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jesterpm

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The Jet Powered Beer Cooler

asciimation.co.nz
3 points·by jesterpm·3 months ago·0 comments

A gigantic landslide shows the limit to how high mountains can grow

economist.com
118 points·by jesterpm·3 years ago·79 comments

Bouvet Island DXpedition

3y0j.no
1 points·by jesterpm·3 years ago·0 comments

Morsle – the daily Morse code challenge

morsle.fun
1 points·by jesterpm·4 years ago·0 comments

A web app for simulating a waving flag

krikienoid.github.io
3 points·by jesterpm·4 years ago·0 comments

The transistor – or 25 miles on a hunk of Germanium (1953)

robkalmeijer.nl
48 points·by jesterpm·4 years ago·6 comments

x86 Machine Code Statistics (2008)

strchr.com
2 points·by jesterpm·4 years ago·1 comments

comments

jesterpm
·2 years ago·discuss
I wouldn't be surprised if it's not already in the Municipal Code for the city, since they need a way to maintain consistency. For example, here's the divisions in Renton, which are oddly complicated relative to the size of the city: https://www.codepublishing.com/WA/Renton/#!/Renton09/Renton0...
jesterpm
·2 years ago·discuss
Oh this is fun. I'm in the process of building something similar, but I'm splitting it into two parts: the first part is a static site generator and the second is a CGI that implements the micropub spec, which can run the static site generator when it receives new content.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
It's even weirder with people: blood sugar level change with how you perceive time to be passing, not the actual amount of time: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603444113
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
That comparison would depend heavily on what you're storing.

Ion has the option of using symbol tables to replace strings (e.g. in struct/map keys or in values). So, if you benchmark had a large number of records with similar structures, I would expect Ion to pull ahead. On the other hand, if each record had nothing in common, I'd expect them to perform similarly.

One feature of the Ion libraries that I've liked is the parser will take any of the formats and figure out what to do with it (text, binary, compressed binary). It's one less thing to worry about. You can switch encodings later without breaking consumers, you can write plain text Ion when you're testing, etc.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
Ion is heavily used on the retail side of Amazon, but it's only recently started to appear in AWS products.

AWS is starting support PartiQL (https://partiql.org/) queries in some places and PartiQL uses Ion's type system internally.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
> and the OS installed takes up well under 500MB

Fast-forward to 2023 and many individual Android apps are 100-500 MB each.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
I don't use my google account for much anymore, but I love the idea. I tried very hard to use it and... it didn't work.

I went to my google account and clicked "Create a passkey", but apparent my "device doesn't support creating passkeys" (Linux, Firefox).

The page said my Pixel 2 has an automatically created passkey, so maybe I could experience the "use another device to sign in" flow. Opened a private window and my only option was a password (but there was a feedback prompt asking why I still wanted to use a password).

I tried again with Firefox on Android, but the "Create a passkey" button doesn't even appear. Same story with Chrome on Android.

Is it just me, or does the future look a lot like Internet Explorer in the early 2000s?
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
Sometimes. Sometimes the fast thing is just heavily parallelized.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
RA (Router Advertisement) handles announcing the prefix for SLAAC addresses and DNS.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
I suspect the lock is more about keeping other people's trash out than keeping theirs in.
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
I expect that's a corollary to Parkinson's law
jesterpm
·3 years ago·discuss
On our last road trip, I gave our 4 year old a printed map with the route highlighted and lettered milestones every hour or so. I was hoping to give a sense of scale (how far away are we, how far we do we travel in a certain time, etc.) that's harder to convey with a digital map. It also worked to practice letters and cardinal directions (we're at K, what's the next letter? the road turns at M, which direction will we be going now?). It worked rather well, but probably because he got a gummy bear at each waypoint.
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
The book I learned from suggested five types of knots for different problems and suggested learning one of type, which I found to be a great starting point.

The five were: a stopper knot, to keep a line from pulling through something, a fixed loop, a running loop, a hitch (attach a line to a thing), and a bend (attach a rope to a rope).

My go-to knots were a figure 8, bowline, running bowline, clove hitch, and sheet bend respectively.
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
I generally only need `ln -s <src> <dst>`. I know the -s means symbolic link, but in my head I read it as "source", since that's how I remembered the order long ago.
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
These, and the spoofed number phone calls where the other side just hangs up when you answer. For the phone calls, I just assumed that someone was trying to build a database of phone numbers that do or do not answer for some other/future purpose...
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
I assumed that the gap between the cost to do the bare minimum and the cost to do some elaborate was smaller at the time. If you're already laying each brick by hand, it seems like the incremental cost to work a pattern into the bricks would be small compared to modern (bland) poured-concrete buildings, where we lay a whole floor in one go. Likewise in other trades.

We invented machines to build large amounts of simple things cheaply, so we designed simpler things.
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
Coincidentally, just before this was posted I read a similar analysis of Windows executables from 2008: https://www.strchr.com/x86_machine_code_statistics

MOV is still the top, but it was followed by PUSH and CALL.
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
Ha, that is quite satisfying when it comes together. Maybe it's just from practice, but I think the sheet bend [1] is easier and faster to tie though.

[1]: https://www.animatedknots.com/sheet-bend-knot
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
The book I learned knots from said that there are ~5 categories of knots and knowing one of each will cover you for most things. The categories were fixed loop, running loop, stopper knot, hitch (rope to object), and bend (joining two ropes).

I have about 4-5 knots memorized for each of those category, but sailing I typically only use a cleat hitch, bowline, and clove hitch (in order of frequency).
jesterpm
·4 years ago·discuss
Ebook: https://archive.org/details/TheAshleyBookOfKnots

The ABoK was something I always wanted to see, but never bothered to buy... until I found that PDF. Scrolling through it finally convinced me to buy a hardcopy. It's one of my favorite books to just flip through. There's more than just the knots: the history and the anecdotes are a fascinating window into the past.