Corvus

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798536

Google Pixel watch. I had a Garmin fitness tracker and a Pixel phone, and had difficulty transferring my fitness metrics to Sheets. So why not combine the two?

I'll tell you why; the Pixel watch manages to combine all the disadvantages of a fitness tracker and a smartphone. Now I have to log in to my watch, the display is too small to read anything on, and I can't increase the font size. The Android fitness app is a walled garden inside a walled garden, and I still can't transfer my metrics to Sheets.

correct URL: https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-has-started-wor...

Lost Lagoon in Vancouver, Canada, is so choked with algae it looks like a lawn https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/stanley-park...

TL;DR: the current Sudanese civil war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80...

https://archive.ph/u210O

“More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them.”

spoiler: it's about the WGN-TV signal hijack in 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking

The Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen wrote a good cartoon called Rat Park about this experiment; https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

Xcrete

TLDR: Paul Erdős https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

CBC Radio had a documentary on Fanon, including archive interviews with people who knew him. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/decolonizing-the-mind-the-lif...

For over a year there was a fake trail that went through a mountain in Google Maps from a ski hill to a waterfall. Local SAR would regularly have to rescue people trying to take the trail; I think at least one person was killed there.

People had long been trying to remove the fake trail from Maps, contacting Google, posting signs at the trailhead saying there was no trail to the waterfall, all to no avail. The fake trail was at last removed in November 2023: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/google-maps-...

“Dream about running races, not about crossing the finish line.” – Benjamin P. Hardy

“The agreement would see Canadian news continue to be shared on Google's platforms in return for the company making annual payments to news companies in the range of $100 million, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told CBC News.”

Google Digital Garage is an online learning platform for Google software such as Docs, Sheets, GMail, Workspaces, and others.

Google will be transitioning their courses to Skillshop at https://skillshop.withgoogle.com/

Requiring passwords to follow strict rules makes them less secure, not more: https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/

Note that “Memory Stick” is a trademark of Sony corporation for their proprietary non-USB portable flash RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick

A much-better “Kitchen of the Future” article was posted on TreeHugger in 2021. Decrying kitchen designs by people who don't cook, the article referred to a lesson by the USDA about applying experience from the US Army to home kitchens; the video is available at https://youtu.be/2N9RCQjPqh4.

It introduces the now-common idea of a “work triangle”; organizing everything needed to cook a meal around a single station.

This is the behavior of the Unicode Right-to-Left Override character U+202E. Meant to embed Hebrew or Arabic text, it is most used by hackers to change their exploittxt.exe attachment to read exploitexe.txt

We had a situation like that once because of circular dependencies; services that needed another service to start. “How is that possible?” you ask. Code reviews; “take that code out and get the data from an existing service.”

We hard-coded data into a base service, pushed it to production, restarted services that depended on it, then services that depended on those services, etc.

Herbie was also in several movies titled The Love Bug e.g. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064603/

I am reminded of a problem faced by geometers in antiquity of building straightedges; how do you draw a straight line when you have no existing straight line to copy from?

The book “How Round Is Your Circle?” includes some interesting solutions to this problem. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2449815

There is a rather obscure book titled "If Hemingway Wrote Javascript" by Angus Croll https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21487480-if-hemingway-wr... that contains literary reviews and source code in a variety of programming languages.

It's hard to describe this book; look at an excerpt at https://blog.honeypot.io/if-hemingway-wrote-javascript/. The source code actually runs and really does capture the writing style and idioms of the purported writers. I remember a factorial program by "Richard Feynman" that used numeric approximations that was just brilliant.

There was a discussion about this a while back at a Tetra Society meeting; http://www.tetrasociety.org/.

One idea I thought promising was audio games and household assistance delivered through devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo. They could be programmed and controlled though a natural-language API like Inform7, which is used for interactive fiction.

I do not know of any working tools for developing these, but I heard of a BBC experiment called "The Inspection Chamber" that allows playing audio games solely through voice. There is an article at https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/inspection-chamber

“draw an arbitrary triangle” means this works with any triangle.

“If men learn this ... they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written” - Plato on literacy, ca. 350 BCE.

One of the most memorable experiences of my life was building a small 2D RPG named Dungeon Of Despair from the book "Game Scripting Mastery" https://books.google.ca/books/about/Game_Scripting_Mastery.h... by Alex Varanese.

The game teaches you to build a simple game for Win32 from scratch. The graphics would be pretty dated now, but the scripting system for enemy AI and quests is a Turing-complete programming language. I learned more from that book than from my compiler course in university.

They never claimed VHS is “superior to modern alternatives”, they claimed it is “the vinyl of analog video recording”.

Moshe Safdie used “All the Lego in Montreal” to design his Habitat complex http://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/19/moshe-safdie-movie-intervie....