Viewing profile — wanderingstan

I worked on a family archiving product (which dead ended) and dealt with this problem. My hacked solution was to repurpose the seconds value to encode precision, as you generally d…

I chose a toaster specifically because it's about the simplest electrical device out there, and thus pushes the thesis to the extreme. But smart toasters are pretty common: https:/…

Yes! Continuing on thoughts of LLM compression, I'm now convinced and amazed that economics will dictate that all devices contain a copy of all information on the Internet. I wrote…

Mine as well. 2 years ago my mind was blown that I could code in a language I didn’t know (scala) while on a log train ride with no internet (Amtrak) using a local model on a lapto…

Here is the Dave Barry column mentioned in the obituary about George’s barbecue lighting: https://www.davebarry.com/misccol/charcoal.htm

Exactly. To refuse the “gift” is an explicit statement of “I know I could do this silently but I want to bother everyone around me.”

My go-to technique has been to offer the offender a pair of headphones, saying something to insinuate that they must forgotten theirs or be too poor to afford them. Most of the tim…

I concur. And would just add two points: (1) Make it that you’re not asking for anything / don’t open with something that could be perceived as a setup to asking for money, or push…

The site seems to be getting crushed. Can someone summarize what it did?

What motivation would the Supreme Court have to get “back on Trumps good side?” If anything, after his recent name calling of them I’d think they’d be less inclined to appease him.…

> Just what the process was in the scam that snared Mr Williams remains unclear but it appears the scammers were able to access his card details and add them to a new Google Pay wa…

And to give them credit: WhatsApp also had brilliant engineering that was able to scale with their popularity.

Might you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and re…

For me, I recently wanted to assemble a “supercut” of my videos of attempts at learning to bunny-hop a bike. The tool was able to craft a python script that used ffmpeg to edit out…

> Attend every week. In my experience, this is the key. “90% of life is showing up.” If you are around the same people every week, for whatever reason, with even a minimal amount o…

Yes, for years now I’ve had this creeping feeling that it’s a social version of the prisoners dilemma: if you’re the only one that puts down the phone (or gets off social media, et…

It’s the 2nd paragraph: > Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=6…

Yes. And it’s so easy: ` `

This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, …

It’s an interesting theory, but I had to downvote as you didn’t provide any references for your bold assertion. Is there data that bears this out? And even if there were, how could…

I’ve gotten in several arguments over the years where webdevs insisted on showing tabular data using flexbox or hardcoded div widths or worse. They insisted that html tables were n…

Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters” https://…

There were specs competing for adoption, but only tables (the old way) and CSS were actually adopted by browsers. So no point trying to use some other positioning technique.

Indeed. I just wish we could get a better sense of the scale, which is always hard in nature shots devoid of trees or human structures. A productive use of AI would be to place som…