dvirsky

You can set it to not be diagonal.

I knew a guy who was selling his art online, he was making tongue-in-cheek, technically bad art but it was very deliberate as part of what he was trying to get at, he had a real artistic vision to his work.

His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.

Dua Lipa has amazing arrangements for example.

There is a great podcast called Switched on Pop, which delves into music theory behind pop hits and their songwriting and arrangements, and analyzes them to show what makes them great. It will give you fresh perspective on how much thought and talent goes into some of these songs. https://switchedonpop.com/

Antimemetics remains a top 10 all-time though.

It's good, but didn't leave that big of an impression on me, maybe because I didn't know all the SCP stuff beforehand, I just liked qntm's other works so I read it.

I actually think the ending of it really prevented it from being that (at least for me). It started good, then the second act was like "Whoah, this is the most amazing sci-fi I've ever read", then the third act was just all over the place and completely lost me. And that's the revised ending, I didn't read the original one.

That is the first programming environment I ever used. It was an amazing starting point.

I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.

IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to make a living.

These are the same trees known as Cum Trees, right?

My neighbors have a couple, I didn't know these before moving to the US, and the first time I smelled them was... something.

I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.

How is it charging as fast as a charger 3 times more powerful?

Same here, I actually started to buy some at $30 for the heck of it, but the process to buy then was so involved that I gave up and wanted to get back to it later, and never did.

Bloom Filters are already lossy compression, so depending on how sparse they are I'm not sure you'll get too much benefit out of it, but maybe I'm just thinking of much, much smaller filters.

BTW we ended up open sourcing that BF library that encodes and decodes filters in multiple languages, the company has been out of business for nearly a decade but the project is still out there https://github.com/EverythingMe/inbloom

One example: I personally used it to deduplicate recently viewed ads in an app, to avoid spamming users with the same ad too much. One interesting challenge there was that we needed to make sure that the client and server encode and decode the filter exactly the same, despite being implemented in different languages.

What would happen if a 1g probe traveling at 10% of the speed of light hits an inhabited planet with an atmosphere? The kinetic energy is insane, but will it just burn out in the atmosphere or will it manage to hit the surface and go boom, assuming earth like atmosphere?

This is pretty great, I used to love this game as a kid. I played it on a PC in the late 80s. Besides being a fun game, it was probably the first game I've played where you could design your own levels, which was awesome, we used to challenge each other to custom levels in our school's computer lab.

It looks like Critque is a branch of Gerrit

IIRC Gerrit is an open source re-implementation from scratch of Critique.

Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )

This needs 2021 in the title, but it's actually really out of date and might as well have 2011 in the title. Redis has modules which can provide a bunch of extra capabilities that do allow querying, indexing, etc. [Full disclosure: I used to work on Redis and created much of the basis of those modules, but haven't been involved in the past 5 years]

* When RSS was a thing but in my country a lot of news/content websites hadn't adopted yet, I wrote a service to quickly define scrapers that turn those sites into RSS feeds.

* In one of my former workplaces I wrote (alongside another person) a gamified shared playlist app that allowed everyone to participate in being a DJ for our company hackathon (people getting more upvotes getting more playtime, songs getting many downvoted being skipped in the middle, etc). That was a lot of fun and surprisingly a very emotionally engaging experience for everyone.

Probably, this conversation took place about 10-15 years ago but I'm guessing these myths persist for years so it might be a relic of the 90s.

This is totally ridiculous, but a lot of time there is a grain of truth behind some of these myths, that is just diluted by retelling from non technical people. I had a serious musician once tell me that if I rip a recording from a DAT tape to my disk it won't sound as good. It sounded about as stupid as this this claim, but the basis of it was conversion between 48khz and 44.1khz sample rates.

I also remember a friend of mine learning graphic design many years ago, who told me that their teacher told the class Photoshop on Mac produces higher quality images than on a PC. I don't remember what the basis of that was.

This has to be the most annoying thing in MacOS. My laptop, soundly sleeping in my backpack, takes over my bluetooth headphones all the time.

Not using a water flosser as well. It always looked to me like some novelty shopping channel thing. Then I got one and OMG this thing cleans so well, way better than normal flossing (which I was usually to lazy to do anyway).

Pretty sure the first monitor on my first PC (~1988) was amber, later replaced by black and white that did not "smear" as much so was better for games, and later replaced by a color one (that might have been on a newer PC).

I feel the same way about a lot of non fiction, but not all.

First, there's entertaining/pop non-fiction, like, say, Malcom Gladwell's stuff, which has a lot of fluff but at least you enjoy the reading.

There are history books and memoirs that are just interesting - for example I've recently went through the entire series of Churchill's WWII memoirs, they're mostly awesome, though I did skip a couple of less interesting chapters. For these I prefer audiobooks while driving, which make it easier for me to focus.

Then there are CS books where you can pick and choose chapters and don't have to read the entire thing; they just go way deeper than blog posts, so if you want to REALLY know a subject, you better buy a book or two. I don't mean books like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer, etc which I almost never read in their entirety and can be summarized in 10% of their length, but more deep guides to things like Information Retrieval, NLP, Database Internals, etc.

Waterpik water flosser! I can't believe I didn't get something like that earlier. It's so effective and useful. Best purchase of the year for sure.

It's exclusive to Spotify, sadly (didn't use to be) https://open.spotify.com/show/5c26B28vZMN8PG0Nppmn5G

I'm not following that whole universe so I guess I missed it, I started following him when it was this little podcast interviewing computer scientists about AI, and now it's this huge thing, and I never figured how it went from A to B.

I listen to a lot of his episodes, but it's always because of the guest. He has amazing guests, no doubt about it.