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throwawaw | 4 years ago | on: Seven Years of Factorio Friday Facts (2020)

Yeah, that one caught my eye (and then moistened it).

The way he breaks his slump by sharing Factorio with his son -- what a wonderful, unexpected benefit of working in games. How many of us will get to do something like that?

throwawaw | 4 years ago | on: Naomi Osaka faces default from Grand Slam for refusing to speak to media

Did they change the rules just to punish her? Last I heard, the policy was that missing interviews incurs a fine, which Osaka decided she could handle. If so, this starts to look a little villainous. I guess they're afraid other players will follow suit.

I have to say, I'm sympathetic to Osaka, and to all the other athletes who have to endure the media circus so soon after a loss. Thirty minutes to recover after a loss is nothing -- especially when the questions you're set to face all boil down to some variation on "That was a tough loss: tell us, how emotionally destroyed are you by your failure?" If what we want as viewers is an eloquent, insightful response that cuts to the heart of the reason for the loss, we should demand a longer delay, to give athletes time to compose themselves. I bet Osaka (and other players) would find a one day lag time more acceptable. Perhaps they could start there.

throwawaw | 4 years ago | on: V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler

I just say "compile", too, because it's strictly correct and I like being correct. But "transpiling adds zero information" seems unfair: when you see that word, you at least know the speaker meant "compiling to something other than machine code". No one has ever called gcc a transpiler, so they definitely aren't talking about gcc.

I like the reasoning in the sibling comment:

> So if you want to understand what other people are saying about "compilers" you should keep in mind that the standard definition includes what you are calling "transpilers".

Really, the main disadvantage of saying "transpile" is that it implies you don't know what "compile" means. In a context where that wasn't an issue -- e.g., if I heard it from one of my coworkers, who certainly know what a compiler is -- I would just think they liked the neologism.

throwawaw | 4 years ago | on: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

I've been playing this game for 15 years now. Somehow, it just doesn't get old.

One great DCSS tradition: whenever a new major patch is released, there's a two week long tournament. You more or less just try to win a lot, in as many ways as you can, for two weeks -- but it's more fun than it sounds, if you can believe that. For example, there's all sorts of "achievement"-like mini goals, such as "make it to level 6 of the Lair without using a potion" (approximately remembered). Between that and some other quirks, even players who aren't in the habit of winning the game can score some points for their team.

Taking a completely single player game and deciding that tournaments for it should be team-based was a minor stroke of brilliance, by the way. It's surprising how much it adds to the experience.

throwawaw | 4 years ago | on: 1700 Cascadia Earthquake

For God's sake, just quote the whole thing. You really broke it off mid-sentence?

If including "a million buildings destroyed" (or whichever other part you felt you couldn't include) would make your comment seem less devastating, it just isn't that devastating. It's fine. Representing things accurately is more important than... whatever we were hoping to achieve there. Seeming cool for knowing the original article was BS, I guess?

It's a good article! I don't think it's BS. I might think that if I read your partial excerpt, but that's a problem with the excerpt.

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Yellen Summons Regulators to Discuss Financial Market Volatility

Your edit drastically undersells the extent to which you were wrong on this one.

> Amateur sleuths found fertile ground to fan conspiracies. They didn’t hesitate in casting Jeff Psaki, a money manager at Citadel, as proof of dark arts at the firm. It started with claims that Psaki, an ex-Goldman trader, was married to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. He’s not: He’s her second cousin and has never spoken to her, a person who knows him said. But on it went, ricocheting from chatboards to Twitter and beyond.

Quick, name all your second cousins!

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Git Koans (2013)

a "dirty" rebase sets $? to 1, so I think the auto-abort feature is just `git rebase foo || git rebase --abort`.

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: If-then-else had to be invented

I wonder whether anyone has used "otherwise" for this. It'd be a simple alias for "else", but it'd certainly sound natural:

    if (X) { doY(); }
    otherwise { doZ(); }

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”

> The current level is "severe", which was set on 3 November 2020, due to a shooting in Vienna by a suspected "Islamist terrorist" in which four people died. It was raised by Home Secretary, Priti Patel, following recent attacks in Europe. It was previously held at 'substantial', set on 4 November 2019. Prior to that it was rasied to "severe" on 17 September 2017. It had been raised to "critical" following the Parsons Green bombing on 15 September. The previous threat level to that was "severe" having been reduced to that level following an increase to "critical" after the Manchester Arena bombing of 22 May 2017.

From the Wikipedia article, which features a Threat Levels Over Time chart that is genuinely funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Threat_Levels#Changes_to_th...

Why is this a story?

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Bitchute Has Been Deplatformed

I'm not buying it. They're already back online after 90 minutes. What kind of deplatforming is that? Why not say who was responsible or post those juicy, juicy emails?

This is a bad fit for deplatforming and a good fit for outrage farming.

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Overcoming Writer's Block

Almost too minor to bring up, but my brain won't let go. In your first sentence, was "surreptitiously stumbling upon" the book meant to happen "serendipitously" instead?

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Recovering Lost Roam Notes

> Importantly for us, Roam differs from other webapps in that it doesn't store all state and history in its backend. Instead, Roam's backend just stores a snapshotted Datascript database (updated ~daily as far as I can tell) and the list of transactions since that last snapshot.

If I'm reading this right... A) OP was hosed if they didn't finish this within ~24 hours. That's fun. B) I now know why Roam takes a long time to load -- it's replaying every edit I made since its last snapshot!

Edit:

> When a message is more than 16KB, it's split into multiple messages without wrapping - so we'll need to stitch these bigger messages together. One way to detect a non-split-message is to just try and parse it as JSON - if it's valid, we can say it's non-split. (There's an edge case we're unlikely to hit here: if the 16KB chunk just so happens to be valid JSON as well we'll be out of luck. Lucky for us, I didn't run into this!)

This is an extremely inconsequential detail to focus on, but I don't see the edge here at all. What's an example 16KB string that OP's method would actually fail to parse? (Maybe I'm failing to grok what "without wrapping" means here.)

throwawaw | 5 years ago | on: Why inequality matters (2014)

What differences did you see? They seem essentially similar. The exception being:

> We should shift more of the tax burden onto capital, including by raising the capital gains tax, probably to the same level as taxes on labor. (2019)

vs

> I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor. It doesn’t make any sense that labor in the United States is taxed so heavily relative to capital.

> But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption. (2014)

He does seem to have reconsidered the utility of a yacht sales tax.

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