Viewing profile — mherdeg

It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeopl…

Was this the premise of the pilot episode of 30 Rock? The trivection oven?

Yeah. It's baffling to me that Private Eye covered this in explicit, specific detail a decade ago and there were essentially no consequences for many years after. (I have the same …

Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to …

Would you accept weaponized trademark infringement as a sibling to patent law? The behavior described here seems odd -- I wouldn't call it "good" or "bad" in a moral sense just tec…

Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The…

> nothing about computers is magic In this vein I think about nelhage's "Computers Can Be Understood" from time to time - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/…

I would play a 2023 entry in the Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker series where you have to learn and use phrases like "Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:" or "Take i…

Boston definitely makes it hard to love. Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. The…

Huh. What happened with the lot of 2000 seized OnePlus Buds? ( https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436760/us-customs-state... ) Did the company just write off that shipment and ke…

Gosh. I just emailed myself a .png of the barcode containing my library card number and open it in, like, the Photos or Gmail app when I'm at the kiosk.

I *swear* that a year or two into this whole thing there were a wave of articles about how individual state marketplaces were having insurers exit the state marketplace. The story …

Wow, the last time I read about this, I had not seen * the 2019 update that someone re-evaluated the risks and thinks the retrofit might not have been necessary after all ( https:/…

Reading this writeup, the procedure takes up to two minutes: * each person in the room pulls up the stem when their individual second hand is pointing at 0, and also sets the time …

(I realize that there are a few details that you can use to tell these apart, but,) Who gets to register the copyright on the image?

So the house pays $10,000 to everyone who hasn't folded yet?

Thanks for this link -- really interesting. I like the suggestion to rethink whether you actually need to be doing asynchronous computing with a message broker/queue/stream or whet…

A little over ten years ago I worked in the Excel Services team that makes the consumer-visible Excel Web App and also the SharePoint-integrated Excel Services product (server side…

If the Earth's rotation speeds up or slows down, would you like the "6pm local time" to be 6pm plus the leap seconds that come in between now and 2030? (We don't know how many ther…

Whenever I want to think about "what does it mean to prove something?" I dig into my copy of Imre Lakatos's "Proofs and Refutations", a Socratic dialogue-style story where a bunch …

I hate to dunk on this type of art while it's down but > Impact Theory agreed to destroy all Founder’s Keys in its possession or control What does this mean practically -- like the…

Knowyourmeme is very late to the meme game. Entire civilizations of memes flourished and decayed on 4chan, fark, Slashdot, YTMND, and the bare metal internet long ago. Bonsai Kitte…

One of the special treats of operating a large distributed system is getting to watch the graph of requests-versus-time as you do stuff, like enabling http flow-control headers or …

This version of the story implies that the outcome is a bad thing people have been tricked into doing. As far as I can tell from TikTok people want to be part of a brand experience…

Nicely spotted. Did the domain lapse and was it re-registered and rehosted for promotional purposes?