jmopp

7 ms·

1.
by jmopp 2y ago
But when you succeed in the game, then what? Yes, the real world is full of endless trials and never a payout. But the entire point is that there is no point. The fun is in the journey. The real treasure is the friends you make along the wa
2.
by jmopp 2y ago
It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good decisions and executing on them.
3.
by jmopp 2y ago
It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week
4.
by jmopp 2y ago
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone lo
5.
by jmopp 2y ago
The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.
6.
by jmopp 2y ago
I always thought fusion was easier than fission, since all* you really need is water and electricity — the problem being that it's currently impossible to get more energy than what you put in * I am eliding over the fact that building
7.
by jmopp 2y ago
Fun fact: the descendants of Moctezuma still live today as Spanish nobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo
8.
by jmopp 2y ago
The bicycles that were made from wood and iron gave an extremely stiff ride and were called boneshakers.
9.
by jmopp 3y ago
The Amish view of technology is a bit more nuanced than "modern technology bad". Generally, technology needs to have a legitimate purpose for the community in order to be adopted. So a grid connection would be bad as it's a c
10.
by jmopp 3y ago
As someone who uses curl and postman regularly, both tools have their places: I've found curl most useful for quick ad-hoc requests, or if I need to figure out why my service is no longer working. Postman I've found most useful to
11.
by jmopp 3y ago
Since we're in the realm of fiction, Harold is a Helion employee and has first dibs on their container-sized fusion reactor.
12.
by jmopp 3y ago
Yep, any kid who obsesses about the periodic table of elements can figure out how to collect radioactive isotopes and attempt to build a simple nuclear reactor. Most don't, because they know better.
13.
by jmopp 3y ago
Presumably you would have built up a pension in your previous country, which you can draw from. That would satisfy the requirement for an independent source of income. When Britain was in the EU it was (and still is) common for pensioners t
14.
by jmopp 3y ago
I don't know, slumlords charging an exorbitant rent for a shack is a thing.
15.
by jmopp 3y ago
This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. Y
16.
by jmopp 3y ago
I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.
17.
by jmopp 3y ago
I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncon
18.
by jmopp 3y ago
I don't know. Sports cars are notorious money sinks. The person who took the bus might be more financially prudent.
19.
by jmopp 3y ago
Peter Thiel might have been a libertarian in 2009, but he's not a libertarian anymore. He's jumped fully onto the nationalist conservative train. https://reason.com/2020/08/02/wait-wasnt-peter-thiel-
20.
by jmopp 3y ago
That's the slippery slope people who want to take away rights exploit. Sure, you can believe women shouldn't vote. You can even go around telling people you believe women shouldn't vote. But just because you can say something
21.
by jmopp 3y ago
From the Zen of Python: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
22.
by jmopp 3y ago
If we're at the point where power producers are saving up excess sunny-day energy to sell at other times, then we've solved renewable energy's infamous base-load problem.
23.
by jmopp 3y ago
> It can't be great to cover so much of nature. You'd be surprised! Solar panels provide shade for local wildlife and improve crop/grazing yields due to the cover moderating the hot sun and providing spots for dew to form.
24.
by jmopp 3y ago
That doesn't really apply since Ireland has different visa requirements to the UK. As a South African national I can enter Ireland without a visa, whereas I do need one to enter the UK.
25.
by jmopp 3y ago
For my work I often run a lot of queries with a similar structure, but not repetitive enough that I can just have one query. What I normally do is paste the query template in a Python REPL and write some code to generate all my queries, whi
26.
by jmopp 3y ago
When I think of 'Western culture', I think of the culture that developed in Protestant Europe and English-speaking America from the early modern period onwards, and aspects of which are diffusing through the rest of the world. I a
27.
by jmopp 3y ago
You don't need language to do maths — the Greeks went pretty far with geometry alone. While language makes it easier to understand things, it's not strictly necessary: you can learn a lot from mimicry, for instance.
28.
by jmopp 3y ago
Yes, but the Chalcedonian schism and the East-West schism were between churches who viewed themselves ostensibly as equals, or at least on a relatively equal footing — bishops leading one church against bishops leading another. The Protesta
29.
by jmopp 3y ago
For one, frozen water won't grow microorganisms as quickly as liquid water would — makes purification easier.
30.
by jmopp 3y ago
Mac's command-line tools are the BSD versions. I always get confused about the command-line arguments for `date` because they differ so much betwen platforms.

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