned the 3 other hangars full of planes from every era of aviation, or Memphis Belle, or Bock's Car.

Oh yeah, they managed to fit a B-36 INSIDE a building. :)

Obligatory: But can it run Crysis?

Another good example is Louie Anderson's debut on Carson:

https://youtu.be/2bRe1CeGe7g

I remember watching this right after he died, and was blown away by how good he was. Not only does he get laughs right away, they're sustained. I went back and timed it, and his first 2 minutes on stage has 1 minute of audience laughter and applause. He nails all the things you mentioned, and has the whole audience roaring in under 3 minutes.

Unicode support. It might have been the Windows ports of grep that were the problem, but ripgrep shines with Unicode files. And it handles a mix of Unicode and ASCII files without issue.

And I totally agree that having grep installed everywhere and it's pretty fast enough. But I had a few ripgrep searches that were genuinely eyeblink fast. Like my finger hadn't fully lifted off the enter key and it was done. On 10K+ plus files, about 1 GB, with 1.5M+ LOC. And the default folder recursion and .gitignore handling is a plus.

There's COBOL code at least twice, and possibly three times as old, that still runs billion dollar businesses every day, and likely will until you retire.

VB has its quirks but during its heyday, it was substantially more productive and easier to use than pretty much anything else.

> What's wrong with stephen wolfram?

The ego.

I think this is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

Not a dev tool, but I was very impressed with this demo of Photosynth:

https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...

Blind Man's Bluff:

https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...

I think it's on par with Skunk Works. Absolutely amazing stories about submarine espionage, stealth fighters but underwater.

Wow...finds a way.

Soul of a New Machine is absolutely classic. You'll learn just how much, and how little, computers and programming have changed since the 70s. And some interesting takes on microcoding, if you're already dealing with APIs on APIs, you'll get a better understanding.

If you want some Apple history, particularly on the early days of Macintosh, check out folklore.org. DO NOT start reading it if you have anything important to do for the next 24 hours.

A harder (and better) goal is how many lines you remove:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

There might be a bit of a problem powering it:

https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/to-boil-the-oceans/

I don't use it, but LibreOffice has the Base component that can be a data entry front-end for many ODBC and JDBC supported databases. I think OpenOffice has/had the same.

If you're using Microsoft, you can use MS Access for data entry to similar ODBC and SQL Server backends. If you want to do some VBA programming you can set up a UI in an Excel workbook too.

OK, but where does the blockchain and Stovecoin mining fit in? I gotta make money from cooking on it somehow!

There's work that Feynman did on the Manhattan Project that is still classified. I believe it was an unpublished formula to determine the yield of the atom bombs.

Some videos of Danny Hillis talking about Richard Feynman and Thinking Machines:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=danny+hillis+ri...

Also listed this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNaEI70hT-o

Danny Hillis article on Feynman (if you prefer reading):

https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-and-connection-ma...

Feynman computer science videos:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=richard+feynman...

Would you have the model numbers for yours and the newer model? Thanks in advance.

KEYHOLE and BYEMAN are code words regarding satellite reconnaisance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byeman_Control_System