dgaudet

yeah one of the trackmania games -- which feature a nominally deterministic physics engine, allowing for replays from a recorded sequence of inputs... except the physics engine relies on libc transcendental functions. players are generally on windows, but backend servers doing anti-cheat validations via replays are running linux. this resulted in false cheat positives when the linux server was running glibc prior to the glibc rounding fixes... and as a result the guy's world record kept being flagged as a cheat. it's a pretty good video with a lot of detail on how they narrowed it down to specific glibc versions/etc.

it has become unfortunately common in marriott hotels in the (western) US, specifically the current generation of residence inn; and i think i've seen it in new towneplace suites as well. it's entirely a form over function decision: you end up with cool air wafting in while you shower, and you end up with a wet bathroom floor (including a soaked floormat).

the same hotels have a kitchen sink tap which has hot/cold selected on the vertical axis, with no indication of which direction is hot/cold.

form over function. so annoying.

if you're up for a road trip, then cedar city utah is an option from southern california. the mountains on the east side of town have plenty of fall colors (lots of hiking options, national forests/parks).

the article claims the playlist is "scientifically verified" ... but doesn't seem to cover the science behind the list construction or verification. is there a background article somewhere else?

FWIW the peakbagger app (android, ios) includes excellent fire and smoke layers. andrew has added these features over the past few years as fires have complicated the quest for peaks.

caltopo.com is another great tool with fire layers, useful for planning hikes in affected areas.

yeah i dunno how people live in the PNW, i was totally depressed the 8 months i spent in vancouver BC!

it would be kind of cool to have calendar software which has a "bad weather" feature: correlate the 10-day forecasts of the required attendees, and pick the least sunny timeslot. mind you i'd also want the software to keep track of how frequently i've hiked, because even a sunny day of meetings is OK after a couple days of hiking. gotta mix it up. i'm sure this bin-packing problem has a reasonable enough solution :)

i would prefer sunny days off, and bad weather days for meetings.

well i guess i won't be moving my music to spotify: i'm on google play music right now, and so i'm in the market.

> Some past, present, and potential clients include ...

i'm having a hard time reading past the word "potential". that suggests exaggeration to me.

this pleases me in so many ways.

as a former public radio listener, who grew increasingly tired of finding something else to listen to during the all-too-regular fund drives, i very much appreciate the ability to skip forward on podcasts.

i'm also happier paying for good audio content than i am willing to pay for a dozen different news site subscriptions. my regular day is full of visual-attention-required tasks, and having an audio-only source of information and entertainment is worth paying for.

it's nice to know that it appears to be a successful business model for NPR.

for a long time i used a variation of this as an interview question for performance analysis positions at google. instead of focusing on I/O costs i was focusing on cache miss costs, but it's pretty much the same observation at a different scale. it's always seemed like an excellent educational example of the difference between theoretical and practical concepts in computer engineering, such as big-O and turing machine vs. practical problem sizes and hierarchical storage/cache capacities/costs.

flying heavy components in a location where the winds are strong enough for wind power generation might pose some exciting challenges.

since C pretty much requires a stack, and a stack requires "RAM" of some form, it used to be necessary that the memory system be trained prior to executing any C code. however once the cache grew large enough, and appropriate "cache as ram" hooks were designed, it became possible to stand up a stack before even the memory system was alive. this definitely reduces the footprint which has to be assembly.