Knufferlbert's comments

That seems to be everyone above 16 years of age. It excludes inmates, that is penal and mental institutions (which in the land of the free is surprisingly sizeable chunk). Also excludes active military personnel. Notably it includes people who are disabled but are unable to work.

We once had a rather angry Irish customer calling our support complaining that we called him a pikey (slur for gypsy). After some back and forth it turns out we just gave him an apikey.

We never had a similar issue with our random numbers/letters/reset passwords or anything like that which don't have any kind of "dont return profanity" protections. Though I agree, someone getting a randomly generated customer portal url or something containing fuck or similar would look bad. Our cloudfront or something (or was it main public facing s3 bucket? can't remember) starts with "gay" and was never picked up on.

That is a very weird take to me. That big slam presumably is the spring breaking, a lot of energy released at once in a rather uncontrolled fashion. The same energy will be released if you make a mistake installing it or the spring is faulty for whatever reason while you are standing right next to it.

My take away is that it's to dangerous to do.

Without knowing details, I can only assume you are misunderstanding something. I and everyone I worked with have bugs prevented by FK constraints. They prevent getting data to be in bad state, instead of it piling up and expensively fixing it afterwards. Not once have I thought "I wouldn't have had this problem without FKs" and every time I thought "oh yeah, I forgot this path, that would have been a problem".

Having to write code that can handle foreign key violations because the DB doesn't check it is a major pain. (we use Cassandra for example, so there is a "foreign key" usually from a PG row to a Cassandra row, obviously that can't be enforced on DB level so application code has to do the work)

As for deleting/updating data, FKs can be a bit annoying, but postgresql for example has two (possibly more) options.

1) The (possibly dangerous) cascade delete, which will traverse the FKs basically for you and deletes them 2) The check FKs (and other constraints) on commit. I.e. instead of checking every delete/update statement causes FKs violations, it'll check at the end, after having done all the delete/update statements if there are any FK violations. (or update statements). Called deferrable constraints.

I make mistakes all the time as a developer, I would hate to be fired for them and if I would, I would never claim responsibility.

And that's why I don't get how people expect directors/managers to be infallible.

Taking responsibility isn't about walking away from the job, but learning from it and making it right.

Whether that is done well in this case, I don't know, but that wasn't your point. As far as I can tell they got pretty decent severance packages.

Slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

A thermonuclear test yielded much, much higher energy, due to unexpected lithium 7 reactions.

Don't know, seems like a good explanation. We have a number of machines that can take CO2 out, the "enough machines" is the problem.

- they either require space (forests or whatever)

- are hard to produce in sufficient numbers (materials, production capabilities)

- are expensive to run (like energy input, maintenance), in particular don't generate new red balls while removing them.

- disposal cost (where the machine becomes the carbon, like trees, cutting them down and doing something with that)

Once we got it out, on a "pile of carbon", the problem becomes much easier.

From what I can tell you can choose where your donations go, so you can focus on poverty and let skynet exterminate us humans if you'd want.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate/organizations

Stumbled over a (German speaking) youtuber, "Held der Steine" (Hero of the stones) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVtbNWH_9So

Who reviews "Bricks" of all kinds including Lego. He consistently is annoyed by how expensive Lego is compared to everything else, with usual worse quality (in terms of design, fun to assemble, etc). If you can bear google translate or even speak German, he may be worth listening to.

Anyway, got sucked into that and got my first "brick" set since around 25 years ago and it felt like Lego (as far as I could remember). Instructions, presentation, the stones, everything.

I believe "Cobi" and "Bluebrixx" are often mentioned as good, affordable (seems about half price for similar set) and lego compatible. From what I understand the patent for the particular form factor of the bricks ran out, which is why there are a bunch of alternative now.

I got that one: https://cobitoys.de/small-army-ww2/panzer-und-fahrzeuge/panz...

I live in the UK, think I got it via amazon, so maybe more difficult for you Americans.

Well, depends, fundamentally it's a paradox.

Either US company get's the data from the Italian one, making the Italian operation illegal in Italy

Or

The US company doesn't get the data from the Italian one (despite ownership), making the US company illegal in the US.

I don't think anyone is under the illusion that the latter option is chosen when push comes to shove.

Apparently it's thought that meteorites hitting the ground freeze water around them after a bit. They get heated up, but it's pretty short, so the bulk of it is "space temperature" only the surface is heating. And a lot of the stuff that heats up is ablated. (depending on size)

Unless the stuff is on the surface of the meteorite it's probably fine.

Reminds me of the "myth" of putting a Radeon GPU into the oven on low heat for a while if it was broken. I tried it when mine stopped working and indeed it fixed it.

Also another Radeon card was identical as a more powerful one, except that two pins (maybe wrong word) were not connected. I drew the connection using a pencil directly on the board and it worked as well, saving around 100 Euros.

It's over a decade ago, so details may be slightly wrong. But still interesting how low tech solutions worked on such complicated machinery.

You may be shocked how much more you can get, I heard of being able to identify the movie/tv show you are watching based on power consumption of the TV based on brightness.

Obviously depends on how granular the smart metering is, but it sent chills down my spine.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/08/28c3-smart-meter...

I like the affordability too, but it also does not take into account edge cases.

Our office door has this metal plate, it pushes outside (I believe it is that way for fire safety reasons). If there is strong wind on the outside, the door has the habit of whipping around after pushing it a bit, leading to shattered glass once every year or so.

Closing the door in strong wind also means grabbing it on the edge and pulling it, the wind kind of reverses on the last couple inches, I have no idea how that did not lead to broken fingers yet (you do it once, then you never try to close it again).

I guess it's a failing to consider all use cases of the door, and the metal plate thing should only be used indoors.

Don't know about I_Byte, though I could have written what he has written.

I can now actually afford games (in the quantity I consume them) now, so that question is fair. But thankfully the video landscape fractured, now you better have NowTv, Netflix, Prime and Disney+ and you still can't watch all. I've started pirating again after 10 years or so of complete abstinence. So I think it's causal (if you have money)

My sibling comments are a bit cynical. Considering the widely reported stress on health care workers during the pandemic I'd suspect that number may be higher than one would think despite the millions working on throwaway products.

Obviously, society should incentivise that those professions that are overworked and useful to society hire/train more, so they are not that overworked.

I think the "suffer"/"rehabilitation" is only one of the important aspects.

There is a selfish component as well, do I want to have low crime. A successful return to society facilitates that (life sentences for all is the only other alternative). The difference between doing what is right (whatever that means), or what is effective (which is much easier to measure).

Though the blatant disregard for human life in general in the US is quite astonishing for a "western" country.

That doesn't seem true. Picketey's (probably misspelled) "capital in the 21st century" has a compelling argument for exactly this kind of tax. And my realization that I can't see it implemented ever, is about as chilling to me as climate change in terms of a real existential threat that we as humans see coming but will be unable to stop, because it requires cooperation that seems impossible.

The basic argument is, I'm hoping I'm getting this right: The return of capital far outstrips return of labour, that difference (if above a certain percentage) is a transfer of wealth from labourers to the capitalists. Return of labour is basically GPD growth, return of capital is income from rent/investment/interest and all of that.

This increases inequality over time leads to destabilization of society, I'd argue you can see that in the USA quite well. And starts happening in rest of Europe more slowly (not quite as capitalistic as the USA but heading there nevertheless). Wealth building for the bottom 50% is extremely difficult (house prices for example)

2.5% is a significant percentage, but rate of return is around 5% or thereabouts, basically a 50% tax if you make the average and continue investing (i.e. it's presumably useful to society). Once you "sit on your money", it would reduce the wealth slowly (no longer useful to society). I.e. if you keep investing, the government will still have less wealth than the capitalists no matter how long you do it. It won't be as a significant increase in national budgets as one may assume.

Also, "government owning things", the idea is that that money is redistributed to the people via benefits (unemployment, education, health care, ubi etc).

I don't think those reasons are true for the "lack of entrepreneurship". I'd love to know some numbers actually, I know EU doesn't have as many unicorns like Uber, Google, Amazon, etc. But that is a tiny amount of people who started those (and now employ a staggering number of people).

I think there are two reasons why that may be: - Generally larger regulatory barriers. GDPR is an obvious recent one, but also market complexity with EU countries regulations/laws differing more than US states. I think (without knowing). That coupled with "first to market" advantage of US companies. - Money isn't as big as a driver for Europeans. "Rags to riches" is a pretty American thing. "Get educated and live well" is closer to our lookout I think.