Viewing profile — Paul_Clayton

I think a microscopic black hole would evaporate very quickly from Hawking radiation, so the result might be more bang than suck.

In D&D, min-maxing (hyphen and one x) is already a used term for character optimization, minimizing undesirables and maximizing desirables (I guess). Minimizing peaks is probably n…

For poetry, I think English has the advantage of Germanic and Latin roots. Such seems to offer some flexibility in tone. The relative lack of conjugation and declension seems to hu…

One can look at abbreviations as being like pronouns with the antecedent sometimes being stored in a cultural context or being placed at first reference in a potentially longish te…

How about rarely_viewed? Such expresses the property of interest, avoids the double negative issue, and is shorter? Of course rarely might imply a frequency much lower than the cut…

The History Guy did a video on "The History of Aluminum": https://youtu.be/Nx16c6SB4kQ?si=jqaObtbTp3uNNjj3 From what I recall of the video, two people independently worked out the …

I would not phrase the means of approaching best length as "edit out everything that's not 100% necessary" but as something more like "make every scene count/pull more than its wei…

When ARM moved to 64-bit the ISA was much more substantially reworked than for AMD's x86-64 transition (which mainly added modes and repurposed INCrement and DECrement to provide t…

While increasing dealer revenue is a plausible goal, it also seems plausible that reducing production cost could cause awkward maintenance. It is even plausible that only the bill …

The PhD Movie introed with Richard Feinman's statement "I don't know anything, but I do know everything is interesting, if you go into it deeply enough." Feinman was a curious char…

That clause reminded me of Popeye's "I can't stands no more" and I took it as an expression of considerable annoyance along with a sense of humor.

I think one should use ex/em units when setting a maximum width for readability. People with poorer vision will tend to prefer a physically larger font size. Pixels can also vary i…

By only testing one static branch, it is possible that the performance of the Intel Emerald Rapids predictor is not representative of a more realistic workload. If path information…

The Triptych Proposals [1] cover a lot of common use cases for submitting information to a server and updating part of a page. Something like that should have been possible to impl…

This reminded me of the CPC Grey video "7 Ways to Maximize Misery" https://youtu.be/LO1mTELoj6o?si=7tWgqLPyug0-NC6Z (which is not specifically about loneliness). That video did not…

I disliked _Always Coming Home_, substantially because it felt misandrous though the less optimistic setting probably also played a role (a post-industrial Earth with a rape victim…

The Motorola 88k and 68k both supported (eventually) extended precision, and, of course, Itanium supported it for x87 compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000 (u…

When returning to Washington University in St. Louis, I was walking a few miles with some luggage. Someone offered to carry one piece with me to the dorm. It was only after reachin…

Even personal recommendations have the problem of requiring significant use time (c. a year?) to estimate value. A company can (it seems) degrade quality for a model faster than qu…

Most parts of the liturgy are teaching. Scripture readings might compare with text book reading; the Lord's Prayer and other formulaic recitations are often taken from Scripture. T…

"higher prices for the consumer" can include lower value at the same price. Size reduction seems a common method for certain commodities. This may result in reduced consumption (e.…

Innate talent can also be tied to one's sense of identity, which makes failure more overwhelming. (If one does not _really_ try, failure does not feel as crushing.) Just an expecta…

This reminds me of a passage in Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign (Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan is speaking to Mark Vorkosigan): Her smile tilted. "Mark, you don't pay back y…

I received the impression that being closed on Sundays was part of corporate culture, a statement of valuing something other than maximizing value extraction. A poster here comment…