Viewing profile — pliftkl

I didn't really remember the "blow up the moon", but he sure posted a lot about "Time has Inertia" on sci.physics.

This was my reaction as well - every article I've read seems to call out "changes the way we think they navigated because out of sight of land", but this may be a perverse form of …

The fact that this is completely unmentioned in the article really surprised me. The physicians may not have done insurance fraud, but they absolutely committed medical malpractice…

This is a common practice at many large companies, though it isn't explicit, and it's rarely transparent. Managers try to find roles on other teams for their worst performers in or…

Not the author you quote, but Christopher Schwartz, who runs Lost Art Press (which printed what you quoted) can also write a heck of a wood-working book: "The journey to the summit…

It's a weird collection of topics, all in the same dry style. Definitely AI.

I have a Mormon neighbor who did his missionary work in Thailand. My wife is Thai, so he came by to chat with us once with some missionaries who had visited us. I spoke to him for …

Well, the punishment for Facebook is twofold: (A) they probably spent 10's of thousands on fighting this in court, and (B) it sets precedent that they are liable for this sort of t…

Thank you for posting this and giving me an injection of nostalgia. :) I loved these books as a kid, and have probably not thought about them in 40 years. Unfortunately, my own dau…

If you're really talking about universal rights in the modern sense, that really didn't happen in the US until the 1960's in practice (unless you were white and had the correct chr…

Depends a lot on the jurisdiction. In Austin, the police will declare "no-refusal" weekends (typically holidays) in which they declare in advance that they'll get a warrant for a b…

In case you take it up as a retirement project: what I'd love to see is an avatar builder's kit. Create the core engine, a basic level, monster, item, and class editor, and let peo…

I loved the avatar gameplay and the fact that it wasn't a "massively" multiplayer dungeon crawl, but rather something small enough that you knew most of the players. I'd trade a lo…

Becoming disciplined enough to use the CPAP every night was a real struggle for me. Ironically, what ultimately helped me was starting to take modafinil during the day. Taking that…

If you tell a police officer that you did a crime, then your words are admissible as evidence against you. If you tell a police officer that you did not commit a crime, you can't h…

"By then Alexa was getting a billion interactions per week, but most of those conversations were trivial, commands to play music or ask about the weather. That meant less opportuni…

I would absolutely be willing to pay a monthly fee for a Facebook that wouldn't serve me ads or "suggested" things in my feed, and only showed me things that I explicitly said I wa…

[Speculation] The issue is probably not the upkeep of the services, but rather the servicing of debt that they took on to get here.

One of the things that made F# "click" for me was Wlaschin's "Domain Modeling Made Functional". It's largely a focus on how to think about the underlying data, and getting in that …

I'm 52, and probably watch more youtube than any other content provider. However, that only started when I got premium and no longer had to deal with ads. If I had to deal with ads…

I picked up wood working in my late 40's when I was on a soul crushing IT project, and could no longer code recreationally in the evening. Wood working uses a different part of my …

"I believe that in general, some people are more allergic to wood dust than other people. Some people seem to breathe in pine dust all year long and are fine. If I sniff a single c…

While I don't do enough C to comment on some of the other items, the global static variable named "last" seems likely to collide with a variable name that would be commonly used.

There are many bad outcomes to unattended children that don't involve kidnapping (think uncommon but normal childhood injuries of kids on playgrounds). That being said, none of the…