Notices by ShadSterling (shadsterling@mastodon.social)

@coreyspowell I hadn’t known that the speed of light had been known before Maxwell, so this prompted me to look up the history, and the estimates before 1800 were pretty good: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#History

So I guess Herschel’s specific numbers were off because it turns out measuring the speed of light is a lot easier than measuring the distances to stars

@inthehands @adapalmer I’m confused that they’re doing this for Alzheimer’s and not for chronic fatigue, but it sounds like good research either way

@mcc because the Golden Delicious are more popular, and the Lady Alice are more portable. If they’d stuck with Macintosh they’d be up to like 15 by now

@bifouba @inthehands @petergleick oh no, now I’m imagining a rewrite of the original trilogy where Darth Vader is as buffoonish as Trump.

It’s a very different story

@hellomiakoda @lrt_writes as of now the ID requirements are different in different jurisdictions, and some sites that implement them do so dependent on where they track your connection to, so using a VPN to appear to be connecting from a jurisdiction that doesn’t have those requirements does bypass the verification on those sites. It might not be a long-term solution, but it’s effective for now. Or so I hear

@dalias @whitequark @NanoRaptor I don’t know how to say why exactly, but I don’t think opposing bigotry is the same as supporting conversion therapy

@dalias @whitequark @NanoRaptor the thing that jumps out to me is that if we could “fix” the worst of the wrong values then we could apply the already existing treatments and all but eliminate the most harmful infections and dramatically reduce the harm done by most other diseases, all at once. If that were an option there’s no other use of the button that would do anywhere near as much good

@fesshole new lifehack just dropped

@lanodan @foone @Truck my favorite was the laptop where the power cable could also be plugged in to the PS/2 port.

(Nothing exploded)

@r @dalias it doesn’t work correctly in [all] fixed-width terminals or editors, especially with double-width characters. I make a lot of lists using emoji as category indicators, and sometimes some of them come out double-width, or break the fixed-width rendering, or get rendered overlapping neighboring (which preserves spacing without confining each character to its cell).

I expect it will improve, like weird effects when backspace removed half an encoded character

@b0rk @endrift only if there’s a way to capture the use of the file handle and set up what amounts to an open-on-use mechanism. I think someone in another branch of the thread mentioned a hypothetical virtual file handle that would work similarly

@inthehands didn’t we already have a problem with more and more programmers avoiding that kind of wrestling? Between the hype about high paying jobs and the economic context squeezing everyone harder to the point where an ordinary job can barely support a single person, my sense of it has been that what was once a small group of people inclined to focus on that part has been overtaken by a much larger group more interested in a better wage, whether by necessity or by disposition

@inthehands I dunno, I think we just gave away the role of managing the word’s reserve currency. I don’t know what will happen next, but I think it will resemble one of three things:
- Some other currency ultimately replaces the USD, tho it will take a few decades for for that to emerge
- We stop having a single reserve currency for the world and and up with a handful of regional reserve currencies
- After a period of diversification and uncertainty it eventually returns to the USD

@inthehands @Rycaut right, I made my comparison public - https://mastodon.social/@ShadSterling/110763753963099232

Didn’t actually compare on how much I like the web interface

@inthehands @Rycaut huh, I tried out I think 6 different brokerages, and decided Fidelity was the best. There’s a few things Schwab does better, and it was a different one that allowed buying mutual funds by shares, but it was way better than most of the web interfaces

@inthehands what’s this sniper story?
My quick search only turned up more comments with the claim that he said that, no good sources

@inthehands maybe make plans in advance to safely dispose of the wreck afterward. I don’t know what’s involved or how hard that is, but having a smashed up car with live batteries and connections in unknown condition and no plan for what to do with it doesn’t sound great.

For extra fun, remove the batteries first and rent a jackhammer or two

@xgranade I wish it were new. I mean I think it’s new from him, but there have been others drooling over the land grab the whole time. Another layer of disgusting on top of all the horrifying

@inthehands the basic problem with that kind of “encrypted” “email” is that it’s only one of those at a time; it’s either encrypted end-to-end and delivered some other way, or it’s encrypted per-hop and delivered as email. None of those services do both at once. It should be possible to do both at once using GPG or S/MIME, but for that to actually work every provider would have to handle it well, and AKAIK none do.

It still baffles me that banks haven’t been pushing this

@inthehands while that update is an improvement, and maybe better than some other orgs, I wouldn’t go so far as to applaud. I can’t quantify how much the bad post decreased my perception of how much good they do, this followup has increased it from there but not as far as back to where it was