DaveInTucson

Remember the whole "how many r's in strawberry" thing?

Yeah, not really fixed: https://imgur.com/a/counting-letters-with-chatgpt-7cQAbu0

I remember in the early 90s seeing 8 GB hard drives being advertised for sale, and thinking "who on earth would need 8 gigs of hard drive storage?"

(Me, that's who. I now have 63+ GB just under my Music folder)

I have wallpapers on my desktop and phone, but honestly hardly ever look at them. Even on the desktop, I pretty much always have various programs maximized or nearly so. If I feel the need to take a break, I either just browse the web (awkward-look-monkey.jpg) or get up from the computer.

hopefully not too dumb a question, but why put this on html instead of body?

Brian Eno's got some great ambient stuff (although Ambient 4 is not one of my favorites).

Some I'd recommend:

* Ambient 1: Music for Airports

* Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror

* The Pearl

* Thursday Afternoon

* Discreet Music

If you like any of those, there's lots more to explore. I don't care for all Eno's ambient works, but I really enjoy some of it.

Yeah, I played around with this a little bit. It seems like Notepad knows the document has been changed, the bug is purely that the title bar isn't updated in this one case.

Which actually seems all the more odd because it does get updated when you move the mouse, use the arrow keys (or other non-inserting keys like Alt+F4)

Many of these are on YouTube as well, just search for "James Burke Connections"

I think the problem is that "payment required" is an issue that's better dealt with in a layer higher up the protocol stack.

One can simply respond with the appropriate redirection code to a login/signup page (or whatever) when the client attempts to access a page where "payment is require" (just like any other authentication/authorization issue).

The only time I ever watch broadcast TV anymore is for (NFL) football. And in that case, I'm usually also , participating in chats and discussion forums, following box scores, and the like.

On the other hand, I've also noticed when watching movies on my computer (which is pretty much how I do it anymore), it can be really easy to get distracted.

On the gripping hand, when I watch shows on Amazon Prime, I generally don't have any difficulty watching through an entire episode without getting distracted. Possibly because I usually watch Prime on my tablet, where it's (a little) harder to switch between apps.

Not sure if the site is meant to be strictly Linux/Unix or not, but on Windows, cd without any path just prints the current directory and doesn't do anything else. (Although "cd ~" produces the response "The system cannot find the path specified.")

Just a series of unconnected errors at big companies

Except that "at big companies" is basically selection bias, problems at little companies don't get noticed because they're, well, small companies.

And the underlying issue of the "unconnected errors" is that software is rather like the airline industry: things don't really get fixed until there's a sufficiently ugly crash.

Here's another way to look at it. This link (https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/) says "traffic crashes [...] account for 2.2% of all deaths globally." Which means that out of your 50 closest acquaintances, one of them is likely to die in a car accident.

According to Wikipedia [0], the number of MV-related deaths has been right about 10 or 11 per 100,000 per year for the last ten years. Which makes the opening claim "Americans are condemned to lose friends and relatives to traffic violence" seem particularly overwrought.

And while the legal system may have been of some help, I rather suspect the main reason cars took over is because they give the user a tremendous amount of freedom and agency.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The linked article discusses this in the first point:

* Changing the visibility of a variable requires changing its name, everywhere it's used.

* It also cuts contrary to some very long-standing traditions, like using all caps for global constant names, using title case for class names, and starting with lower case for most everything else.

I thought one of the basic lessons we learned from the last 70 years of programming language design is that it's a bad idea to make semantics depend on lexical structure.

I'm really surprised people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would design a language where the visibility of an identifier depends on the case of its identifier.

To add on to zaroth's remarks, here's a list of records set or tied in the most recent (and IMO not very remarkable) 53rd Super Bowl:

https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/02/03/patriots-rams-super-bowl-2...

* Your time is worth something, even if your employer isn't making the best use of it

* I'm surprised he waited 7 weeks before submitting a bill (especially given the hurry up and wait circumstances).

The sequence beginning at 1:58 is (I think) a still from the Hard Day's Night movie. The sequence beginning at 4:29 uses the Help! album cover

Or you could alter the recipe. I've made baking powder biscuits any number of times (flour, salt, baking powder, milk, and butter) with very serviceable results.

An annular lake is a circular lake caused by the impact of a meteor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annular_lake

For me, the problem with the Fermi paradox is that we only have one poorly understood and incompletely documented example of a planet with intelligent life from which to draw conclusions. Beyond that:

* How many habitable planets are out there? We're just now starting to get data on this, there might be a lot

* Of those, how many develop life?

* Of those that develop life, how many develop intelligent life?

* Of those that develop intelligent life, how many advance to the point where they're capable of interstellar travel? How many are interested in interstellar travel?

* What if FTL travel is simply not possible? STL interstellar travel could basically be a one-way trip. Maybe most (or all) alien civilizations are unwilling to explore beyond a few light years.

* What is the lifetime of a space faring civilization? maybe all the alien civilizations just died out before they explored very far.

I feel like the actual moral of the story should be "don't underestimate how trying to scrimp on a vital resource can result in horrible logistical complexities and a nightmare UX".

I have it pretty much for the no limit two day shipping feature. It'd be great to have a "shipping only" version at a lower price.

Back in those days I wrote my own assembler for the C64 (and later the C128). Probably my single greatest moment of joy as a programmer was when it successfully assembled its own source code.

I wondered if I would be accused of victim blaming.

I'm just suggesting better education is probably a useful avenue to improve the situation.

I'm not sure if I would describe a 94 degree angle as "behind them", but I would also observe it's a good idea to exercise caution in navigating a blind intersection whether you're on a bike or in a car.

Basic rule of the road: if you haven't made eye contact with someone, you should assume they haven't seen you and don't know you're there.

I mean, they could improve the intersection by making it a full stop, but educating bicyclists not to ride out in front of somebody who will hit you if they don't slow down seems like a good step too.

Perhaps OP was referring to the pre-cooked chicken available at the deli counter? That's typically a lot more expensive than buying it raw.

Here's a bookmarklet I keep handy. I call it "Sane Margins":

  javascript:var style=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].style;style.marginLeft=style.marginRight='1in';style.maxWidth='7in';void(0)

If you also find little or no use for .bash_history, you can do this:

  rm ~/.bash_history
  ln -s ~/.bash_history /dev/null