Viewing profile — timmaxw

> Cut threads into printed parts with a thread tap for quick design of low-reuse joints. I've found wood screws work well for this. The wood screw can cut its own threads without n…

> refusing charge backs is too easy That doesn't sound right...? Credit/debit card chargebacks are handled by the bank. If the merchant doesn't pick up the phone, the bank will tak…

> If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M…

Here's an intuition that might help: Suppose we define β=1/T, the reciprocal of temperature. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_beta .) As a system gets hotter and ho…

Really? I zoomed in on the Towers of Bologna and then used the "measurement" tool to draw a 97m line on the ground. The line seems about as long as the tower is high. If you try th…

Note, those pictures depict the towers as about 5x bigger than they actually were. To get a true sense of scale, here's the same view on Google Earth: https://earth.google.com/web/…

Yes, Python dicts remember insertion order. This is different from C++ std::map, which maintains the keys in sorted order. For example, std::map::lower_bound(X) finds "the smallest…

In Python job interviews, I think the interviewer will only judge your code on asymptotic complexity, not absolute speed. I think Python engineers generally aren't expected to know…

Well done. It's horrifying that the Python standard library "+/-" operators don't handle DST correctly.

> Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing bu…

The reason people complain about "high art" is because we're told that everyone should aspire to appreciate high art, and that people who appreciate high art are somehow better tha…

The non-wealthy regularly pay for books, music, movies, video games, etc. Hollywood is a $40B/year industry. All these industries follow a model of "make a work of art, then sell i…

If Uruguay can run on 100% renewable energy, the unstated implication is "The US could do it too, we just lack the political will". (As opposed to the idea that "Renewable energy i…

Yeah. I agree with most of what David Gerard writes, but this attack on Scott Alexander was weak. The "54 billion lives" thing was obviously a joke.

What are all those transistors doing? I've heard the cache is the biggest part. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17 , the A17 has 72MB of cache. Cache is typically SRAM. Pe…

As a beginner, I've been a big fan of the Digilent Analog Discovery. This guide lists it under "logic analyzers", but it's also a passable oscilloscope if you don't need more than …

haymaker (noun) a powerful blow with the fist. etymology: "the punch probably so called for resemblance to the wide swinging stroke of a scythe"

The latter seems plausible to me, but the former makes no sense. If the problem is that Amazon-retail has too much market power, how would splitting off AWS help with that problem?…

This writeup has a lot more details: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-cuts-to... DC AG Karl Racine filed a lawsuit over this in May 2021. The judge threw it out…

> People have families to feed. People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be…

yonron's comment made a specific claim: "Amazon will raise the price in the long run and capture monopolistic profits." aga98mtl pointed out this isn't actually true in practice. I…

I think there's a dynamic where: - Desirable job applicants get hired quickly, but people who can't get hired stay on the market - People who can't get hired will keep applying to …

That still doesn't seem like very much time to me. Job hunting involves hours and hours of interviews; five minutes of paperwork is negligible by comparison, right? Are people mass…

At tech companies I've worked at, when people use phrases like "the best product" or "product quality", they are in fact using those phrases to mean "the product that does the best…

To clarify: what specific remedy do you want the court to impose on Google, and how would it make things better for everyone?