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The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.
There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.
The question applies more broadly than Union Pacific. Why hasn't this been an industry standard for 100 years?
It was such an amusing story I never thought to double check it. I'm sure I first heard it before Snopes existed. Thanks.
There's also absolutely no chance that a pure plastic box is going to have proper RF shielding. Good luck finding one with the regulatory marks that make it legal to sell.
I heard a story long ago when it was Japan, not China who was the source of cheap garbage. The town of Usa, Japan got a lot of manufacturing so they could all say "MADE IN USA".
Given enough time, that describes every codebase that exists.
I love Chesterton's Fence and haul it out whenever I can. Even though it's about 100 years old and the context is barely relevant anymore.
The LaserWriter was like something from the future compared to the Laserjet. I think they used the same Canon print engine, but the HP was far less sophisticated. It only used bitmap fonts, nothing scalable like Adobe's Type 1 for Postscript. Knuth probably used a supercomputer for his typesetting.
And if you don't know the origin of the phrase "lucky 10,000" then it's your lucky day too!
Thanks for mentioning the actual frequency. The article says "long wave" many times without specifying what it actually means.
I once worked at a company that used a Code39 font cartridge in HP Laserjets. When HP stopped putting font cartridge slots in their printers, I had the task of intercepting print jobs and detecting the font selection sequence, then taking the text and converting it to a Code128 bitmap graphic. It wasn't hard at all, kind of fun actually.
In 8-bit (per channel) color there is a standard for when the context is unspecified: sRGB. It was developed to match the characteristics of a "typical" display at the time of its creation. It won't be 100% accurate, but it represents the best you can assume. You're not forced to throw up your hands and give up.
Thermos bottles are relatively heavier to their contents than flimsier bottles. That goes double if they're only half full. I have a couple of the recalled bottles, so I just weighed one - 14 ounces empty.
So the lesson here is to wait for the black part to become available, then buy the beige or brown because you know their teething problems are gone?
I'm not aware of a digital camera that can take a 10 minute continuous exposure, but maybe there are special astronomy cameras that can?
If you blow up a satellite, half of it will end up going slower and half will go faster. The slower bits will probably burn up nicely, but the faster bits will just elevate their orbit.
Automatic conversion to 1-bit has been available since the 1980's. The trick is to do it artfully.
The biggest problem was when there was an established protocol, but it wasn't always followed. I remember scroll bars being the worst. Usually you could respond to the messages and everything would work the way you want, but there were some edge cases where Windows would update those scroll bars without even telling you it was doing so. And of course it would paint those updates in the default colors.
I honestly don't know if Qt would have made it any easier. But this was a large and old app that relied on Win32 at its core, and nobody was going to accept rewriting it for just one feature. Plus our customers were very time sensitive, and anything that could have slowed it down by a few ms was off the table.
But it wasn't just one window, there were lots of controls on that window and the relationship between them wasn't as obvious as you'd assume. Trust me, recreating the whole thing from scratch was easier.
The fun part was making a C++ class that could build up an in-memory dialog template. You had to do it that way because it was dynamically sized based on the message you displayed and the buttons you needed. If you used the default colors, you might be able to tell they were different if you squinted but you wouldn't know which was mine and which was Microsoft's.
I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new feature. That's when you find out that certain Windows features like scroll bars under certain conditions bypass the usual message loop completely, because they know they can get away with it. The part I remember most vividly was recreating the lowly MessageBox from scratch, because none of the internals of the system supplied one were exposed in a way that you could modify them.
I wonder if I got Alzheimer's so bad that I couldn't remember my kids names, would I still be able to juggle? And would it be therapeutic in any way?
I know mine sure did! As a kid I was totally uncoordinated, always the last one to be picked for any sports teams. But I definitely noticed the difference when I picked up juggling as a young adult.
But where's the fun in that? Chasing the balls is half the challenge!
Seriously, knowing the balls are going to roll away if you drop them gives you some incentive to do it right. I think I used tennis balls early on.
That's circular logic. It's the demand from LLMs that are driving the DRAM shortage.
It's theoretically related to color blindness, so you'd expect it to be as common. But the problem is even if your eye has the extra primary, your brain may not have developed the ability to "see" it. They had to test quite a few people with the proper genetic background before they finally found one.
The bioaccumulate part I understand, for the body to eliminate something it has to bind to it somehow. Tough to do if the chemical won't react with anything.
I'm not sure what "biologically inert" means specifically. Are you saying there are biological chemicals that actually do interact with this stuff? A single example would help me understand.
It took me about a second to realize the link took you to a list of articles. It took another second to realize the article referenced was second in the list.
I've never understood one vital thing - if PFAS is by nature totally inert and unreactive, how is it harmful? If you drank a glass of the stuff, what would happen?