Viewing profile — pardoned_turkey

The thing is, within normal, stable households, most of good hygiene practices - including hand-washing after using the restroom - are unnecessary. You already share all the microf…

Well, yes and no. You're correct that ZX Spectrum is a lot slower than the author estimates, but there's also a software-side performance bottleneck: the code is written in the bui…

They had looong waiting lists in most places in the Bay Area, though.

It's a bit more complicated than that (but no less reprehensible). The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what…

The author wasn't asking you to write code, but to analyze some existing snippets. And it wasn't about "intuition about how compilers work", because not all of these deal with unde…

It's even worse: for example, the first one isn't undefined, it's merely unspecified - i.e., "depends on the system in a well-known and predictable way," not "you're doing somethin…

In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly re…

People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children a…

Nobody is arguing that you should feel sorry for short-sellers. It's just a mildly interesting fact, although it's less meaningful than implied in the article, because Tesla is als…

It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. Al…

> how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it. Do online commu…

Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, an…

Rick Hartley's content is fantastic, but I think it caused collateral damage by making hobbyists who work with 8-bit microcontrollers and I2C believe they need to follow the same r…

Well, on the flip side: the whole reason these are sold is that the FDA is preventing the substance from being sold OTC. This is not an example of a manufacturer putting something …

Mozilla has been diversifying itself away from Firefox for 15 years. They're still pouring money into SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, on top of a range of more recent projects that have…

At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article: > To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person w…

It's a bit weird because electricity delivered to your home is generally more expensive than fossil fuels. What currently makes EVs cheaper to operate is that at the pump, you pay …

Is there any article explaining what they actually did, or are alleged to have done? With the VW scandal, there was a fairly in-depth discussion of the technical aspects of it. But…

Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to works, which are specific, complete expressions of ideas. The problem artists have with LLMs is not that they routinely output copyr…

It's unfortunate, but also not surprising. These cropped up in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet with no particularly good prospect for long-term sustain…

Yeah, that'd be my guess. People who have been driving the same vehicle for 20 years are probably not in it for the thrills. In contrast, Teslas are fashionable and probably dispro…

The substantive claim against PFAS is that they're very persistent in the environment, can bioaccumulate, and end up in places we didn't anticipate (e.g., in the rain). This is a g…

The embarrassing part is how they have been allocating subsidies to ISPs that don't provide rural connectivity improvements nearly as significant as what Starlink managed to actual…