bbitmaster

I never understood why it's considered strange to take time off to just stay home. We spend so much time away from home, and then when we finally take a week off, we're expected to go through all the stress of travelling just to return back to work when its over?

What if someone actually wants to stay home, and relaxing and relieving stress is playing a new video game or working on some personal project, or even just you know... resting? I did not think the work/life balance meant never having any time to yourself. Even on weekends, people ask "What are your plans?" as if "nothing" is the wrong answer.

If you had legally purchased DVDs and blu rays during mega-upload's time, and hadn't tried to decrypt them for backup purposes (thus circumventing copyright measures, also using tools developed mostly by "outlaws"), those discs would now be suffering from bitrot and becoming unplayable.

But now we're moving away from physical media, we're fast moving to a world where all you can even "own" legally is a DRM laden copy that can be revoked at any moment by the digital store front providing it. Your windows 11 upgrade requires hardware TPM (a form of hardware DRM that everyone used to really fear) chip support to even install.

And this seems to be the world the hacker news what and tech crowd really wants. I personally miss the old mid 2000's slashdot days when everyone knew better. I haven't changed -- they changed.

I remember just learning to code at a young age, but not knowing trig or seeing how it applied because I only knew it as being about triangles.

I had learned to use some game graphics library (specifically DJGPP with Allegro, coding in C) and I was trying to make a 2d spaceship game, think like asteroids, where you can turn the ship and apply thrust. I couldn't figure out how to take the angle the ship was facing and get a direction to move. Basically I needed to understand the unit circle. I eventually found what I needed probably on some old internet forums. From that point on, trigonometry really started making sense to me.

Alas! Didn't get the memo? We're In the era where AI tools are all "software as a service," and you must pay for individual inferences from the model. How could they charge for inferences if they gave you the model to download?

What a lot of nonsense, where is the executive order banning gain of function research?

I don't think I will ever understand how the freedom of separate IRC servers got replaced by a single platform that mistakenly calls each community a "server" when it's clearly all on the same server and moderated by the same company.

I personally got a warning threat from discord for (I assume) joining some server, but I joined a lot of servers I never said anything and I wasn't even sure what happened on the server to warrant such a warning since it was shut down and I couldn't even see anything.

I read at the link that yt-dl uses ffmpeg and doesn't endorse avconv. Just curious if this is the place to ask, Does anyone know what the differences are between avconv and ffmpeg? Do they still basically do the same thing, or is there any reason to use one over the other. I remember years ago reading that one was a fork due to a disagreement or something, but I don't know how things have come along currently. I've mostly exclusively used ffmpeg any time I needed to convert a video, or more commonly for my use case, converted a directory full of images to a video.

Assuming this is real, I would ask what could it possibly be. The whole popular culture "x-files" narrative doesn't make sense to me. If these are craft which are manned with some beings, why would they be leisurely flying around earth's atmosphere unless they have some destination. Why haven't we found the source or destination?

Perhaps it's actually Von-Neumann probes, or unmanned craft collecting data and observing. I would find this much more likely, but even still, why would they need to keep traveling on earth?

Personally, I keep an open mind about everything, regarding what is possible. I just imagine some civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us could do things that would seem like magic. It certainly seems plausible in terms of the fermi paradox that we would be being visited. It's just incredibly odd that it would happen this way, and I have very basic questions as to the nature of what this phenomenon even is.

Most people don't get enough vitamin D. It's probably good advice for everyone to take a little. Above average vitamin D levels have been shown to correlate strongly with many beneficial things, including covid resistance. Low levels correlate strongly with many negative health problems. Correlation does not imply causation, but after seeing some data and studies, I think I'd prefer to be on the above average side.

I personally have a theory that our skin color evolved to reflect optimal vitamin D absorption. People living in tropical areas where they get more sun have darker skin, which blocks vitamin D but protects from the harmful affects of the sun, where lighter skin has the opposite trade off. If getting enough vitamin D was important enough to literally affect natural selection to change our skin color, it must be very important.

I also learned that furry animals like cats obviously can't absorb it through their skin since it is blocked by fur, but when they lick their fur grooming after sun bathing, they consume it orally from the oils in their fur.

Of course too much of anything is bad, 150,000 IU per day is an insane amount, that would literally be 150 pills of the 1,000 iu variety, which I personally take maybe 1 a day if I don't forget (as I was advised by a doctor).

What does CNN mean by this being a "cautionary tale for people who are considering adding supplements to their lives". Why don't we just encourage people to take some but not too much, and not treat people like they're too dumb to figure it out. To be fair, the article does point out that a daily dose is recommended for most people.

The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind. Thinking back to the slashdot days of early 2000s. Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China ( for example). Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling (another example). Most everyone was also very liberal. It's sad to see most tech companies turn into the thing I thought everyone was against. The justification seems to be that it's ok to do it to people we disagree with. It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what they deemed COVID misinformation. This is during a time when the truth we know was dynamic and changing -- that is what was misinformation before sometimes later turned out to be correct. Of course it all turned political as well. I don't know what to do about it but it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.

This brings back old memories. Amazing how it hasn't changed in 20 years. I was learning c and c++ and this provided a free full development suite comparable to others which were way outside my budget as a teenager.

DJGPP + Allegro was great in it's time

Nowadays I think there are much more recent versions of GCC that can be made to target DOS. I don't know the work involved, but a guy named bisqwit had some tools.

Ah, I personally preferred gotoblas to linpack as it was faster (keep in mind this was a few years ago when I did research, no idea how it kept up). I also enjoyed the story of how an unknown Japanese student ( Mr Goto - cool name ) outdid all the top linear algebra implementations by hand writing everything in assembly. It was an amazing story. This was when everyone said assembly was dead.

John McAfee claimed they were doing this to him before he "suicided".