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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • If it’s all if statements and if it uses well nested logic and if it’s written in a modern language and if the number of if statements doesn’t exceed 57, it could be good. Otherwise it is overly verbose. Otherwise it is dated. Otherwise it is spaghetti code. Otherwise it should go to the regular code check routine function.



  • It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

    So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile

    … And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.





  • I made paneer, following a recipe I’ve used dozens of times before. The resulting cheese was perhaps softer than usual, and even after squeezing it and dripping for hours, the slow drip of whey continued, unabated.

    I dared to try a bit. The texture was just as expected, with the familiar squeak as the cheese broke apart upon chewing, and just a hint of extra liquid. The flavor was also fine. I could have added more salt, but that’s a problem I’ve run into before, and I usually cook the paneer into something, so I would just make a saltier sauce.

    I decided it would be fine to leave dripping overnight, but I thought something was unusual. It was late, and dark, and I was ready to go to sleep, so I needed an answer to the lingering doubt at the back of my mind. The bowl I hang cheese over to drip is one of my largest bowls, but I dumped out the accumulated whey anyways - then I went to bed.

    In the morning, my wife woke me up in a panic, and I came downstairs to discover that the bowl had filled, then overflowed with whey. I dumped the bowl once more, cleaned up the mess, and then promptly dug a pit to bury whatever this approximation of cheese was. Maybe it will stop. Maybe it will flow down into the water table, and bacteria will digest whatever is in the Great Value whey.

    In either case, I have made the important decision that the outcome is not my fault. Walmart is responsible for whatever occurs, and if I need to sell this house at some point in the future, I hope Walmart will disclose the state of affairs to the buyer, because I most certainly will not.

    Three stars out of five.








  • In industrial software, I’m sure performance is a pretty stark line between “good enough” and “costing us money”.

    The pattern I’ve seen in customer facing software is a software backend will depend on some external service (e.g. postgres), then blame any slowness (and even stability issues…) on that other service. Each time I’ve been able to dig into a case like this, the developer has been lazy, not understanding how the external service works, or how to use it efficiently. For example, a coworker told me our postgres system was overloaded, because his select queries were taking too long, and he had already created indexes. When I examined his query, it wasn’t able to use any of the indexes he created, and it was querying without appropriate statistics, so it always did a full table scan. All but 2 of the indexes he made were unused, so I deleted those, then added a suitable extended statistics object, and an index his query could use. That made the query run thousands of times faster, sped up writes, and saved disk space.

    Most of the optimization I see is in algorithms, and most of the slowness I see is fundamentally misunderstanding what a program does and/or how a computer works.

    Slowness makes customers unhappy too, but with no solid line between “I have what I want” and “this product is inadequate”.


  • Apple put inadequate coolers in the later Intel Macbooks to make Apple Silicon feel faster by contrast. When I wake mine, loading the clock takes 1.5 seconds, and it flips back and forth between recognizing and not recognizing key presses in the password field for 12 seconds. Meanwhile, the Thinkpad T400 (running Arch, btw) that I had back in 2010 could boot in 8.5 seconds, and not have a blinking cursor that would ignore key presses.

    Apple has done pretty well, but they aren’t immune from the performance massacre happening across the industry.

    The battery life is really good, though. I get 10-14 hours without trying to save battery life, which is easily enough to not worry about whether I have a way to charge for a day.


  • When I was a child, my elderly neighbor grew pears, and they were the best pears. My parents live in the same house, and the pear trees my elderly neighbor grew are still in the same spot, still alive.

    The pears on those trees aren’t the same anymore. They turn meally before they get soft, and they never get sweet enough. They don’t have the same strong flavor, and they don’t bake up well in desserts.

    She taught me many things about growing plants, but never anything about what she did for the pear trees. So now pears aren’t what they’re supposed to be, and the reason is lost to me.


  • IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific “feel”.

    If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own “book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents”, but can’t sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.

    Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is “different enough”.


  • At least in the US, government policy has meant that getting a drug to market is an extremely high bar. This means that funding the wrong drug can waste a billion dollars or more of time, material, trained researchers and lab space, etc.

    Funding drugs by popular attention, private donation, kickstarter, or anything like that is likely to produce a bunch of scams and even more waste.

    Funding drugs by having the government select which ones to study is likely to produce several gigantic financial boondoggles that are dragged on because some Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.

    If we want more drugs to come out, the best thing to do would be to reduce the cost of making a drug legal to sell, like by lowering the proof required for efficacy, or by alleviating the doctor shortage by permanently increasing the number of medicare funded residency slots.