pseudonymcoward

As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.

Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.

Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.

This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.

It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I was really struggling to understand how this worked from the website, which seems to have no photos or video of it actually operating.

I searched youtube and found a youtube short of it being used.

First you have to use another small machine to slice up a plastic bottle into a spool of roughly formed plastic spaghetti. Then you feed it through the nozzle on this machine to draw it into a properly formed filament.

Having to slice up every plastic bottle you want to run through it by hand seems like a cost to using it in any kind of bulk (I originally was trying to work out if it melted them down which would alleviate that).

The author addresses this in the post.

"I'm not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June."

I think this is kind of a bad take. There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits. "Cassette Beasts", "Nexomon" and "Temtem" spring to mind. From larger studios there has been stuff like "Monster Hunter Stories" and "World of Final Fantasy".

Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.

What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.

My biggest question is "why would I buy this and not Aseprite?". Aseprite is very well established in this space and this new tool doesn't seem like it has anythign unique to offer. Not that building a new tool isn't a good project, but when you're selling it you probably need some distinctive features, certainly if you want to win over existing users.

I recently tried Literate Programming and I've found that it has some downsides not commonly discussed by its advocates. (It also has upsides which are valid, this post may come across as overly negative because I'm only covering negatives.)

* It messes with tooling. If you're lucky then your editor will be smart enough to syntax highlight inside code blocks, or can be taught to do so easily. It's unlikely that more advanced IDE-style features will work. Obviously tools could be adapted with custom plugins but literate programming isn't popular enough for these to already exist as far as I'm aware.

* It adds overhead to refactoring. Refactoring code now means editing and rewriting a book, doing a good job requires significantly more effort. If you have designed the program thoroughly ahead of time you can avoid this, but that's not generally the way most programmers work.

* The "includes" problem. Most language require you to include/import/require packages used in a file. These are usually all placed at the start. This means a lot of chapters will start with "here are all the includes we'll need" if you're using a linear format. More complex formats that rearrange the code to generate outputs can do a better job but it's still a little clunky.

Overall my conclusion was that literate programming works best if you write code like Donald Knuth: work solo, have a good idea of the entire design and a fixed scope which you can complete to declare both book and program "done forever". Unfortunately that doesn't cover most real world programming. I don't think it works well in the most common commercial/programming team style settings.

I recognized the Reservoir Dogs example just from my brain.

To the site author, if you're going to list unknown images like this it would be nice if there was a way to give you feedback on them directly.

The github page has screen grabs of all the fonts in each stack: https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks

That's only for the telemetry that happens during the install process (if I've read the link correctly). Seems quite reasonable as long as we accept them sending telemetry during install. ("A single telemetry entry is also sent by the .NET SDK installer when a successful installation happens")

For telemetry during actual use, you can set that flag any time, and a message is shown on first use to inform you about it.

So seems relatively reasonable to me.

In Magic, cards come in one of 5 colours* - white, blue, black, red, and green. Each colour has specific mechanics associated with it as well as a general play style. Magic players often have a preference for specific colours as a result.

The colours are analogous to factions in strategy games, or to the different heroes in Hearthstone, but with more flexibility to mix colours in a single deck.

* or colourless, or multicoloured combinations

It's not just you. There's a community on reddit called "mechanicalheadpens" centered around the overlapping interests in mechanical keyboards, audiophile headphones, and fountain pens. Hence "mechanicalheadpens".

I believe that they would have written the manuscript, probably by hand but possibly aided by a typewriter, and then given it to a typographer (probably one with experience working on mathematical material) who would have typeset it, cutting any new symbols required.

I'm not a historian but this seems like the only plausible process given the technology around at the time.

Interestingly named package given that it's clearly using quite a few non-ascii characters which will break non-unicode aware consoles. Also that the description, Node page, and github repo list different licences.

In general I prefer languages to be small and simple - like Go and C. This doesn't seem to be a design goal for Rust, which puts me off. Some specifics:

Trying to do anything non-trivial with ownership/lifetimes/borrowing always ends up in a tangle, fighting with the compiler.

Everything in the stdlib seems to have a giant api with pages and pages of functions. Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html Scrolling down through those methods is overwhelming.

The overhead imposed by the goal of maximising safety is big, and not that important to me (as I'm not writing Very Important Crypto code or whatever, I don't find it hard to write good enough code for my purposes in C).

I think this may be exactly what I've been looking for. I've been wanting a "Better C" type of language, but all the existing candidates fall down on some point like - too complicated (Rust/D/C++), no manual memory management (Go), etc. I've even made some half baked attempts at writing my own language.

It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.

Mind if I steal this idea? I've been meaning to learn some elisp for a while and games revolving around fictional computer interfaces appeal to me.

It appears to be a standard 6 axis robot arm equipped with a specialist end effector designed to pick, mortar, and place bricks. It's possibly on a linear track to drive up and down the wall too. This is likely far cheaper than designing and building a specialist robot for this one task.

This is only idle speculation but:

A web cam resembles an eye staring at you all the time. This makes people feel weird, like something is staring at them. The threat to privacy is right in their face and on a gut level.

That's the reason so many people cover them even when they won't take other basic online privacy precautions.