jl6

6 ms·

1.
by jl6 4d ago
I used to feel mildly synaesthetic about day colours. Saturday red, Sunday blue, Monday orange, Tuesday purple, Wednesday green, Thursday pink, Friday cyan. Then I realised that was just the colour scheme used by the Radio Times.
2.
by jl6 4d ago
Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.
3.
by jl6 5d ago
Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.
4.
by jl6 7d ago
So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?
5.
by jl6 8d ago
I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other grea
6.
by jl6 8d ago
"tax and regulate" isn't immune from second-order effects either. Set the tax high enough and you'll get smuggling gangs with all the same tendencies.
7.
by jl6 9d ago
At the risk of an analogy, this is like finding that the Linux kernel provides no guarantee that a process won’t contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities. While buffer overflows are bad, and it would be a good idea to try to prevent them, en
8.
by jl6 10d ago
Low stakes conspiracy: the high-security operation to move the tapestry to London was actually cover for the simultaneous movement of gold from European nations as part of their recent hedge against US counterparty risk.
9.
by jl6 11d ago
No disrespect to Arnold Rimmer, but that telegraph pole society has got nothing on the insulator folk.
10.
by jl6 12d ago
Well I can’t say I understand the appeal of collecting insulators, but I’m completely in love with the idea that there are people who enjoy such a niche hobby with such intensity, and apparently have been enjoying it for decades, and have s
11.
by jl6 13d ago
I can only assume somebody was asleep on the job when this scheme was approved, because the outcome is in direct contradiction to ICANN’s mission statement: > Its enduring mission is to ensure the stable, secure operation of the Internet
12.
by jl6 14d ago
I think “medium” is a key enabler for being able to sustain a regular schedule of reactor building. It’s way easier to raise $3bn every 3 years than $30bn every 30 years.
13.
by jl6 14d ago
Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a producti
14.
by jl6 23d ago
Great outcome, and I hope the weight of mainstream browser support will spur camera and phone manufacturers to emit native JXLs from their devices.
15.
by jl6 29d ago
Not sure about high espionage, but information laundering is the right phrase for how it usually works: consultants cut across organizational boundaries, gathering useful information from the people who know what's actually going on (t
16.
by jl6 29d ago
It’s just gone past the halfway point between the date Deus Ex was released, and the date it was set. That puts it on target, because it feels like about half the plot has come true. It was a prototype for a much larger system.
17.
by jl6 1mo ago
Can I get this, but for geology?
18.
by jl6 2mo ago
Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective
19.
by jl6 2mo ago
Infantino’s justification has been to “grow the game”, but I cannot imagine how football could possibly get any bigger, except maybe in the US.
20.
by jl6 2mo ago
> the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?) No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.
21.
by jl6 2mo ago
Good question, with a couple of possible answers: 1) maybe those species aren’t as unchanged as we think, because our evidence of the past is limited to things like skeletons, and maybe the skeletal structure of the shark didn’t change much
22.
by jl6 2mo ago
We must prepare for the possibility of a malicious secession of Exeter City, likely with Chris Martin as president.
23.
by jl6 2mo ago
Is that from the San Francisco Examiner? Do you have sources for the family information you mention?
24.
by jl6 2mo ago
Yeah. Nobody is innocent here. Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly
25.
by jl6 2mo ago
Wikipedia sources the claim to an article by Jerry Pournelle in BYTE magazine, from 1985.
26.
by jl6 2mo ago
I don’t think anyone can lay claim to a plot of land in perpetuity. Reverence should and does fade over time. Maybe when you are initially buried, that plot of earth belongs to you for a while, but after hundreds of years, it’s the other wa
27.
by jl6 2mo ago
Here’s one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode... -5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more
28.
by jl6 2mo ago
If you have a billion year long civilization, it would probably be easier to genetically/medically engineer humans to live forever, so that a 75,000 year space voyage doesn’t seem so long. Easier than near-lightspeed space travel at an
29.
by jl6 2mo ago
A definition that is debatable at the edges doesn’t have to be debatable at the center, so I don’t think it follows that we need to completely throw out the concept. Nature doesn’t provide neat categories, but speciation is nonetheless a re
30.
by jl6 2mo ago
All forms of entertainment are entering crisis, because there is so much of it competing for attention, and so many years of back catalog that are still entertaining and available for free-or-nearly-free. Premium gaming and premium content

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