Give Sumatra a chance. At least under Windows. It requires a bit of love in terms of changing default color (e.g. single value in config file, from bright yellow to something toned down), but it super fast, lightweight and open wide range of formats (pdf, epub, mobi, djvu).
It was my first though as well. Idea of aliens, which can just "skip" the sight of humans is pretty cool. The same goes with concept of consciousness as a parasitic/optional part of inteligent species.
Blindsight is one of the best, 10/10 on Mohs Scale of sci-fi hardness. I love the description of scientific concepts behind sci-fi story at the end. Such a shame, there is so little books with that kind of deep research.
One of the best written, first contact novels out there. I have the luck of hearing Watts lecture on one of the Cons. He is even better in person.
If you are from Canada, it is good idea to check, where he is speaking.
Authors blog, filled with pop-scientific concepts and ideas [1], is well worth it.
Surgical high-proof mask doctors and nurses use are pretty good against viruses, combined with googles of course.
For normal person? They are mostly useless. Only for people, who are already sick, to stop them from spreading virus further. Wearing mask by healthy person doesn't make sense, because there is not much to stop viruses with coming in contact with your eyes. You are always a scratch away from bringing those viruses into your body, negating any benefit from mask. And most of mask, you can buy currently are not dense enough to capture viruses.
OP is correct, unless you are sick or medical worker, you don't need mask. Don't buy them, hospitals need them much more than you.
Everything old is new again it seems. Anyone used Maxthon Browser before? It was multiengine browser, which used both Webkit and Trident under the hood. It has that feature for ages, just for flash content back than.
If only someone would built good email client into Browser like old Opera, that would be godsend. Opera and Maxthon were ages ahead in terms of certain features.
It is little weird for me, they ended up putting video within shadow DOM container.
I mean, significant mental investment sound like typing "sunk cost fallacy" to me.
The whole Urbit system could be described in terms of linked-lists and S-Expressions. Even languages as obscure as K, J or APL have better reasoning than Urbit.
Obscurity only leads to smaller number of people wanting to explore something. Only people who stays with it are "believers" and not experts.
I think as far as other languages are concerned, the best JSON handling gives youn Serde in Rust and F#, from what I read. If only C++ metaprogramming was easier without crazy complexity, Json library would be made to be much smaller and more efficient with less work.
That is way I really think Svelte3 can shake webdev a bit. It generates small, plenty fast builds by default with easy syntax. Currently it is missing a bit in terms of tooling, but the results just bring you back to almost pure HTML and JS with much less to be worried about.
Just open the docs. Seriously, first link in Google/DDG/Bing on topic of "<any c string routine> safety" will explain it to you. I am self-taught and I can see it.
Seriously, just looking at function arguments shows you, there is a problem under the hood. Reading docs also will point out.
It is open-source, read and learn from Git, Linux code and so on. If you do not have experience is sysdev or high security, just don't contribute there.
This is like saying, construction engineering is gatekeeping beginners, because you have to work for few years before you can start your own project.
Not native speaker here, but I think, he just meant that, most programmers and drivers thinks they are better in respective things then, they really are.
It is just like letting programmer build a house. It is just a really bad idea.
As far as I don't like the "Angry Lisp Drunk Haskell" version of TS e.g. loads of `<` and '>' mixed with functional concepts from half of the Haskell, which makes understanding code harder than necessary.
Typescript is one of the rare good things in javascript. You have to understands JS, because there is always gun pointed at your foot, waiting to blow you away.
Still TS makes this gun, a little bit harder to trigger. You cannot just write Java in it and cross your fingers.
Typescript gives you pretty good docs most of the time for free. Only problem is when author of code used `any` type or `Angry Lisp` version of it. Interfaces, enums and field access and typedefs are godsend.
In defense of TypeScript, your example looks like casting `void*` in C. Well typed `JSON.parse` would be pretty complicated and require runtime-machinery.
Only thing I dislike about TS is lack of proper `optional` types. I know the '.?' operator is coming, but still.
It is basically in progress by largest forest owner in Poland - state company to be exact.
It is called Carbon Forest Sylviculture (Leśne Gospodarstwo Węglowe). Over all it is more of a marketing scheme with very small impact. We tried to increase sequestration rates with correct sylvicultural regimes.
Currently it is more like a way for companies to sound ecological. IDK if it can be profitable, remember land and everything cost and I think those profit margins would be very small.
I am a forester and maybe I can chime in. From the point of view of CO2 assimilation the clear-cut or even better cut in small parts over the years forests are much better than those old-growth multicentury forests around the world. Actually old-growth forest will accumulate less CO2 than younger counterparts and may have ratio of realeased and accumulate CO2 being close to 1:1. Number of species at least in European or rather Polish forests are pretty large in both natural protected and normally used forests. Of course they are countries with worse forest conditions like for example Africa or Scandinavia, but still greener planet = better planet. It doesn't matter that much, why it is greener.
The general approach changes at least here. The largest difference is relatively smaller density of dead wood in the forests, which is important and still not fully understood habitat.
More programming oriented, less ego boosting.