Ingvar

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• Commented on Tentative hypothesis
  Why not just voice? It may or may not have occurred that young male said, in a clear loud voice (actual phrasing approximated and translated), "north wall clock-face, two metres lower, canteen lady in open, unlimited meatballs, at own pace,...
• Commented on Tentative hypothesis
  Having been in the business of running stuff on clusters, if your unit of cluster size measure is "cores" or "machines", you're probably running small clusters. The only unit that makes sense is MW. I think the typical cluster size...
• Commented on Whoops Apocalypse!
  Writing an INTERCAL compiler in INTERCAL is kind of brilliant and kind of WHYYY. "It is a thing that can be done. It is a thing that should not be done. It is thus a thing that MUST be...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  In re "laser-catalyzed spider silk", you'd still end up with a "solid" sheet (modulo intentional skips made during the printing) rather than something that is closer to a woven fabric. That is bound to have quite an impact on skin-feel...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Er? That's exactly how I did most (if not all) of my daily work for multiple years. My primary workstation was an IBM X terminal, my primary work computer was a HP-UX box in a different room. Works perfectly fine,...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  No, it was designed to solve a problem everyone had, when it was designed. Up until NT 3.5 (I think), the NT windowing system (apart from the actual graphics card driver) ran in user-space. But in 3.51 (again, I think),...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Yes, but you are missing The Most Important Bit Of The X11 Design, namely "you don't have your keyboard, mouse, screen, etc plugged in to the machine where your applications run". Your screen should be able to crash with wild...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  "ed is the standard editor." And emacs is still "a pretty nice operating system, shame it doesn't have a text editor", getting your slurs right is important. Btw, if you're wanting to use vi, you may want to try either...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Well, first, you probably mean "X11". And it was designed as a platform for experimenting with graphical UIs and allowing graphical interfaces to span across network links. A lot of the underlying protocol is actually quite elegant, but does require...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Hm, memo to elf, get a bottle of that really rather excellent Dutch rye, offer a dram to Charlie. What would be worse, "cat software, on dog hardware", or "dog software, on cat hardware" (fwiw, the former has been used...
• Commented on Story time!
  I know there used to be role-playing tournaments in Sweden (because I ended up GM-ing in quite a few). There were basically two models of scoring. Model #1, there's essentially a tick-off sheet with various things ("solved riddle A", "passed...
• Commented on CMAP #16: Book Title Blues
  Charlie says: TLDR is: names are cultural constructs that vary far more widely than those of us raised in traditional western European cultures can imagine. I'd say that it varies more widely within "traditional western European culture" than most people...
• Commented on Three pieces of news about the Laundry Files (UPDATED!)
  I am more trying Real Hard to not think of a Laundry Files / Yes, Minister mashup....
• Commented on Lessons learned: writing really long fiction
  Seriously - what about the Drake equation? Possible answer, in a paper on arXiv....
• Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
  Stirling engines are also super-useful if you want a low-vibration engine. Like, say, in a submarine....
• Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
  There have certainly been AIs unleashed with "basic understanding of maths" (essentially Peano arithmetics) that self-guided have proven a bunch of things we already have proofs for. I don't know if one of these, unleashed for long enough, has managed...
• Commented on Test Case
  It's probably on par with the "you are not allowed to drive away when you're parked on the wrong side of the road, and the light conditions require headlights" (because having headlights on, on the wrong side of the road,...
• Commented on Test Case
  Well... That's an interesting tangle. Before we continue, I will assume that Scotland is still part of the UK, and that UK is not part of the EU (change either of those, and I suppose the results may change). UK...
• Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
  A small group of analysts in an Israeli intelligence agency realise hat an unhealthy obsession with "fiat money" and banking conspiracies are starting to rise among their primary monitoring targets. After a few days of discussing possible uses for this,...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Dutch (and I guess Flemish) also uses the ij-ligature, in both upper and lower case. ij and IJ...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  "Using emoji" in a URL is something that trivially falls out of "Use Unicode in URL". That is something people are kinda keen on, to have URLs (and domain names) that support whatever language they happen to speak, that isn't...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Greg, by reading this: RAIB report of terminally stupid teenager who walked into the path of a train with her earphones & jingle-jangle at full volume ... And this: Darwin awartds, here we come! I suspect that the picture that...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  It's been about 16-17 years since steered beams started getting deployed, requiring a base station to know not only how far away the phone is, but also what approximate angle it is at. I don't recall where state-of-the-art beam steering...
• Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
  I suspect feeding Hume and Kant both in could end up with... interesting output. Hume remains the master (abuser?) of footnotes, having (in the edition I have) two pages with a total of six (or so) lines of body text,...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Note that method of preparation heavily influences "temperature after poured into mug". The five methods I've used to make coffee (ranked from least to most tasty) generate quite different temperatures, and I really should get around to actually measure them,...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Modern compound cross-bows have much lower draw-weight than their medieval cousins. But they have a much (much!) longer draw distance, so can spend much more time shuffling energy into the bolt. This leads to something that is easily cocked by...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  I suspect that fitness (and to some extent muscle mass) will be important for VR players. Primarily to preserve precision. Your precision is shot way before your ability to continue is....
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  The healthy focus with any sport should be on performance, not results. You don't want to focus on "winning a competition", you focus on "performing well in the competition". If the performance is good, the winning will happen anyway; if...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Actually a spin-off of driving simulators from driving schools (at least the first rig was exactly the same stuff as used in driving schools), tested out by a couple of doctors who were starting to get really annoyed at having...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Not necessarily "rehab", but "useful for healthcare purposes", there's been a car driving simulation rig (basically front half of a car, probably some sort of six-axis motion table, plus plenty of large screens) for both "are you safe to drive"...