timmaxw

7 ms·

1.
by timmaxw 1y ago
> Cut threads into printed parts with a thread tap for quick design of low-reuse joints. I've found wood screws work well for this. The wood screw can cut its own threads without needing to use a tap. It does put some stress on the
2.
by timmaxw 2y ago
> refusing charge backs is too easy That doesn't sound right...? Credit/debit card chargebacks are handled by the bank. If the merchant doesn't pick up the phone, the bank will take the money from the merchant and return i
3.
by timmaxw 2y ago
> If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash No, that's not the _only_
4.
by timmaxw 2y ago
Here's an intuition that might help: Suppose we define β=1/T, the reciprocal of temperature. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_beta .) As a system gets hotter and hotter, T gets bigger and bigge
5.
by timmaxw 2y ago
Really? I zoomed in on the Towers of Bologna and then used the "measurement" tool to draw a 97m line on the ground. The line seems about as long as the tower is high. If you try that, do you get the same result?
6.
by timmaxw 2y ago
Note, those pictures depict the towers as about 5x bigger than they actually were. To get a true sense of scale, here's the same view on Google Earth: https://earth.google.com/web/@44.48152905,11.33820409,94.604...
7.
by timmaxw 2y ago
Yes, Python dicts remember insertion order. This is different from C++ std::map, which maintains the keys in sorted order. For example, std::map::lower_bound(X) finds "the smallest key in the map which is greater than or equal to X&quo
8.
by timmaxw 2y ago
In Python job interviews, I think the interviewer will only judge your code on asymptotic complexity, not absolute speed. I think Python engineers generally aren't expected to know how to micro-optimize their Python code. Some general
9.
by timmaxw 3y ago
Well done. It's horrifying that the Python standard library "+/-" operators don't handle DST correctly.
10.
by timmaxw 3y ago
> Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing budget and all the other costs. Otherwise Hollywood wo
11.
by timmaxw 3y ago
The reason people complain about "high art" is because we're told that everyone should aspire to appreciate high art, and that people who appreciate high art are somehow better than the general public, even though it's d
12.
by timmaxw 3y ago
The non-wealthy regularly pay for books, music, movies, video games, etc. Hollywood is a $40B/year industry. All these industries follow a model of "make a work of art, then sell infinite copies"; this makes it possible to se
13.
by timmaxw 3y ago
If Uruguay can run on 100% renewable energy, the unstated implication is "The US could do it too, we just lack the political will". (As opposed to the idea that "Renewable energy is a genuinely hard problem that will take tim
14.
by timmaxw 3y ago
Yeah. I agree with most of what David Gerard writes, but this attack on Scott Alexander was weak. The "54 billion lives" thing was obviously a joke.
15.
by timmaxw 3y ago
What are all those transistors doing? I've heard the cache is the biggest part. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17 , the A17 has 72MB of cache. Cache is typically SRAM. Per https://en.wikipedia.
16.
by timmaxw 3y ago
As a beginner, I've been a big fan of the Digilent Analog Discovery. This guide lists it under "logic analyzers", but it's also a passable oscilloscope if you don't need more than 30MHz bandwidth. Because the target
17.
by timmaxw 3y ago
haymaker (noun) a powerful blow with the fist. etymology: "the punch probably so called for resemblance to the wide swinging stroke of a scythe"
18.
by timmaxw 3y ago
The latter seems plausible to me, but the former makes no sense. If the problem is that Amazon-retail has too much market power, how would splitting off AWS help with that problem? Amazon-retail would still have the same fraction of the ret
19.
by timmaxw 3y ago
This writeup has a lot more details: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-cuts-to... DC AG Karl Racine filed a lawsuit over this in May 2021. The judge threw it out, supposedly for lack of evidence that
20.
by timmaxw 3y ago
> People have families to feed. People would submit fewer applications, but each individual application would have a higher chance of success, because everyone else would _also_ be submitting fewer applications. The number of job opening
21.
by timmaxw 3y ago
yonron's comment made a specific claim: "Amazon will raise the price in the long run and capture monopolistic profits." aga98mtl pointed out this isn't actually true in practice. It sounds like you're describing a d
22.
by timmaxw 3y ago
I think there's a dynamic where: - Desirable job applicants get hired quickly, but people who can't get hired stay on the market - People who can't get hired will keep applying to more and more jobs - So every new job opening
23.
by timmaxw 3y ago
That still doesn't seem like very much time to me. Job hunting involves hours and hours of interviews; five minutes of paperwork is negligible by comparison, right? Are people mass-spamming applications or something?
24.
by timmaxw 3y ago
At tech companies I've worked at, when people use phrases like "the best product" or "product quality", they are in fact using those phrases to mean "the product that does the best job of giving users what they
25.
by timmaxw 3y ago
To clarify: what specific remedy do you want the court to impose on Google, and how would it make things better for everyone?
26.
by timmaxw 3y ago
The full quote from the trial exhibit is: > When talking about revenue, we could mostly ignore the demand side of the equation (users and queries) and only focus on supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales. Sure, we had to build
27.
by timmaxw 3y ago
In _this_ case, the case of the human brain, I think it's fair to say that evolution started with the reptile brain and added something (even if that "something" is "new function and complexity" rather than "a
28.
by timmaxw 3y ago
> evolution of the brain always happens by modifying the existing structure Hmmm, my impression was that evolution took an existing structure and stuffed a bunch of new functionality into it, making it much larger and more complicated. A
29.
by timmaxw 3y ago
> And these cases are the utter majority. I think it's the opposite -- tech and politicians agree on the vast majority of things, but they're considered banal so the topic never comes up. But, you could imagine an alternate uni
30.
by timmaxw 3y ago
Yes, tides do naturally dissipate energy. The main source of tidal dissipation is friction between the moving seawater and the seabed. [1] Current tidal generators work either by inserting a turbine into the moving water; or by a dam that c

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