colonial

colonial, 16 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

It’s hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It’s a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

colonial, 28 days ago

I mean… you’re surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They’re called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.

colonial, 29 days ago

We need better alternatives

We’d need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮‍💨

Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.

colonial, 1 month ago

I suspect I get mild SAD in the winters. Not enough to feel truly depressed, just more of a constant low-level “damn, I wanna nap right now.”

It’s probably different from your case, but what helped me was a sunlight lamp (light therapy) and a grab bag of supplements - standard multivitamins as well as magnesium pills and vitamin D fortified milk.

colonial, 1 month ago

Oof. Looks like this affected some other languages as well - somebody at Microsoft needs to up their documentation game, methinks.

colonial, 1 month ago

Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.

• Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
• Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
• Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

colonial, 1 month ago

Snowball throwing was banned because a nephew of a friend of a friend of a teacher was supposedly blinded by one.

FWIW, this can actually happen, although I still think that’s an overbearing rule. One of my younger siblings had a teacher who was blind in one eye - ice shards from a snowball when she was in elementary.

colonial, 1 month ago

I’m not well versed in the machinations of the Chinese government, but if a relatively “normie” VPN like Nord works in China… it’s probably controlled opposition (i.e. they’re logging everything to a government server.)

colonial, 2 months ago

I understand the sentiment, but… HTML and some light CSS is just as fast and much more accessible. It just strikes me as something that defines itself in opposition to “thing everyone uses” for no good reason.

colonial, 2 months ago

set timers

This broke for me a few months ago. It just randomly… won’t start, despite saying otherwise.

colonial, 2 months ago

That sounds like more effort than just… writing the code.

colonial, 3 months ago

A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.

colonial, 3 months ago

My guy, see a doctor. Temporary blindness/blacking out is not a normal reaction to nicotine, even in excess. “Nic sick” should just mean nausea/vomiting, dizziness and headaches.

colonial, 5 months ago

I liked GalaxQL.

colonial, 6 months ago

Can’t beat Iosevka in my opinion. I use the Term variant for my shell as well.

colonial, 6 months ago

A few posters I bought from the campus poster sale at the start of the year. (Specifically, a woodblock print, a solar system map and a Cowboy Bebop poster.)

I have a huge window with a nice view (in a university owned apartment no less!) so I can afford to skimp on the other walls.

colonial, 6 months ago

$0.26/hour is pretty good!

colonial, 6 months ago

Too late, already moved to Garmin after my third dead Charge 5 in ~1.5 years.

colonial, 6 months ago

I’ve had mine (first generation 13" model) for over a year now. I’m very happy with it, and I intend to make it last me through university (3 years) and then some. I would consider it a good investment for me.

colonial, 6 months ago

At least five years. Even if the company goes under tomorrow, it’ll be a while before the mainboard is truly obsolete. The main “consumable” would be the battery, which I can probably hack a replacement for if official parts are no longer available.

colonial, 7 months ago

… Eh, no. I’ve seen GPT generate some incredibly unsound C despite being given half a page of text on the problem.

colonial, 7 months ago

Let the arms race begin

colonial, 7 months ago

Good, I would like to avoid interacting with the hallucination machine.

colonial, 7 months ago

It wouldn’t be as relevant, since passing a function or method instead of a closure is much easier in Rust - you can just name it, while Ruby requires you to use the method method.

So instead of .map(|res| res.unwrap()) you can do .map(Result::unwrap) and it’ll Just Work™.

colonial, 7 months ago

The GNOME text editor or Nano.

I appreciate Vim, but when I just need to inspect something or change a single line, the former are easier.

As for Neovim and Emacs… I don’t have eight hours to set aside monthly to keep them configured and working.