twic

An Italian friend was excited to visit a castle, and on arrival disappointedly exclaimed "but this is a "fortezza!".

See? Immortality through memes!

It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.

[1] https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside-story-of-le...

[2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rati...

Timecube was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness website filled with bizarre cosmological claims.

Was? Timecube.net will outlive any and all faddy Silicon Valley cults.

Reviving? I'm still running a 2007 EeePC 1001HA on Fedora.

Terrible, the cytoskeleton is the best bit of the cell!

(not just grumpy because that's what I did my PhD research on)

Reminds me more remotely of scoops used in coal mining, in very low-ceilinged seams:

https://www.komatsu.com/en-us/products/equipment/room-and-pi...

The worst part, by far, was the emptying / prepping.

As described in one of the great modern tales of legend:

https://singletrackworld.com/2009/02/the-picolax-thread-retu...

Where does that come from though? I don't see any flow control or anything else compute-y in the bytecode itself. I know unpickling can run Python code, but i wouldn't say that makes the bytecode itself Turing-complete.

The Python pickle format is a bytecode [1], although not a Turing-complete one, I think.

[1] https://formats.kaitai.io/python_pickle/

If a tool had been replaced by a better tool, wouldn't it be natural to discuss that?

Perl is what I've spent the last thirty years running away from.

Not bad, but the subprocess invocation is too verbose given this is a staple of shell script type work, and the string mangling is a bit painful.

Not sure if this is related, but i'd love to see more scripting languages (mostly Python) offer facilities which let them take over from shell script for more scripts and one-liners.

Think about what it would take to write this in Python right now:

  for wmv_file in $(find $1 -name '*.wmv'); do
    echo -n "${wmv_file} "
    ffmpeg -i $wmv_file ${wmv_file%.wmv}.mpg 2>&1 | grep kb/s: || echo "ERROR $?"
  done

  for wmv_file in find(argv[1], glob="\*.wmv"):
    print(wmv_file, end=" ")
    result = do("ffmpeg", "-i", wmv_file, basename(wmv_file, ".wmv") + ".mpg")
    if result: print(grep(str(result), "kb/s:"))
    else: print("ERROR", result.status)

Swatch Internet Time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

The article mentions:

the German and Japanese point is 0.250 mm

It's probably the sanest adaptation of the point to the metric system. A traditional point is close to a third of a millimetre, but that's too weird.

Since the Q is close to 3/4 of a traditional point, it's also quite easy to convert from traditional multiple-of-three point sizes: 9 pt -> 12 Q, 12 pt -> 16 Q, etc.

Although it's even easier just to call those 3 mm and 4 mm!

This is pretty much what GL.iNet does. A nice slick interface for normal people, full OpenWRT nerd power a couple of clicks away for HN readers.

If anyone is curious and near South Kensington, there is now a little exhibition on urushi at the V&A [1], which includes a film of a guy who harvests his own sap, processes it into lacquer, and then makes things with it.

That video is not online AFAICT, but there is another one about another artist, which includes some footage of an urushi workshop preparing the stuff, and her using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeult7lZtbg

[1] https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/urushi-now-contemporary-ja...

What is going on with Japanese lacquer at the moment? There's this. There's the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition [1]. The V&A opened an exhibition on it last weekend [2]. The Times had a puff piece on it a few months ago [3]. Is urushi suddenly cool? If so, why? Did the Urushi Marketing Board decide to have a big push, pull some strings, and now it's everywhere? I'm not complaining at all, just mildly puzzled.

As it happens, i saw the exhibition at the V&A today. It's decent, but small. Has a bunch of artefacts, and then some videos of some of the artists working, which are interesting.

[1] https://www.msi.com/Business-Productivity/Prestige-13-AI-plu...

[2] https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/urushi-now-contemporary-ja...

[3] https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/luxury/article/the-ancie...

That was a long and dark time in history. We're still in the shadow of it. But these days a much better world is available - a more powerful language, good libraries, and much, much simpler frameworks.

To be clear, all the annotation and Java EE stuff is still going if you want it!

jeberle made a completely factual reply to this, but people hate Java so much it's downvoted to dead.

The boring choice is the right choice. It always was.

Right, absolutely correct, Java is a great choice, so why does this post keep going on about Go?

I suppose you get into astronomy because you're interested in outer space. Your question is like asking a soil scientist about something you found on a pavement.

There's a mild hybrid Qashqai. A friend of mine hired one and drove it into a bus.

The traditional approach in Java has been to let those things happen in third party space, then form an expert group to standardise a shared API for them. That was done with XML parsers and ORM fairly successfully. It doesn't always work, as with your examples - there was an attempt with logging, but it was done badly, JSR-305 ran around, etc. But I think it's a much better approach than the JDK maintainers trying to get it right first time.

A skilled programmer can write APL in any language.

You don't have a refrigerator or freezer?

Intelligence is knowing how to talk to anyone. Wisdom is knowing not to.

Mercurial has serial numbers which work like this ("revision numbers"), but you can only see your local repo's serial number. There's no concept of a public revision number authority.

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe worked like this, but badly.