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randallsquared

9,601 karmajoined vor 19 Jahren
A developer in Delaware, doing a startup since summer 2025.

Previously I lived in upstate SC. I'm still there infrequently.

Email me at [email protected]

comments

randallsquared
·vorgestern·discuss
It need not be democratic in the modern, universal suffrage sense.
randallsquared
·vor 4 Tagen·discuss
The poster isn't pussyfooting around the issue, he's feigning discovery to emphasize the point as a rhetorical move.
randallsquared
·vor 6 Tagen·discuss
> I saw a question once on Quora asking why the poor don’t rip the wealthy out of their houses and the top reply was “Nazi!” with hundreds of upvotes.

This seems odd because it usually goes the other way: people complaining about the rich typically tar them as the "Nazis". For people against destroying the rich, the usual epithet for those who want to do so would be "commies"...
randallsquared
·vor 7 Tagen·discuss
The rule bans the supersonic flight regardless of whether it's audible or not, so they'd still be asking for the rule to be changed.
randallsquared
·vor 7 Tagen·discuss
When Boom was testing last year, the sonic boom never reached the ground, as I recall. That can be arranged at higher altitudes, but doesn't work at low ones.
randallsquared
·vor 8 Tagen·discuss
I did notice that the "quotes" weren't linked as I would have expected with that "you can check" language, but after searching for the exact phrases, it does look like they're vague paraphrasing, not actual quotes. Sigh.
randallsquared
·vor 10 Tagen·discuss
> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.

It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.
randallsquared
·vor 13 Tagen·discuss
Some tool or library is interpreting the newline as two characters (as you note), and then a subsequent step is removing unprintable characters. Things like this used to frequently happen in shells, Perl, PHP, and so on.
randallsquared
·vor 13 Tagen·discuss
I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
randallsquared
·vor 13 Tagen·discuss
I guess we're so used to the title edit that we mentally re-insert "The Best" at the start of this link so that it makes sense.
randallsquared
·vor 15 Tagen·discuss
Agreed that as worded, this one is just "authoritarian". It seems on the "Right" at the moment because they're in power in the US (sort of), but it was "Left" only five years ago.
randallsquared
·vor 15 Tagen·discuss
Water is pretty fungible, so while it might not be that alfalfa fields in the Arizona and southern California desert are irrigated from a residential pipe, it's the same water either way. Whether the water arrives at the field/datacenter via municipal pipe or irrigation canal doesn't seem relevant, except that a municipal pipe probably could supply most datacenters' needs, while desert alfalfa has a whole different scale of usage.

But if your point is that no one would farm alfalfa in the desert and use water that would otherwise be available for residential use, you are quite wrong.
randallsquared
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
I assumed people here mostly already knew that water usage for data centers was trivial compared to lots of uses like alfalfa, non-data-center power generation, etc. My point used that as a foundation, so I agree that if you didn't already know that, it's undermined. It's a quick thing to dig into though, via search or LLM. You could start with Andy Masley: xcancel.com/andymasley / x.com/andymasley
randallsquared
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
It was already near zero compared to various other uses. It's always depressing to me to see a lot of effort put in to "solve a problem" (with subsequent fanfare) which is only a PR or image problem in the first place.
randallsquared
·vor 17 Tagen·discuss
Unless mandated, why would the people controlling a corporation (and its budget) do that? While the corp has money in the bank, it's kinda their money, in the sense that they decide what to spend it on. If distributed back to the shareholders, the money evaporates from their perspective, so there's not much incentive to do it unless it's required, or unless they will benefit by it (e.g., they have a lot of stock themselves and would like the dividend).
randallsquared
·vor 17 Tagen·discuss
Well, in the secondary link, at least.
randallsquared
·vor 19 Tagen·discuss
Nearly two decades ago I worked briefly for a "startup" in the DC metro which (in retrospect, for me) existed only to show activity toward using an IP that was the subject of a lawsuit. The expected payout from the lawsuit would have rendered the cost of running the ~20 person startup meaningless, had they won. I suppose the lawsuit didn't go well, since the startup folded 4-6 months after I started, with paychecks being late, then stopping, and employees progressively not showing up. Fun times.
randallsquared
·vor 22 Tagen·discuss
I think the argument is that the urban setting itself is ancestrally unnatural. Only a tiny proportion of humans lived in areas full of strangers in close proximity until the last hundred or two hundred years, which is not long enough for any related changes to spread widely given generation length.
randallsquared
·vor 23 Tagen·discuss
My comment was not about what happened, which does not need to be justified, in my opinion, especially at this late date.

My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.
randallsquared
·vor 24 Tagen·discuss
The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.