Posts by Notas Badoff 1076 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2009
I do wish someone would put together a decision tree map for keyboard buyers. Because there really are too many variations to consider and right now everyone is selling for Gaming!1!! Everytime I dip into the ads and articles about keyboards I'm appalled at seeing yet another new frabjets feature, like magnetic actuation. I just want to type, not slash and zoom.
Having read all the comments, I'm surprised that no one linked to XKCD comic "Writing skills". That would've been a good start for a discussion.
Please pardon my derailing your thread, but I'm bothered by something not mentioned in any of these "It's war!" articles.
Um, what other languages are used inside Linux. Aren't there just C and C++ ? And a smattering of assembler? And C++ is still being digested?
Unless there were some large multiple of two languages _already_ being used in Linux, a statement like the above title just gives me instant heartburn.
Yeah, right, boss, anything you say! (calcium pills gonna be a rare earth 'round here!)
Trump says coronavirus will ‘miraculously’ be gone by April ‘once the weather warms up’
During the campaigning, when Trump would claim he'd reduce food prices, why didn't people just point at his steady grasp of reality the last time around.
3am text: Hi! This is Megan with Tenagra. We were wondering if you have Tuesday nights free? Tuesday night is our company karaoke night. Everybody here loves it! Can you just drop us a note about your availability on Tuesday nights, before our 7:30am stage two intermediate candidate maybes meeting this morning? Thx
We have 'progressed' from the days when MSIE was the fiat "must use", to now when we sometimes have to say "don't use" one or another browser, because of persistent bugs or features lag behind the others.
This is not the advance we were hoping for.
Aiieee! You scared me silly about this. Even after checking a bit I don't know that I'm not nervous.
I just generated such a URL from Google maps and it looks like
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YBAJQeF5....
so indeed does have goo.gl in the URL
But it also has "maps.app." in the hostname, so not strictly the shortened URL format?
Then found in Google's notice that they explicitly say:
"Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025."
So (whew!) Google maps derived links will continue to work. Well, until....
Google translate has a great number of wince-inducing goofs, in likely every language.
Try "sigue tratando"... that comes up as "keep triying". Let's call it more correct than not?
Then there's 香, which is the first character of "Hong Kong". Is the resulting "sweet-smelting" the result of offering perfumed virgins to the forges?
I suppose the hope here is that AI will be *more* accurate at copying, rather than how Google started by ripping off badly done copied texts?
Have a great idea for a beneficial invention? Stop! Prehensile you may actually be pre-heinous! In the wrong hands your aid to mankind could will be turned to destruction.
Hmm, might this be a good party game? Challenge everyone to come up with a 'good' thing that isn't a 'bad' thing some how some way.
"Vaccines" "Whoa! Vaccines are mind control devices! And that's without anything being wrong with them! Just how they're used by the conspiracy theorists."
Make it an alphabet game? Axes, balloons, concrete, drugs, email, ...
Looong time ago, a bug report noted that a famous database product had timers that would overflow at around 4 days uptime. And then crash the database. And Microsoft closed the report with "not a problem, working as designed". At the time, between the prevailing uptime spans of the database and underlying OS, staying up for 4 days was only a 'theoretical' possibility. So the database people shrugged it off.
It would seem some equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would apply.
Somethings met and there was a 'blip'. You don't know how big they were (and are now) because the energy released would be partly determined by incidence angle. You don't know where they came from because you weren't measuring before the 'blip'. You can't measure where they then go because you still can't see them.
Sounds like all you'll get are frequency statistics - how many 'blips' per unit time per unit volume.
Hmm, might as well put up a STOP sign, wait for a bit, and count the holes.
Is this the article and research about 'revelation' 4 ?
* Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans (at businessinsider.com)
* Pretraining Data Mixtures Enable Narrow Model Selection Capabilities in Transformer Models (at Arxiv)
My S8 is dying, but so have my hopes for a decent new phone. Thinking about it last night, replaceable batteries are gone, expandable memories are gone, earphone plugs are gone, etc. etc.
Are they really thinking I'll spend BUCKs just to get a new battery? Cuz that's all the 'good' they're offering _me_.
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
.
Arthur Conan Doyle, after writing so much apparently intelligent text, asserted fairies were real. Willingly fooled by children. I can't think of a better cautionary tale. Can you?
Google news recently re-did their home page. With 80 pixels of blank dead space on the left side. No reason for that. It never contains anything but dead space.
I look at that and wonder - which of several negative conclusions about Google am I supposed to imagine?
↑ This ↑
I've had glimpses of the "foundation stories" of several coworkers. They didn't grow up with *any* experience of 'normal'. They are still flailing with real life and sometimes we (the bystanders) catch the blows.
Pick a particularly failing coworker - ask them what number marriage they're in. Or, conversely, ask them how many step-parents they have.
Yah, but that's the weekly summary of commentary delights. The *original* comment cannot be found by Google. Hmm, perhaps they have retroactively instituted "history off" against ElReg?
Thought I'd drop in this oldey, from El Reg comments, from 2010 (but I can't Google the original article? Hey, ElReg?!?)
Arrests were made after an argument over stolen cake led to a fight among scientists studying sea birds on an Arctic island, in a muffin stuffing Baffin puffin boffin biffing cuffing.
Glad that their product evolution has been of service to you. My oldest order is dated 2000/12, for Linux and Windows products. I even bought a copy for my brother-in-law in 2009 to save him boots to DOS for some software he was reviving.
But what brings me here is: "The company started life serving developers with a desktop hypervisor so they could more easily test their work in multiple environments."
And so I last bought VMware in 2014, when with lack of support, dropped features, and inflation of prices they left this developer behind.
I understand that it's a cutthroat world out there. And the stock market demands more and more revenue/profit. But this developer customer thought I was supporting the company. Instead we were the throw-aways on the road to victory.
On the other side, looking at other people's code is finding out how 'standard' APIs really work. Sometimes, *if* they really work. Heck, *if* they are really utilized by anyone!
Programming blindly gets you pokes in the eye. I don't trust documentation to call out the pain points and gotchas in real world usage. Do you really think you can duplicate years worth of painfully discovered production oddities in your pitiful few 'tests'? I'll search through the code of successful mature projects to find "here be dragons" warnings. Long time ago reading jQuery source convinced me R.O.U.S. exist!
I'm not trying to copy their code, just avoid their gray hairs.
An AI helping at improving organization seems likely to fail, when such organization doesn't already exist.
My "to wish for" standard of meeting notes looks like this: [CSSWG] Minutes Telecon 2023-01-25 [css-nesting] [css-text] [css-pseudo] and like this: www-style@w3.org from January 2023 by date
But that requires people being organized when coming to a meeting and a commitment to actually making progress. If not already true in your environment, new 'magic' won't work.
It's hard to implement a magic bullet when your company is more into political paint ball tournaments.
"... would mean intentionally draining the batteries of users' devices without their consent."
This "negative testing", what would it prove? How would it be evaluated? I'm at a loss to understand.
Would it be thus: person was using our app daily for X hours a day, and now they use our app less, and less often? Do you *ever* *want* to turn off your users?
Apoptosis: a form of programmed cell death. (Sometimes hoped for in anti-cancer treatments)
Shouldn't they have started with a list of functional requirements from existing extensions, especially the most visible?
You can keep saying you've thought of everything, but you're not actually doing any checks against reality. You're just moistening your finger and sticking it up where you won't feel a breeze. Pull it out, your design stinks!
"dubbed Operation Safeguard"
With a new admin password BarnDoorClosedCorrectly?
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