kwoff

In the 1800s recycled wool called "shoddy" was invented, or at least began being mass-produced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycled_wool "Rag and bone men" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man would go around collecting scraps to sell to shoddy factories. Anyway, if you encounter any shoddy code... :)

(I can't find a source, but I thought a similar thing happened in Shakespeare's time, except I remember it being children going around collecting old scraps of clothing. And in my head it's related to act 1 scene 1 of Hamlet, the famous quote: "But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad". A mantle was a kind of cloak, and russet was the cloth it was made from which was originally reddish (though eventually "russet" was just this rough cloth of various colors). So I think maybe "shoddy" is a kind of evolution of "russet".)

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

Without them making a statement of how long they will provide security updates

They said this:

  What version of Android will be supported?

  Communicator will run Android 16. We’re comfortable committing to 2 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.

Perl's "decline" means there is some metric to measure how high Perl is. It was higher, but now it is lower. I don't think the metric is well-defined, though.

I hope this doesn't come off as argumentative. You said that with Python "In two days I had what I wanted", but another way of looking at it: in a week of not succeeding in Perl plus those two days in Python, you had what you wanted.

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/#:~:text=Declining,analysi... so you apparently have to opt-out of consenting to them tracking you...

  - weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

I guess "weird" triggered me a bit, heh. I know it's subjective.

11 em dashes

Not sure if it counts as "really works", but on Windows with PowerToys you can enable Keyboard Manager and 'Remap a key'. (Might want to remap right-Ctrl to CapsLock, in case it turns CapsLock on.) There's also old Registry hacks to do the same thing.

(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow

I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.

Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.

"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."

Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.

It's kinda ironic, since one of the three "virtues" of a Perl programmer is hubris, heh.

(re nobody codes in Perl: I still do professionally, and I'll probably never understand why it draws so much hate)

"This also strongly suggests that sleep and hunger are both tied to mitochondrial function and energy balance (the latter was already pretty clear!), and that aerobic organisms are constantly adjusting for both fueling their mitochondria and giving them (especially the ones in the central nervous system) some down time for repair and recovery. As the authors say, rather eloquently, “electrons flow through the respiratory chains of the respective feedback controllers like sand in the hourglass that determines when balance must be restored”. There could well be many other functions that have since joined in with the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!"

yawn :) I was wondering if sleep and hunger are tied to mitochondrial function, then wouldn't breathing be affected? If you're hungry, you're not getting enough glucose for respiration. If you're suffocating....

"He also helped to create an advanced physics course for M.I.T. freshmen with more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject. He and Robert J. Kolenkow wrote a 2013 textbook for the course, “An Introduction to Mechanics.”"

I used Kleppner/Kolenkow's intro to mechanics (copyright 1973) in 1993 or so, not at MIT. Seems 2013 is referring to the 2nd edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kleppner#Books Maybe the 1st edition was created for the "mechanics for masochists" MIT course.

"She wrapped her arms around my shoulder and said, “My father too.” She gently reached for my hands and introduced me to the group. “She’s a third-generation sirhyangmin (실향민). She’s traveled across the ocean to join us here today. She is a jebi (제비).”" - who's cutting onions?

That was hilarious. Also kudos for paying a person instead of using AI to generate it.

Dlang always makes me think of two things: Walter Bright, resident of Hacker News. And awesome games I played on Linux in the 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games

There's a paper that suggests that de-oxygenation might happen in around a billion years, so before the sun swallows the earth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5

"MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~."

Oh, goodie.

"Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers." Poetic? albeit depressing.

I know it's about programming, but I have a thought experiment I think about occasionally. Imagine a universe with one point particle. There's no time or space. Add another particle. The particles can either be separate or at the same point. So in some sense there is time, since we can go between separate and together states. There still isn't space, I think? Is this a philosophical subject I can read about?

Oh man, we have a certain email template at work, and the marketing team wanted to redesign that email; for some reason (broken communication, things out of the blue by company who bought ours, blabla), the designer thinks it's appropriate to just give us a Figma link that has no connection with the existing template or even any HTML. As a backend dev, I have no idea what to do with it. For an email, I'd expect something that someone actually made the HTML and sent the email to test it, like with hardcoded values that I could replace with variables, logic, etc, but I can't even understand how they think the Figma design was appropriate. They might as well have sent me a watercolor painting. I got them to export HTML, but it was completely useless since it's placing everything at specific pixel positions. I have no idea how to replicate the design in the email template. Anyway, I don't blame Figma or anything, just ugh, venting...

I've had celiac for over a quarter century, but my first thought seeing the headline was something like "oh no, another thing to look for?" Then I realized, like you said, it probably depends on how it's made.

Not to exaggerate, but there's a sort of low-key "trauma" associated with celiac. I used to have nightmares where I'd eat bread or something without realizing it (should I throw up? do people think I'm faking it? why didn't I remember to check if it has gluten?). There are these gluten-free burritos in the gluten-free section. The other day, I got one out of my freezer and only after opening the package and seeing the burrito was a bit browner than usual and thinking "is this spoiled?", then I thought "wait, is this not gluten-free?" and verifyied the package...didn't say gluten-free. Next time in the store, I found they have non-gluten-free burritos beside the gluten-free ones, in the freezer marked gluten-free.... They often do this in the gluten-free bread/etc aisle, too, right next to the gluten-free stuff. And recently they stopped adding green "gluten free" labels on the price tags which were handy when strolling down the aisles, so now I'm back in "turn every package around to check for allergens" mode. Anyway, just saying I understand OP's knee-jerk reaction.

I'm not sure I agree that nothing can change your perception, but I'm definitely interested to hear what you consider a "few other foundational sources". Shakespeare? Einstein? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

I loved that series. It's on Caltech's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJddRABXqJ5h5...

Reminded me of Sartre's Cookbook: https://pvspade.com/Sartre/cookbook.html

I'm guessing the "special treatment" was that they were nerfed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Egypt "Egypt was unique in that its garrison was commanded by the praefectus Aegypti, an official of the equestrian order, rather than, as in other provinces, a governor of the senatorial class." They didn't want another Cleopatra/Mark Antony situation.

A playlist of him on Numberphile (youtube channel): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWI9eDSJREzp...

In the "Simulated Annealing" section:

"At first, you might want to make moves or swaps over large distances or you might want to accept some percent of moves that don't improve the objective, but as time goes on ...

However, as it turns out, you technically don't need this annealing part to make FPGA placement work. You can just randomly try different moves and accept or reject them based on whether they improve the objective function. This is what I did in my toy implementation of an FPGA placer just to keep it simple."