Hetare King

“Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive.”

Certainly, in the same way that failing to catch a bank robber and allowing them to skip town is expensive.

I’m still fond of the classic “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!”
Those kids going on about 6-7 like it’s some kind of power couple don’t know what they’re doing to poor 6.

Same idea as behind “Enough is enough, an egg is an egg.”

Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.

Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.

Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.

Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.

It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.

Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.

As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.

I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. What it boils down to is that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

I have a collapsible silicone bucket with a lid for popcorn making that goes into the microwave. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require any fat, also serves as a bowl and you can just throw it into the dishwasher. Size-wise, it’s probably not that different from an air popper when collapsed, but it’s easier to find a spot for; mine is on top of the stack of roughly bowl-shaped things. And you could also use it as a bowl for other things, so it’s not necessarily single-purpose.

This was in elementary school. It was pretty cold, even inside, so I was blowing into the inside of my elbow to get warm air into my sweater. I’m not sure how, but I messed up the alignment or something and ended up making a loud fart noise. And without getting any opportunity to explain, I was made to stand in the hall.

PNG does not compress photos very well. A photo that is 5 MB when saved as a high-quality JPEG may very well be at least 15 MB as a PNG. Also, a lot of cameras (phone or otherwise) save to JPEG by default.

I do wish more people would use PNG where it makes sense, though. The other day I made an edit to an image containing line art that was purely black and white except for the compression artifacts. I applied a threshold so that all the artifacts became either perfectly black or white and saved it as a monochrome PNG, reducing the file size to less than a third, while containing more information and having a cleaner image. I later remembered that I could reduce the file size even more by using indexed colours. In other words, whoever originally saved it in a lossy format actually made it take up more space than needed while also needlessly reducing image quality.

The FLCL sequels were made at Production I.G., Gainax just licensed out the IP. There’s no real overlap in the people who worked on it either; I think just the director, and only in the role of “supervisor”, and the original character designer.

The most recent work by the director (Tsurumaki Kazuya) and writer (Enokido Youji) of FLCL is Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, at Khara, Anno Hideaki’s studio. Some other prolific people who worked on FLCL, Imaishi Hiroyuki and Ootsuka Masahiko, are now the big cheeses at Studio Trigger. Yoshinari You also mostly works at Trigger.

Most countries don’t do the absurd funding the local public school using the district’s property taxes thing, but they still have property taxes.

I do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between something being attributed to a real person and a fictional character being loosely based on real people, though. Like, I think we can be pretty confident that the events in the Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t really happen (at least not literally), but if Gilgamesh was, like is generally accepted, a real person, the Gilgamesh in the Epic is most likely supposed to be that guy. Whereas Robin Hood was probably never meant to be any particular person.

That said, do we actually know whether all the stories in the Bible about Jesus were originally about the same individual? The new testament was written decades and centuries after the death of historical Jesus, by people who didn’t even live in the region, right? So all the stories the authors heard would have come from traders and missionaries of Christian cults with vocal traditions. That alone is very long game of telephone, but I imagine every town at the time would have at least one person claiming to be messiah, and if one of them became a big enough deal that rumours around him spread beyond town, there would also be bunch of copycats. So a lot of room for mix-ups.

“I am Jesus, your king!” “I heard Jesus was buried like three days ago!” “I uh- I have come back from the dead!” And then he skipped town ASAP.

The standard type aliases like uint64_t weren’t in the C standard library until C99 and in C++ until C++11, so there are plenty of older code bases that would have had to define their own.

The use of #define to make type aliases never made sense to me. The earliest versions of C didn’t have typedef, I guess, but that’s like, the 1970s. Anyway, you wouldn’t do it that way in modern C/C++.

If you’re directly interacting with any sort of binary protocol, i.e. file formats, network protocols etc., you definitely want your variable types to be unambiguous. For future-proofing, yes, but also because because I don’t want to go confirm whether I remember correctly that long is the same size as int.

There’s also clarity of meaning; unsigned long long is a noisy monstrosity, uint64_t conveys what it is much more cleanly. char is great if it’s representing text characters, but if you have a byte array of binary data, using a type alias helps convey that.

And then there are type aliases that are useful because they have different sizes on different platforms like size_t.

I’d say that generally speaking, if it’s not an int or a char, that probably means the exact size of the type is important, in which case it makes sense to convey that using a type alias. It conveys your intentions more clearly and tersely (in a good way), it makes your code more robust when compiled for different platforms, and it’s not actually more work; that extra #include <cstdint> you may need to add pays for itself pretty quickly.

I’m not an expert on making browser extensions, but I doubt they’d get direct access to the audio buffer just before it gets sent to the the OS. It should be possible to do this on the OS-level though, like with (on Linux) a PulseAudio module or something.

In Japanese: 春夏冬
It means spring (haru), summer (natsu), winter (fuyu). What’s missing? Autumn. In other words, autumn (aki) is nonexistent (nai), so this is pronounced akinai, which means “not getting tired/bored of something”.

I will hate the game and the player, thank you very much. Even under this system, other choices could have been made that are neither illegal or financially nonviable, so Monsanto is very much responsible for the choices they did make. They’re not victims of the systems, they’re gleefully pursuing everything the system lets them get away with.

Of course, if you want things to change, it is indeed changes to law and government incentives that need to be pursued. But in order for that to happen, you need enough people to get upset about the current state of things, and for that you need concrete examples. And it doesn’t get more concrete than this.