Zak

6 ms·

1.
by Zak 5d ago
The brand name that comes to mind is the Wicked Lasers Flashtorch, which uses a 65W halogen bulb that emits most of its energy as infrared, and a ~30 Watt-hour Li-ion battery. The old-fashioned light source is better suited to party tricks
2.
by Zak 5d ago
> flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.
3.
by Zak 5d ago
"May contain" should provide legal protection. It may be compliance tits in some cases, but that's better than forcing the addition of a compliance ingredient .
4.
by Zak 5d ago
"May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product.
5.
by Zak 17d ago
This seems like a beginner-level OOP-in-Python tutorial, and I'm disappointed the author didn't demonstrate a functional abstraction for `find_by`.
6.
by Zak 18d ago
The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the
7.
by Zak 19d ago
Google Maps has a better excuse for wanting to be an app than most since a primary use case on mobile is turn-by-turn navigation. That's possible to do in a web page now, but several features that improve the experience are not avail
8.
by Zak 20d ago
The only time I've ever managed to burn through a quota that fast (on the cheap plan) was with an open-ended request to check a codebase for any defects or deficiencies. It dispatched five Fable subagents.
9.
by Zak 21d ago
I also found the description of Lisp development weird, as if it's a second-hand repetition of someone else describing watching a Lisp developer in action. The workflow I always use is to write code in my editor and use a keyboard shor
10.
by Zak 26d ago
This is a half-truth. In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will. The USA is somewhere i
11.
by Zak 26d ago
For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reac
12.
by Zak 28d ago
They do, and 20 years ago a move like that would have also drawn widespread condemnation. It's not as big a problem as it is with phones though because the vast majority of PCs on the market are not locked down in this way, and only a
13.
by Zak 29d ago
Voiding a warranty due to unauthorized repair is only one of many things a company can do to make third-party repair, or any repair more difficult.
14.
by Zak 29d ago
The first part is clearly illegal in the USA. Is it not in the EU? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
15.
by Zak 29d ago
Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it. I'm sad there w
16.
by Zak 1mo ago
To borrow an idea from Nilay Patel of The Verge, all the other items in the parent comment describe consumer products . People like smartphone cameras and cheap TVs and effortless data backups, and they'll put up with some significant
17.
by Zak 1mo ago
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
18.
by Zak 1mo ago
It's not the tinkering that's sociologically important, but the ability to install things like ICEBlock even though the government and OS vendor don't want you to.
19.
by Zak 1mo ago
I like the goal of making it harder to overfit, but there are a couple significant weaknesses. A big one is TM-30 Rf is still an average, and with a larger number of samples, the average minimizes the effect of strong deviations that only a
20.
by Zak 1mo ago
Some additional notes on the topic: The author describes color rendering index as a percentage; it is not. It's 100 - [a calculation of average color error on 8 color samples]. Reporting the color error directly would probably be bette
21.
by Zak 1mo ago
Somebody I was talking to about a web app I wrote in Clojure asked me how I hosted it. He seemed surprised my answer was an $8/month VPS. That might be the wrong solution if it was going to have a million users, but it isn't. This
22.
by Zak 1mo ago
I don't like the article's tone of inevitability: > I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners.... Indiscriminately filming people in public plac
23.
by Zak 1mo ago
An open question is whether the rideshare model, where the service provider knows which passenger was with which driver at which time and place solves the problem that regulation was trying to address. I would have expected someone to publi
24.
by Zak 1mo ago
> the complexity of the problems demands so much code that the REPL cannot keep up. Now we disagree, at least in part. REPL-driven development is in part about incrementalism. You wouldn't run all the complex code every time you w
25.
by Zak 1mo ago
I think we're largely in agreement here. Unit tests and REPLs serve different purposes and are poor substitutes for each other; red_admiral was arguing that unit tests obviate the need for REPLs.
26.
by Zak 1mo ago
Unit testing doesn't provide the level of interactivity a REPL does. A REPL lets you see the output of parts of an unfinished function based on the running program's state. If you've already thought out the whole program befo
27.
by Zak 1mo ago
C++ predated the OOP hype cycle and triggered, or at least accelerated it.
28.
by Zak 1mo ago
I don't think C++ succeeded because it was object-oriented. I think C++ was object-oriented because classes were an abstraction that could layer on top of C with fairly low overhead, giving it more expressive power without much mandato
29.
by Zak 1mo ago
I was hoping it would address Lisp. Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until
30.
by Zak 1mo ago
Not a pilot either, but it's my understanding that accidental spins almost never happen at altitudes where they're recoverable. Preventing the spin is the only way to avoid most crashes involving spins. Stalls, on the other hand a

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