The LACK (https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/) is probably one of the most optimized pieces of furniture you can buy. There's no hand crafted desk that can be this cheap. A wood worker won't even get out of bed for $17.
Now is it an amazingly beautiful, rock solid, heirloom quality piece of furniture? No, but it's not trying to be that.
I meant CD quality audio, as in 44.1 KHz/16 bit digital files, not specifically the CD physical medium. It's an old invention and still fulfills every playback need possible, let alone for old audiophiles who long stopped being able to hear the highest frequencies anyway.
It is bad by modern standards. Low capacity, high noise, imperfect stereo separation, pretty bad frequency response. CD quality audio solves every problem perfectly and it's old and dirt cheap at this point. To even approach that with vinyl you have to fuss over needles, weight, turntable mechanics and so on and and spend a lot of money and still won't get there.
Personally I see far more magic in digital electronics. Storing vibrations physically is neat and clever, but none of that looks particularly magic to me. Just a straightforward, logical solution to a problem. More elegant simplicity than magic really.
One thing I didn't realize for a long time is that it turns out that a lot of these machines have a digital stage. To cut a disk you need to pack the grooves as close as possible. But the spiral isn't fixed, it's adjusted dynamically. Quiet sections can be packed close together. That means that before cutting, the machine needs to know how much physical space it needs for the audio it's about to put on the disk. And that requires a buffer, and that's very often digital. So it turns out there's precious little vinyl out there without a digital step being involved out there.
Not that it matters anyway, since vinyl is a pretty terrible technology, but still, it's kind of funny.
msoTriStateMixed applies to aggregates. Eg, text.isBold() can be true, false, or a mix. Partly bold, partly not bold.
msoTriStateToggle isn't a real value but only used as a sort of flag. So eg, text.setBold(tristate), where "Mixed" would be invalid, and "Toggle" would flip the bold-ness of the text.
The msoCTrue one is where it gets really weird, no clue what's that for. I suppose an ill-conceived attempt to support the other way to express True.
True being -1 was a thing in Visual Basic and I suppose by some other Windows stuff. Logic being all the bits are 1.
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.
I'm referring to actual people I argued with in the past. People convinced that AI in a self-driving car would involve the car calculating whether to kill a pedestrian or the driver, rather than trying to figure out whether this thing half obscured by foliage is a speed limit sign or not.
Obviously that's not what everyone argues, my point is that there's a lot of chaff in such arguments and not much wheat. People make a lot of noise about dramatic but completely unrealistic scenarios, while ignoring the far more boring reality.
The PauseAI people are for instance talking about human extinction, somehow. And not crappy GitHub PRs.
The critics didn't do themselves any favors. Part think the Terminator has something useful to say on the subject, part invent contrived scenarios like self-driving cars having to resolve trolley problems. Reality turned out to be much more boring.
But yes, what you said but unironically. Like it or not it's here, it's not going away, so all the remaining options have to assume that.
My most blood boiling error message (long time ago, maybe they fixed it):
"No headset audio" -- displayed by the Oculus desktop app, in regards to not having audio on the headset. There's a "learn more" link, which would send you to the general troubleshooting FAQ.
So, the program knows something is wrong with the audio, but completely refuses to say what. Is it a headset problem, a driver problem, a restart needed!?
Then to make it more fun, when I complained about this stuff originally I got the advice to upload a debug log. Ok, good. That failed every time with "The upload took too long, connection was lost". I pulled out the dev tools and then I saw that what the API actually returns is:
[{"error":"Attachment is too large. Limit 20 megabytes."}]
Bloody infuriating. They built a system that translates sensible errors into completely useless ones.
I like coding, I just don't particularly enjoy figuring out the framework du jour. The task at hand is interesting, but the part where I need to figure out what are the incantations to have a Qt list with images in it is not. I need a working UI to get the thing done, but the framework stands in my way, requiring me to step away from my task intended task and spend a few hours on understanding QTreeView.
That's where I really enjoy AI currently, because I can get the GUI stuff out of the way much faster and get back to the thing the GUI is for.
Now within the specific problem I'm trying to solve, sure, I enjoy thinking about the abstractions, maintainability and extensibility. That's the part that actually matters. But the Qt UI on top, that's just a visual layer with a structure that was already set in stone, there's no big decisions of interest to make there. Just to figure out how to make it do the thing.
I wonder why this is not more common. LVM is easy to set up, and it's already common to allocate volumes for things like disk images for VMs, so why not databases?
> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
I believe transactions are quite optional though? A miner could choose to mine empty blocks if they truly wanted, which transactions to include if any is up to them.
A transaction fee of what? To take a fee from a transaction there has to be a transaction to take a fee from, which needs some sort of "coin" that came from somewhere. Somebody has to create a money supply and distribute it somehow. When the network first comes into existence, nobody has any money, so where does it come into being from?
Mining is what generates the coins. And you need mining because otherwise you need some other issuing organism. Without decentralized mining you get a central issuer, and that's untrustworthy and possible to shut down.
True, but that's the theory, and there's the practical reality that is messy. Where things like almost the entire team being on vacation for Christmas happens. Or where Bob, coming back from vacation 2 days into a new sprint would find out that everyone made a plan without him being involved.
In such situations something's got to give. My choice is that the something is the rigid process. Because I think it's much preferable to make a plan with the whole team present.
It's not that big of a deal really. Flexibility doesn't mean we're always picking random sprint lengths, it means we make occasional concessions for real world constraints, which is kind of the point of Agile anyway.
The LACK (https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/) is probably one of the most optimized pieces of furniture you can buy. There's no hand crafted desk that can be this cheap. A wood worker won't even get out of bed for $17.
Now is it an amazingly beautiful, rock solid, heirloom quality piece of furniture? No, but it's not trying to be that.