Viewing profile — lopsotronic

If the rest of the world stayed still, that's a hard "maybe". Since the rest of the world isn't , what we're actually watching is the "Western Flavor" of the Soviet collapse. The f…

I've always taken particular note of how wisely scope-limited Pandoc is. Markup that aligns with natural language convention[1], is tightly converted, but the further from natural …

As an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme f…

Have they thought about the expenses in running continental Death Pits? OK, dumb attempt at funny over, but certainly someone is thinking about instability costs? Even if everyone …

It's arguable that - pre-Exile - the majority of the vague coalition we today refer to[0] as "Israelites" did not practice monotheism outside of rural cult centers[1], if then. Deu…

He's definitely a messenger of something but I'm not sure I can speak its name. "A narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehea…

Yeah, I was going to point out there's a few "big bombs" out there that aren't useless at all . . Someone will break the First Use taboo, but I wouldn't put money on it being Russi…

I think that the problem might be even more fundamental than that. Ownership of a strategic nuclear deterrent seems to short circuit some of the internals of the modern Westphalian…

What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing. "Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. …

I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then st…

I have heard it confidently stated, repeatedly, by extremely technical coder types, that "once we have enough data, we don't need Statistics" It's a pretty funny sentiment. It's al…

My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job. Hmmm. Probably it wasn't steril…

One of my favorite horror films of the 1980s, Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession . One quote I heard about it, is that some movies are about madness, and other movies seem to be th…

The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the…

You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that danc…

Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century. Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St…

Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually…

For all the editorial hay to be made from the "The Victory of Capital" or the purported "Inevitable Self-Destruction of Communism (with Russians In It)", the process of nations tra…

Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams. https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz Some years ago I wired …

Oh, this gold rush has breathed new life into the old school Semantic guys. Lord knows the DITA priesthood has been running low on rubes, so this new era is a godsend. Re-coding al…

Much more informative than I thought. So it's not Pluto, it's something like variant 2 of the NB-36's engine, a direct air cycle nuclear turbojet. A bit less insane than Pluto, but…

"just for adopting . ." OK, I'm really sorry, but " just for adopting " is doing some heavy lifting here. Watson's other greatest hits: worries about Big Black Dicks; melanin injec…

The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata. The goal is - and I am not picking on the react…

I've been a very vocal advocate of Asciidoc as replacement for thick granular XML-based CCS (component content system) specifications, but Typst is the first one that gives it a ru…

As long as the "learning" part is more pleasure than the sensation of not caring about other human beings, I think you're solid, man. The problem with the nerd-kings-tycoons of tod…