alanh

Chesterton's Fence is the flip side of this

"Data has weight, but only on SSDs" - Not just SSDs! Unless you always hang the chad, surely writing data onto punchcards reduces the weight of that 'storage medium'!

10^–15 is not a negative number, just a small one. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10%5E-15+

Apparently I can’t attach a cover letter, but I think I might be a better fit than might be obvious from my résumé. I do tend to "think like a product owner" (to quote the job desc) and love learning new tech on the job; I have been a React fan since 2014; and I know a dozen languages, so picking up Golang sounds fun. I am a design-thinking engineer who can also write: https://alanhogan.com/blog

"Cars now provide zero benefit..."

"Gender-based discrimination..."

"Fuck Brendan Eich [for opposing gay marriage at a time that Obama did as well]..."

"As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."

Ugh. What if you could possibly focus on technology instead of woke virtue-signaling (and threatening to kill those who disagree)?

Anyway, 'write ur website by hand' is absolute garbage advice, sorry. No, you are not going to effortlessly syndicate it elsewhere when you are manually updating your index.html to point to your latest hand-coded plain html file. Surely you won't even have a sitemap.xml. Will you write the sharing-friendly meta tags by hand every time too? No.

The idea of changing what 'rm' does sets off all of my "foot-gun" alarm bells

Huh. I watched a lot, but not all, of the video, and I thought he made it clear early on that he was stitching together 1px videos & repeating the event for each pixel (about a million times for that 720p result)

And?

Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times

See my reply to parent. Reply to sibling: Whoa, I've seen the Sopranos 3 times and never caught that reference.

Curious, I asked Grok:

Is there controversy over the true inventor of the telephone?Yes, there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone. While Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited, several inventors and researchers argue for recognition based on their contributions:

Antonio Meucci: An Italian inventor who filed a patent caveat for a "voice communication apparatus" in 1871, five years before Bell's patent. Meucci's device, the "teletrofono," could transmit voice over a wire. Due to financial hardship, Meucci couldn't renew his caveat, and Bell was granted the patent in 1876. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 269) recognizing Meucci's contributions, stating he demonstrated a working device earlier, though it didn't officially credit him as the inventor. Some still argue Meucci deserves primary credit.

Elisha Gray: An American engineer who filed a patent caveat for a telephone-like device on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. Bell's patent was filed hours earlier, leading to disputes. Some claim Bell may have had access to Gray’s ideas through patent office connections, though no definitive evidence supports this. Gray later challenged Bell’s patent but lost in court.

Philipp Reis: A German inventor who developed a device called the "Reis telephone" in 1861, capable of transmitting music and some speech. While it was less practical for clear voice communication, some argue it was a precursor to the telephone.

"The message format is not dangerous. It is the message viewers that are dangerous in this particular regard."

Ah, I see. We should allow HTML but display it as plain text.

Oh, clever name. Typed Lua → TL → "Tee Ell" → Teal

And the extension is .tl

That’s great! ... Where are the downloaded models so I can delete them or at least exclude them from Time Machine backups? (Mac)

I think you two are confusing Roko's Basilisk (a thought experiment which some take seriously) and Rococo Basilisk (a joke shared between Elon and Grimes e.g.)

Interesting theory... Just whatever you do, don’t become a Zizian :)

For a lot more specific suggestions on how to have actual arguments that can lead somewhere (not a tantrum) read “how to have impossible conversations” by Lindsay and Boghossian

"And the reason avocados have exploded in the U.S. is that most of them are no longer grown in the U.S.

"We have developed such a voracious appetite for this versatile fruit that the U.S. now annually brings in nearly 3 billion pounds of avocados."

These consecutive sentences each state as fact an opposite causality.

How can the central thesis of the article be so confused?

I recently opined here that devs should really stop setting their blogs in monospaced fonts, and got downvoted to -4, which is very funny.

It’s TRUE!

Monospaced fonts are a thing for two reasons:

1. Historically, they were all computers did, because it is simpler to have fixed widths. (Remember Knuth's biggest contribution was typesetting -- it is complex). Do you know why the Macintosh changed this? Because Jobs was inspired by a calligraphy course he audited at college

2. Because lining up text is important for programming

Other than that, variable-width text is much easier to scan and read. Yes, even for people who spend a lot of time working with code.

You should also be setting a maximum line-width of about 40em, as it becomes hard to read text when the eye has so far to travel back to the left side.

You also shouldn't center paragraphs 99% of the time, because it’s better when your eye can 'seek' to a consistent left edge (assuming LTR languages!)

If you want to know more, please look it up or ask the nearest LLM!

How does it compare to SiteSucker (<https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/index.html>)?

So interesting! The author doesn’t, I believe, yet cover how the first log tables were computed (by hand), so I asked ChatGPT. This may be of interest: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d3a64d-f8a8-8012-bde3-e80813b2b4...

For readability:

  html { font-family: system-ui; }

A bit off-topic, but I found it very dystopian a few months ago to ask ChatGPT to describe the game in some detail. It refused to, claiming it violated content policy. Chilling.

Is it supposed to look like a Microsoft Word document from 1996? It’s all Times New Roman with 16-bit color highlights.

I really doubt that. Coming out isn’t the same as “realizing.”

This is self-evidently incorrect, for a multitude of reasons.

Reason 1: Gay men do not wait to 'realize' they are gay until their 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s. "Trans" do.

Reason 2: Autogynephilia exists.

Reason 3: Orientation threatens (essentially) no one. But transgenderism directly attacks the sex-based rights that women have long fought for, undermining their rights to sex-segregated spaces (see Tickle vs Giggle or that crazy LA Spa case).

Reason 4: While homosexuality is trivial to define (same-sex attraction), transgenderism is not. Gender was defined as "performing" one's sex, per feminism. But if one "performs" the other sex, they are merely non-gender-conforming, not the other sex! This is why "what is a woman" has become such an infamous question, because trans activists cannot answer it in a way that actually makes sense to anyone.

I could go on. Downvote if you must, but we are post-peak-trans and reality is re-asserting itself; I am glad of it. Without wishing ill towards those caught up in the madness, I say: No. I shall not use pronouns that require me to lie about how I perceive the world, and I deny that the assertion of my right to speak truth is an act of hatred.

Here's your clew (sic) that the article may not be so reliable: It credits the FBI's linguistic analysis for locating the Unabomber, when in reality, it was his own brother who said “hey, it sounds like Ted.”

Voters do find it confusing. Not all of them, but enough that it matters. E.g.: In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin only won as District Attorney in the final stage of the final vote count because his supporters were more likely to know about and use RCV than moderate, conservative, and/or low-information voters.

I DO NOT BUY IT. Plenty of sites use unique identifiers and other random hex strings all over, e.g., fingerprinted assets. If your explanation were accurate I would expect more kinds of sites to show up

3-nanometer technology

Wow. I remember being assured that we would never reach even low double-digit nanometer processes.

Sorry, but is https://hnjobs.u-turn.dev/candidates working for anyone? I don’t know how to get it to say anything other than '0 results'