don-bright

10 ms·

1.
by don-bright 3mo ago
i just took that pesky 's' out of https and it let me click thru.
2.
by don-bright 3mo ago
It's not dead. It's included with every copy of Desktop Excel and probably will be for 20 years. Press Alt-F11 and away you go (enable Developer tab first i guess?). Forms, SQL connectors, collections, alot of other stuff even XML
3.
by don-bright 5mo ago
Surprised Wildberger’s youtube channel wasnt in here. People ask whats the point? For me the study of the infinitesimal vs finite has really helped me better understand issues of precision and approximation in computers. I feel like I know
4.
by don-bright 5mo ago
have to ask the Maintainer of Time https://twilightzone.fandom.com/wiki/A_Matter_of_Minutes
5.
by don-bright 6mo ago
Jaquard loom was one of the first machines that could operate based on a set of symbols / patterns encoded on a punched card. Computers ran on punched cards until the 1970s. Voting machines used punched cards until pretty recently (inf
6.
by don-bright 6mo ago
I had this feeling of alien math when I went thru his videos on ancient Babylonian math. They were very serious about the everything divided by sixty stuff. Good times.
7.
by don-bright 6mo ago
The other thing it can give you is computationally exact results since rationals are closed over division. Sine is interesting because where the input is rational the output is almost always irrational and where the output is rational the i
8.
by don-bright 7mo ago
thats so awesome. i wonder what a live forth interpreter would look like on NES.
9.
by don-bright 7mo ago
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
10.
by don-bright 7mo ago
How I started. Once upon a time there was this magical kingdom called Radio Shack. But it's people left the Earth and went to Capacinor - the Unshorted Lands, a place where batteries are always charged and every circuit board has a sch
11.
by don-bright 8mo ago
I spent a while on an open source project debugging some bizarre crashes. Cant remember exact detail but something like Someone was throwing an exception inside a destructor which had been triggered inside another exception. It was layers d
12.
by don-bright 8mo ago
Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong
13.
by don-bright 9mo ago
Floating point numbers are not closed under addition. They are not real numbers and not rational numbers. FP is on a grid whose size changes the farther you get from 0,0. For example 0.1 doesnt exist in fp nor does any number not represent
14.
by don-bright 9mo ago
Also since LLM generated content is not copyrightable what happens to code you publish as Copyleft license? The entire copyleft system is based on the idea of a human holding copyright to copyleft code. Is a big chunk of it, the LLM part, b
15.
by don-bright 10mo ago
Every copy of Microsoft Excel includes Power Query which is in the M language and has tables as a type. Programs are essentially transformations of table columns and rows. Not sure if its mainstream but is widely available. M language is al
16.
by don-bright 10mo ago
That immediacy is mostly thanks to OpenCSG which is essentially a magic trick to quickly fake 3d rendering of booleans between 3d objects using stencil buffer of gpu. http://opencsg.org/ In other words it renders the cylin
17.
by don-bright 10mo ago
well the fact that you can wire the Rotary Switch to power and the thing physically rotates --- that's definitely Haptic Feedback that i dont ever recall seeing in a computer. lol. that manual is wild too. entire section on games. remi
18.
by don-bright 10mo ago
I also like how they call it a "3 nm process".. bruh DNA is 2 nanometers. Are you saying your transistors are like a tight fit on a DNA strand?
19.
by don-bright 11mo ago
so it appears the entire text has been Translated with non-breaking space unicode x00a0 instead of normal spaces x0020, so the web layout is considering all paragraph text as a super-long single word ('the\00a0quick\00a0\brown\00a0fox&
20.
by don-bright 11mo ago
We already see the 'best' LLMs switch between different languages while they are 'thinking'. It seems to me that the more languages it can 'think' in, the better off it will be. Different human languages have d
21.
by don-bright 1y ago
The amount of power this is using is roughly the same as it takes my car to do my short commute to work
22.
by don-bright 1y ago
I feel like eventually the Leave no Trace convo will shift to the microplastics hikers have dumped into the environment, especially shoes but also clothes, packs, gear, maybe even waste products
23.
by don-bright 1y ago
I support more research but anecdotally HEPA air filters changed my life. I used to get pretty bad respiratory infections every winter but after getting these that went away. I’m talking the simple kind with basic charcoal prefilter and fi
24.
by don-bright 1y ago
I'm missing the part where they solve for the collection problem. The article mentions the boy who gathered dangerous amounts of Americium from smoke detectors but doesn't provide any kind of mechanism to counteract that risk. It
25.
by don-bright 1y ago
on my Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz it takes 6 seconds to import/load and text generation is roughly 1x realtime on various lengths of text.
26.
by don-bright 1y ago
Im just going to make sure at least one post here mentions S-100 bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic https://en.wikipedia.org&#x2F
27.
by don-bright 1y ago
Regarding Indexes: "When the same borrowchecker makes references unworkable, their solution is to... recommend that I manually manage them, with zero safety and zero language support?!?" Language support: You can implement extensi
28.
by don-bright 1y ago
RIP TenFourFox. https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfo... orrr... maybe not! https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/02/february-patch-set-f...
29.
by don-bright 1y ago
Dating myself, typed in "Global Thermonuclear War". Watching various cities of the world have their map flash on the screen for a few seconds at a time was certainly nightmare inducing. But fascinating.
30.
by don-bright 1y ago
What people forget is that VBA is still built in to every copy of Desktop Excel (press alt f11) and is used by entire industries that are disconnected from the open source tech online discourse. In a lot of locked down business environments

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