dbatten

I play mostly with the aforementioned wife and kids!

We were shocked by how early our kids could pick up board games, including many of the ones mentioned in this article. Our 2 oldest kids were playing Ticket to Ride and Carcassone well enough to beat us form time to time at 3 and 4 years old. Now that they're a little older, slightly more complicated games like Catan and Flamecraft are on the table!

> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

At least based on some of the things he's written in some of the anthologies, it seems like a lot of that disillusionment was not just because of age, but rather because of his battles with the publishers and what not that were pushing him to make changes that he felt would compromise the integrity of the strip. A lot of the comics include subtle jabs about corporate greed, artistic integrity, etc. because he was actively fighting with the corporations that distributed his strip over such matters...

Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...

> Gurobi solved the new model to optimality (i.e., the bound became equal to the value of the best solution found).

Ah, I was not aware that that's what this language indicated. Thanks for helping me understand more!

I've used Gurobi (and other solvers) in the past, but always in situations where we just needed to find a solution that was way better than what we were going to find with, say, a heuristic... I've never needed to find a provably optimal solution...

Unless I missed something, though, the highest bound the author reported for the relaxation was 271 2/3 moves, which is obviously significantly higher than 218...

Genuinely interested in being educated here: If Gurobi's integer programming solver didn't find a solution better than 218, is that a guarantee that there exists no solution better than 218? Is it equivalent to a mathematical proof?

(Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there's no bugs in Gurobi's solver and no bugs in the author's implementation of the problem for Gurobi to solve.)

I guess I'm basically asking whether it's possible that Gurobi got trapped in a local maximum, or whether this can be considered a definitive universal solution.

Any chance she's going to write anything about this when she's done? I'd love to read somebody's account of this experience. Very cool idea.

Used to use some of this data for analyzing cellular service coverage. The info on cellular data (e.g., LTE) availability is provided by the cell providers and is usually... very optimistic.

I'd assume the terrestrial fiber/cable/DSL data is more accurate, though?

Google still does this! They seem to use some sort of generative neural net to produce fake names, descriptions, and even reviews for the trap locations.

You can report the location to Google as "bad data" and they'll delete it, but then a totally different fake location will re-appear in its place a few days later.

It's worth pointing out that the conventional bombing raid of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 was deadlier than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, depending on whose counts you use...

The objection I've usually heard is less about farm land being used for pasture instead of growing crops, and more about the amount of crops that have to be grown to feed the cattle... Growing corn to feed cows to feed humans is massively less efficient than growing corn to feed humans, or at least that's how the story goes.

Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could improve on?

(Not an expert in this area, genuinely curious.)

Lemur Pro owner here. I personally have super-mixed feelings about the machine.

Pros: Battery life is excellent. Used it for 12 hours while walking around a factory doing an IT system install, never had to charge it. Slim form factor is nice. With an upgrade to an i7, additional RAM, SSD, etc., performance is good for any task not requiring a GPU. It would easily be the best laptop I've ever owned, except for...

Cons: WiFi chipset died within months of purchase and had to be replaced. Battery swelled by year 2 to the point that the mouse was unusable, so battery had to be replaced as well. The machine shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which had a Linux kernel bug that caused the machine to freeze when trying to throttle up/down the i7 CPU for power management purposes. I contacted System76 about the problem, and they didn't know anything about it... I ended up having to troubleshoot it myself, at which point I told them the issue, and they sent out an email about the fix to (what I assume was) all Lemur Pro owners. I thought buying a Linux laptop from a company that specializes in making Linux laptops would let me avoid these kinds of nagging issues around things like drivers and power management bugs, but alas it did not. More startlingly, I would have expected a company that specializes in Linux laptops to at least be AWARE of such an issue on their machines, but it seems they had no idea... I feel like I would have been just as well off going with a Thinkpad.

Related final pro: It was frustrating to have to replace multiple parts in this machine (especially so early in its life), but I have to give credit to System76's self-install policy. They sent me the parts and detailed instructions for doing the repairs myself. Saved so much headache.

Overall, I really want to love my System76, but I'd have to think really hard before buying another one.