fair_enough

Joined 1 year ago

Karma
129
Submissions
58
Member since
Aug 28
My experience is in systems programming and biotech.

I'm also well ahead of the S&P 500 managing my own portfolio using said experience and Peter Lynch-esque common sense.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Gateway timeout, 504 host error. My mattress is stuck foot-side up.
Comment · 1 year ago
Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good folks on the other side of the world find so many things about Western culture fascinating.

My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his university's American-style football team in the 80s and grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.

Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as some of us are "Japanophiles".

Comment · 1 year ago
I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.

It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:

https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...

"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."

This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.

Comment · 1 year ago
I don't see how being compensated for giving your organ to someone else is worse than being told you can either give it away for free or not at all.

Imagine if billionaires had to pay the "riff-raff" organ donors to continue living their vain and hollow lives instead of bribing hospitals and public officials to cut in line. If I were old and on my way out the door, this would give me a chance to leave something behind for my wife and kids.

Let's say I have a heart condition or neurodegenerative disease and I'm living on borrowed time. I could make at least a couple hundred thousand selling 1 lobe out of my very healthy liver to a desperate billionaire. Knowing my heart or brain will give out long before my liver, I can accept my fate and die with courage and dignity and as an added bonus, also help my family by profiteering off of the cowardice and selfishness of people like Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos.

Comment · 1 year ago
You're right, but it still sucks that my car now depreciates as fast as my Macbook. I don't think batteries will ever hold their value though, and those things constitute at least $10k of an EV's sticker price.

Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.

If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.

Comment · 1 year ago
It seems the once "Great" Britain cannot let go of its grandiose delusions of ruling over and "civilizing" the entire known world.

I've always held onto the suspicion that the distinction between left-wing and right-wing social views is more aesthetic than philosophical. All you have to do is tell a leftist "no", and they turn into everything they hate about their parents.

Comment · 1 year ago
Reminds me of a time-honored aphorism in running:

A marathon consists of two halves: the first 20 miles, and then the last 10k (6.2mi) when you're more sore and tired than you've ever been in your life.

Comment · 1 year ago
I don't care if there are some special privileges unlocked at higher "karma" levels, I hope my "karma" stays at 69 forever because of this thread.
Comment · 1 year ago
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:

Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.

Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.

Comment · 1 year ago
How many 2025 dollars will it cost me to take a nice lady to the candy shop?
Comment · 1 year ago
Only if you earnestly give a rat's ass about all of the above.

Again, you're thinking of an "agile" stakeholder- not a "stakeholder capitalism" stakeholder.

Why is this so difficult for you to grasp?

Comment · 1 year ago
That's the magic of action potentials. As sodium ions (+1 charge) propagate, they dissipate throughout the cytosol and sometimes leak out of the cell membrane, but they also trigger their own influx of regenerative current by opening voltage-gated ion channels on the cell membrane. Think of it as a "signal repeater".

As long as the initial stimulus is strong enough to trigger an action potential, the signal propagates all the way from the nerve ending to the central nervous system, and whatever response the CNS cooks up always makes it all the way to all the muscles it intends to trigger. Stated another way, the peripheral and central nervous system have enough of these signal repeaters for any signal to travel anywhere.

Comment · 1 year ago
Like I said, that's the engineering context of the word.

In business managerial side of operations, "stakeholder" is definitely a weasel word.

The word "stakeholder" in "stakeholder capitalism" as used by the World Economic Forum literally means "every single person on Earth". Unless you think Klaus Schwab also considers the possibility of life in the Andromeda Galaxy, it doesn't get anymore nebulous than that. The word "nebulous" describes something cloudy and ginormous- like a nebula.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but the rarity of the exception justifies the rule.

Comment · 1 year ago
Not to be pedantic, but I think you mean "shareholders".

In the context of software, the term "stakeholder" means anyone who will use the project being worked on.

In the context of business, "stakeholder" is an intentionally nebulous term designed to obfuscate who is supposed to be enriched by the actions of the company. Usually that term is a way of deceiving people into thinking the company's goal is to serve "the community", when in reality it's serving the shareholders at the expense of the well-being of the community.

Sometimes, it's a way of deceiving the shareholder for the benefit of the executives, e.g. some "DEI" bullshit that hurts the community, the shareholders, and most of the employees just to feed the HR department and the C-suite's insatiable lust for power.

EDIT - I'd like to add a comment about "shareholder" and "stakeholder" sounding so similar, but in practice meaning two mutually-incompatible things:

This is by design. You're not supposed to be conscientious of the difference in meaning.

You're supposed to hear "shareholder capitalism's kinder, gentler successor", not "corporate-owned feudalism".

Comment · 1 year ago
A lot of those design decisions in OSes were influenced by hardware limitations of home computers in the 1970s and 1980s. UNIX may have been around since '71, but Windows NT was designed to expose an API similar to DOS-based Windows 95 (the Win32 API), which in turn was designed around backward compatibility with MS-DOS, which in turn was designed to mimic other other "DOS" OSes from other companies in the late 70s. This ultimately traces back to a time when consumer-grade hardware just couldn't handle all the features we now take for granted, like virtual memory and preemptive multitasking, or even floating point math.

However, Windows NT was also written after machines capable of running Unix cost less than a BMW so a lot of the good folks in Redmond during the early 90s took some liberties to improve on some fundamental design flaws of UNIX.

1. "Everything is a file" is very flexible for writing server applications where the user is expected to know and trust every program, but it is potentially harmful to expose devices as files to non-technical users. Nowadays with UEFI, you can even pipe /dev/zero to /dev/mem or /dev/port and brick your motherboard. There was a patch for this, but there are old servers running old Linux versions in the wild that can be permanently bricked.

2. Arguably, exposing such a wide range of signals to a userland program for it to handle is a design flaw, like the memory fault signals SIGSEGV and SIGBUS. They were not designed for IPC or exception handling, but they ended up being used that way by a lot of developers over the years. I won't start a war to make the case because I can see both sides on that, but #3 below is not controversial at all.

3. NTFS ACLs are a big improvement over UNIX-style ugo-rwx permissions. FWIW, they're also easier to work with than POSIX ACLs.

Just something to think about: the Windows way is radically different because compatibility with ye-olde DOS running on 68k CPUs ruined it in some ways, but in other ways its design was driven by learning from UNIX's mistakes.

despite the confusing name, Win32 is not just a 32-bit libc, it's a 64-bit libc on 64-bit Windows.

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