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phphphph's comments

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: Amazon's customer service backdoor

At one point in the past it was argued that hosting your site with a provider that injects ads was sufficient to consider the page "commercial". I don't know what came of it, or what is now required for a page to be commercial.

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: Intrinsic Motivation Doesn't Exist, Researcher Says (2005)

Very misleading title. His points are roughly tl;dr:

- Intrinsic vs. extrinsic is not sufficient to fully describe the range of motivation

- intrinsic isn't well-defined

- Extrinsic can work well, too

- It's not proven that intrinsic makes happier

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: Why is Germany so obsessed with Hamlet?

I started to care about the stuff we read in school in my early thirties (Shakespeare would be an exception, for ... reasons).

There's a special exception for Max Frisch which I discovered mid-twenties and was very thankful I did not have to read it in school.

So, well, the "why" is: maybe later in your life.

(There's another "why" in "you an your friends aren't necessarily representative for Germany as a whole, bit that would have been a rather cheap comment)

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: I worked in a video store for 25 yrs – what I learned as the industry died

My town has two successful DVD rental places. Their "hipster twist" is basically: quality movies, and an owner that can find something for you. They aim at students and established inteligentia. At its core, the service they provide is discovery.

(the town also has a surprisingly thriving arthouse cinema scene, so it's certainly a welcoming environment.)

As for the wall of nekkid: "Confessions of a porn store clerk" (http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Of-Porn-Store-Clerk-ebook/...) is a fabulous read. It's available for free, too, but I found it worth the dime.

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris attacks

No.

The way our mind works, associations need to be strengthened for permanence (which is an extra-weird process because it can apparently modify memories).

More importantly, he needs to get this off his chest. You find people to talk to in the msot unlikely places.

Both language as encoding of thought and transmission are lossy. Rule of thumb: A sentence contains four different things: what I mean, what I say, what you hear and what you understand.

Putting things into words already is an important part of how we for ourselves deal with the incomprehensible, the disturbing and revolting.

Finding agreement, or at least getting feedback form others that our words form a comprehensible sentiment, heck - just knowing that we ended up with a gramatically well-formed sentence comforts us that the abyss between you and me, between you and everyone else can be bridged.

tl;dr: it's great that it can be said.

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: 133 Years Later, Gaudí’s Cathedral Nears Completion

I've seen it in a few stages over the recent years. The step from open-roof construction site to a close place of worship was - and still is - captivating.

(Though walking up and down the spires in the earlier stages was much more fun than the lift, if a little scary.)

While it certainly doesn't have the duration of this construction: After watching the LOTR making of, I'd say projects like this are the closest equivalent to the construction of a medieval cathedral, w.r.t. scope and scale, attention of detail, the imagination of a whole, complex interwoven result that conveys a planned experience.

phphphph | 10 years ago | on: Why time may be running out for the leap second

> too lazy to use TAI or GPS time for internal time calculations...

it's a tiny little more complicated than that.

The key element to grasp is that for all units above "second" aren't fixed: the duration of a minute, an hour, a day or a month or a year varies, depending on when it starts.

It's complicated by the fact that colloquial expectation - and likely often legally binding - is that "one day from now" is tomorrow at the same wall clock time.

So just expressing time deltas as seconds doesn't cut it, either.

This is on top of pesky details such as leap year rules (if multiple of 4 but not of hundred unless multiple of 400), half-hour time zones, and DST decided anually by parliament.

TAI and GPS - even if available - don't help you there because these things affect the algorithms and - worse - the data you need to store.

If you have a local time and forgot to store the UTC offset, you don't have a time. If you have a duration of one day, and haven't stored when this day starts, you don't know how many seconds in that day.

The particular problems of leap seconds are two: first, they are easily forgotten - leading to incorrect calculations. Second (heh!), since insertion of leap seconds is not regular, you need updates to keep your time arithmetics correct.

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Now it might surprise you that I'd personally think leap seconds are cool, and we should keep them. However, it's hard to explain to someone faced with these problems why a few seconds of offset in sunrise time is such a big deal.

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