Viewing profile — mrob

It is absolutely the government's job to regulate externalities. Otherwise, personal virtue is just subsidizing third party vice. Energy is fungible. Every joule you save lowers th…

Lower color rendering index than incandescent lights too. High CRI LEDs are available, but they're still worse than incandescents and less efficient than the conventional LEDs.

There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion: Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection. Direct atmospheric cap…

British ice cream is generally terrible because our laws are too lax. Previously (from 1996 until 2015), "ice cream" required a minimum of 5% milk fat and 2.5% milk protein. This i…

Big generators in power plants use alternators with field windings, not permanent magnets. Wind turbines use either permanent magnet generators or induction generators. Permanent m…

>there was very little need for personal mobility in society People regularly traveled to nearby market towns. There's still a strange omission: why didn't anybody in Europe invent…

100% agreed. Restricting possession of physical items is less tyrannical than restricting communication. Social media is only harmful when it's ubiquitous and inescapable. When you…

A pure Harvard architecture machine has exactly that separation. Admittedly, there needs to be some mechanism for converting data to code so you can actually program it, but it doe…

"Downloadable" should be "weights available" by analogy to "source available". K3 is weights available because it includes usage restrictions. K2.6 is open weights, because the onl…

>Stable aerodynamics The F-16 is famously the first production aircraft with unstable aerodynamics, to increase maneuverability. It's not flyable without computer assistance. This …

There's a good article about this: https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/ (previous discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972 The Amiga feels fast because its slownes…

Even if you can reject the aesthetic argument for non-fiction works (although read some of Dijkstra's papers for a good counterargument), it is still a problem because it breaks an…

You can also spoof a keyboard and simulate keystrokes to open terminals and run arbitrary commands. I don't know about Windows, but on Linux it's possible to block USB connections …

That fact that you're posting on a web forum makes you an outlier. Most people only passively consume, and mobile devices are good enough for that.

>This is not coming to the Linux world. The moment this sort of thing happens, distros get forked. I installed Debian 13 recently. The first time I opened Firefox ESR (installed by…

>they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad This one specifically has a good solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_bread

I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storag…

>no human being would ever refer to Michael Jordan as the "Space Jam guy." Maybe not in the USA, but globally I think it's likely that more people watched Space Jam than ever watch…

>every 3db is a doubling of sound power and intensity since its a logarithmic scale This is true, but the ear measures sound pressure, not sound intensity. Sound pressure requires …

Doesn't read like slop to me. The only sentence that could be argued to conflate the two is: >A new law taking effect this year will require manufacturers and importers to collect …

High level languages are analogous to airbrushes or paint rollers, not assistants. They let you paint faster, at the cost of making some things impossible that you would be able to…

"High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compressio…

Latency is cumulative, so avoidable latency is never acceptable. Maybe the hardware will change. Maybe somebody will run your software in an emulator. That 5ms could be enough to p…

>averaging the last 50 reads and wait till the majority is either off or on. This is a bad way to do it because it adds avoidable latency. A moving average is a low-pass filter. Th…

I have an air purifier with built in particulate sensor. It doesn't provide numbers, but has a multi-color LED indicator to report PM2.5 level as good/mediocre/bad/terrible. Runnin…