frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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frezik,

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that’s not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don’t reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.

In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.

frezik,

Major engineering organizations, like the IEEE or the ASME, often require degrees, but do have exceptions built into the rules for on the job experience. So this does happen, and regularly enough that there’s consideration for it.

frezik,

PNG mainly lacked support from Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Photoshop). IE didn’t handle PNG transparency, while Photoshop had a shitty PNG implementation that tended to produce files larger than an equivalent GIF. Held back widespread adoption for almost a decade.

frezik,

Odd they bring up TIFF. That one is more like a container format that can hold many different types of images.

frezik,

I could have sworn he said he had a legal degree in his home country of Australia, but I can’t find any evidence of it now.

frezik,

Maybe that skill is how they end up with suspiciously high amounts of money.

frezik,

There’s a few different techniques. The crudest is to check what cell tower you’re connected to and use its location as your location. Good enough to find what sandwich shops are in the area, but not precise enough for driving instructions. That takes GPS satellites.

Flat earthers sometimes confuse these modes to say your phone only connects to local towers. Most people don’t know the details and don’t know how to refute it.

frezik,

That’s Christopher, and he died in 2020. Now it’s a few different members of the family plus their attorney.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Estate

frezik,

There’s a guy out there who made a reversible NES emulator, meaning it can run games backwards and come to the correct state. He made a brilliant post on Reddit /r/programming linking his ideas for the emulator to quantum mechanics.

Then he was asked why he didn’t distribute his program in git. He said that he didn’t know git.

To me, that’s a pretty good example of the difference between computer science and software engineering.

frezik,

Adoption for what? There’s no indication that it’s becoming interconnected to the economy at large. Just the opposite, in fact. FTX, one of the biggest crypto banks, completely collapsed and the rest of the economy didn’t care. If it was Goldman Sachs or BoA, everyone would be sounding alarm bells, because they are actually integrated into the rest of the economy. Crypto just isn’t.

frezik,

Surface area of the fin stack matters. An air cooler will always be limited by the space available around the CPU. A water cooling radiator has more flexibility to be placed in around the case.

That said, having less than a 360mm AIO is probably a waste. Also, higher end Intel chips these days are so power hungry that they can’t be physically cooled properly with the surface area available on the package.

frezik,

BIOS.

They recognized that PCs were the next big thing and needed one of their own. Large companies don’t move fast, and IBM is certainly no exception, but they had to move fast now. So they took a bunch of off the shelf components that anyone else could have bought and called it their PC.

Everything except the BIOS. It regulated how the OS interacts with the hardware. Almost to the point where you could argue DOS isn’t an OS at all, but just a thin command line layer over the BIOS, plus a simple minded file system.

Anyway, some people at Compaq make a cleanroom implementation of the BIOS and release an “IBM PC compatible”. This quickly becomes the basis of everything we call a PC today. But IBM doesn’t get to profit off it in the long run. They sold off their PC division decades ago.

The show “Halt and Catch Fire” has an excellent fictional example of the reverse engineering process.

frezik,

Just to correct a few details that don’t contradict your main point:

Now its the lifetime of the original author + 80 years after IIRC

Life of author + 70 years.

Copyright has stalled so severely that the latest works to come into public domain are from the 19th century.

Things from 1927 entered the public domain in 2023: americanwritersmuseum.org/new-works-to-enter-the-….

frezik,

There was this other time they discovered a whole fucking Dyson Sphere, and then promptly forgot about it.

frezik, (edited )

Nonsense. It’s a simple continuation of something that has always been around. They would have needed to actively and purposefully changed it. The first company that tried to sell “1 Megabyte/s” instead of “8 Megabits/s” is shooting themselves in the foot because the number is smaller. If it was going to change, you would need everyone to agree at once to correct the numbers the same way.

Modems were 300 baud, then 1200 baud, then 56.6k baud. ISDN took things to 128k baud, and a T1 was 1.544M baud. Except that sometime around the time things went into tens of k, we started saying “bits” instead of “baud”. In any case, it simply continued with the first DSL and cable modems being around 1 to 10 Mbits. You had to be able to compare it fairly to what came before, and the easiest way to do that is to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

Ethernet continues to be sold in the same system of measurement, for the same reasons.

frezik, (edited )

It has plenty to do with engineering, because it was engineering that first decided to measure things this way. Marketing merely continued it.

frezik,

That metaphor is . . . not entirely wrong.

frezik, (edited )

I’ll take DS9’s first two seasons over TNG’s first two any time. Yes, even Move Along Home. TNG also peaked around season 5, and was somewhat more mixed after that (but never going quite so low, either).

frezik,

The for-profit portion doesn’t have stock like that, either. Not in a publicly traded way where we can actually say the price dropped.

This whole thing is crazy, and it’s hard to know as an outsider what the fuck is going on.

frezik,

No, no they didn’t. Run through the alt.startrek Usenet archive throughout the '90s and you’ll find plenty of bitching about every series.

frezik,

Yup, that’s their whole outline of the end days. Supposed to happen in the lifetime of people alive in 1914, and there’s a whole thing about how they’ve managed to extend that deadline.

frezik,

Out of curiosity, I ran through some sample quizzes of the A+ exam a while back. Managed to pass, but I had to dig out a lot of my old knowledge about IDE master/slave setups and COM port settings and the like. That may be partially due to A+ being a silly, meaningless cert, but it’s pretty clear there is a need for that crap still.

frezik, (edited )

No, it’s not threads. Here’s a closer picture: makingitsew.com/…/illustrator_command_ops_pattern…

They might use some kind of mask to spray something on. I tried to replicate it by printing TPU to fabric, but TPU can be hard to work with for such fine details and consistency.

frezik,

I saw more Confederate battle flags in Indianapolis than Atlanta. Fuck Indianapolis.

frezik,

Most of the criticisms that come from the right are solvable problems, such as lack of chargers, electricity coming from dirty sources, or lithium mining. We pretty much know how to solve all those at this point. Just a matter of doing it.

Criticisms that come from the left tend to be more fundamental. Things like car-based cities being too spread out, infrastructure costs spiraling out of control, or having the average person operate a 2 ton vehicle at speeds over 60mph and expecting this to be safe. None of those are specific to EVs, and are only solvable by looking at different transportation options.

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