HN user
Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...
Yeah I suspect a lot of their cases going forward will be on contingency.
It's already the start for Night of the Living Dead.
It might be a fun project to create a UI for use with low refresh displays. Maybe have config options for super low refresh rates, color calibration for the new eink displays and adjust the scroll step size. No mouse pointer, just keyboard shortcuts.
Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs. Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in your desktop's searchbar and being taken directly to it.
At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more feasible.
I read somewhere that he even programs on paper and punches it into a computer when he's done.
As for myself, I definitely understand the problem he's describing. I catch all my fleeting thoughts with a keyboard, but I always find my mind wandering into tangents and end up losing the focus of what I'm really getting at, or I end up in a cycle of endless micro revisions. When I started writing with pen and paper it enforced a certain economy into my writing process. By having a natural speed limiter, I have to focus more on the heart of what I'm getting at; being in the zone writing with pen and paper feels totally different to me than writing on a keyboard, you get into a much deeper state of focus.
You should talk to some teachers who've been teaching since before 2010. They almost all say that kids got noticeably dumber around the time smartphones became common. They also say that grading standards today don't resemble anything they used to; most kids today would fail a 2009 curriculum.
College lit professors are now saying they get kids in their class who've never read a book from cover to cover. Those that have, say their favorite book is a YA book like Percy Jackson. Most can't even focus on something like a sonnet. This was described by a professor at Columbia, and they say that this is a recent phenomena and it's the majority of their students now.
Something has fundamentally changed, and there's evidence that points to kids missing key developmental windows. It's not just them on social media either, it's probably also their parents who are on their phones and not interacting with their kids who need that to develop normally.
It was in an Economist article sometime around December; unfortunately I canceled my subscription because of their screen-hijacking ads, so I'm not able to find it. Problem was, Ukraine was being chipped away slowly by Russia and Biden wasn't giving them more aid. The thought was that Trump may shake things up a bit so they at least had a chance to improve their situation. Obviously that hope was misplaced, but Biden was too afraid of provoking of Russia to do anything but slow them down. Ukraine knew they were suffering a slow death, so basically any change was reason for hope.
I'm a bit of a nerd for hand tools and I've the same book for axes, and another for hand files lying around somewhere. Around this time these tool companies had a huge array of designs for their tools. It seems like almost every region of America had their own pattern of ax head with a range of sizes to choose from, and their own preference for style of handle, of which there are probably more than you'd expect, and users had their own preference for the style of cutting edge too. You had axes for just about any type of wood cutting job you can imagine. The land was conquered by these tools and the people using them put a lot of care and consideration into them, and it showed.
Nowadays, you still have some regional patterns available, but they're almost all swamp axes (a general purpose axe, not good at any one thing -- the head is too thick for very effective falling, but too thin for very effective splitting). You could thin them out, but filing the cheeks down messes up the temper of the steel. Handles have about two styles to pick from, and they all come clearcoated, which is awful on your hands, unlike linseed oil. Sure you can go boutique, like Gransfors of Hult Bruk, or Tuatahi, but you're looking at spending hundreds, which may actually be more in line with what you would have been spending for a quality tool 100 years ago, if you adjust for inflation.
People are getting screwed every which way so any change seems like an opportunity for improvement. Even Ukraine was excited to see Biden leave office so they could at least have a chance for a better arrangement with America.
Nitpick? No. I'm kind of a fan of Mason and Dixon and I think it's a great story.
Just curious, were they able to purge or scrub the smoke from the cabin? Seems like a battery fire in a closed space like that would be a lung hazard.
One notable exception to this was Jeremiah Dixon, of the Mason-Dixon line. From Wikipedia:
"Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!'
Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."
Vitamin D deficiency has also been linked to cancer, specifically colorectal IIRC. Also people who had D deficiency were more likely to have problems with COVID.
The base units of the metric system are often not very ergonomic. Why is a meter so damn big? And why is a gram so damn small? I can barely detect a gram. And a meter is frickin huge, causing people to usually divide it into hundredths of a meter, which you can hardly picture in your mind unless you already know what it looks like, especially arbitrary counts of cm. Metric's only real advantage is that it shares the same radix as our counting system.
What we really need is a new system of units...
Muni utilities get treated with kid's gloves by courts though. I have direct personal experience of a muni burning nearly a quarter million acres, destroying over 500 homes and ~100K acres of timber. When it came to trial, the court capped their liability at $50m on day one. Their employees even joked about what an outrageous fire hazard all their lines were over text just a few days before it happened.
The funniest part is the utility increased rates...but only for people living in the fire-affected areas.
Heat is the real killer for LEDs. Most LEDs sold for home lighting do not have very good thermal regulation, possibly as a planned obsolesence "feature".
with intelligence comparable to dogs
Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.
It goes back at least to Plutarch:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/misctracts/plutarchE.html
There's speculation that this was derived from an earlier Erisian mystery cult, but how it ended up in a temple of Apollo I'm sure I don't know.
I've begun to notice the number five a lot. I was reading Tammy Wynette's wiki page the other day and noticed that it appears quite a bit -- born May 5th (5/5), married five times, dead at 55. She also collaborated with the KLF, a pop group from the early 90's which also had an unusual number of fives to do with them (as well as 23's...2+3=5? Oddly, Tammy has a memorial highway in Missippi, MS23). Which brings me back around to Nick Drake. One of the members of the KLF now runs a small web store which mostly just sells his books to do with his post-KLF career, but they also sell other things as well, like overstock Nick Drake album tuck boxes...which are designed to hold all five of Nick Drake's albums.
https://www.alimentation.cc/product/tuck-box/
Not sure what any of this means.
Edit: just noticed that I responded to your post five hours after you posted it.
Thanks for the heads up! Just ordered one.
If you want a native options on a mobile device, Free42 and 48sx work great on Android (I believe at least Free42 is on iOS). Emu48 works on desktop (personally I like `dc`). Look at SwissMicros if you want a physical calculator.
I have several of these and I'm really impressed with the quality. The DM32 is nice and has a manual available from SwissMicros, but I prefer the DM42n. I had a print shop print and spiral bind an HP-42 manual for me. Works good.
Fun fact. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, using theodolites, plumb bobs, and spirit levels, were able to detect variations in gravity from the local environment in 1767. Upon completing the resurvey on the way back to Philadelphia, they noticed a systematic error and concluded it was because of gravitational deflection due to the Allegheny mountains (with the help of Maskelyne, Cavendish and the Royal Society).
Sometimes I think about that and it just blows me away.
I love the idea of shortwave but all I ever pick up are Jesus channels.
Had one. Price was good, but the resolution made it nearly unusable with most DE's, and I don't think I ever got the nvidia card working on Linux.
Great concept though. I wish the format would have stuck around. I'd like a premium version in that same size.
Obligatory xkcd:
I saw a documentary (PBS? Ken Burns? Something like that) about bison and I'm astonished we have any left today. They had a couple of private herds and a handful of individuals in zoos, and that was just about it. That's after having a population, less than a century previous, that produced regular accounts of covering the land for as far as the eye could see. The only reason we didn't wipe them out completely was because of just a few people working independently of one another who thought it would be a shame to see them disappear.
I'd say causality and entropy are contingent on the (very compelling) assumption that time is real. We could be Boltzmann Brains, or something even weirder. Do I believe that the world is terribly different from what it appears to be? No, but ultimately our perceptions of the world are merely representation held in our minds.
2nd largest military in the world if they put it all together
Military industrial capacity is Europe's main problem right now. I believe they're ramping up production, but it's going to take years. They may end up having to buy the arms from the US in the meantime if they want to aid Ukraine. If it gets to that, the question is whether they give China some business.
No I want to say this was ~10 years ago. Happened to a university researcher IIRC.