actionfromafar's comments

On: The year I didn't survive

[actionfromafar]

That's beautiful, thank you.

[wvh → actionfromafar]

Beautiful in that painfully human way, I agree.

On: A pair of scissors on formica table suddenly bursts into flames

[actionfromafar]

I see two issues:

1 - the amounts would be so incredibly tiny, even microscopic, for it to get lodged in there.

2 - any flammable stuff would either evaporate or gradually oxidize.

On: A pair of scissors on formica table suddenly bursts into flames

[actionfromafar]

Come to think of it, what's the point of the sharp ends? Seems mostly useful in horror movies.

On: The other 99%

[actionfromafar]

They are looking for clues to the The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. If we accept the premise HN is part of that, it should relate.

[froh → actionfromafar]

so particle researchers doing particle research, "CERN stuff".

vinyardmike's short spotlight on gluons (top level answer) was what I was looking for.

On: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

[actionfromafar]

Wow, can't even see the Overton window from here.

On: Ada crate of the year 2024 announced

[actionfromafar]

I wonder if some misconception can have snuck in there somehow. GCC (which also has an Ada compiler) has its lowest level link libraries under GPL. But there's a link level exception. This is the same for C, C++, Ada, whatever languages GCC supports. (IIRC.)

(Edit: apparently it used to a problem as per sibling comment?)

[fiddlerwoaroof → actionfromafar]

The binaries AdaCore used to distribute stated that you had to get gnat elsewhere for this link level exception because the runtime library they distributed did not have the exception. But, I'm glad to know that this restriction has been solved.

On: Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data

[actionfromafar]

Looks like the entire legal system is being retooled at the moment.

On: Blocking the telemetry of Adobe apps

[actionfromafar]

Could be any number of answers, maybe the tracking is outsourced to another division or company altogether without shared infrastructure.

[alkonaut → actionfromafar]

You could still just proxy everything through a single endpoint. I honestly don't know why people would run software that phones home to function, yet are worried that it phones home...

[actionfromafar → alkonaut]

I'm just saying large corps move incredibly slowly, especially across internal silos. A big effort just to deter a couple of users fiddling with their network settings.

On: Blocking the telemetry of Adobe apps

[actionfromafar]

At least for consumer software, an EULA is quite literally "throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks in whatever jurisdiction".

[self_awareness → actionfromafar]

Yeah.

"I don't care what the EULA is, I just throw money at the company who has written it."

and later

"OMG they are raping me with their EULA! Halp!"

On: Donald Knuth's 2024 Christmas Lecture: Strong and Weak Components [video]

[actionfromafar]

Maybe everyone around are so used to seeing him they sometimes forget he's a National Treasure. :-)

[xeonmc → actionfromafar]

So what you’re saying is, we need Nicholas Cage to abduct him to preserve the appreciation?

[petalmind → xeonmc]

Funny that Nicolas Cage comes up in this context. Here is a trivia snippet from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/trivia/:

> During an interview, Osgood Perkins recalled a story from production where he learned Nicolas Cage has a particular skill that he says no other actor possesses: the ability to recognize how high or low he is able to speak without messing up the audio. According to Perkins: "The sound guy came over to me one day...(he) comes up to me a couple of days into Nic being on set and he's like 'Oz, I've never seen anything like it. When Nic is mic'd, I'm watching the dials, when Nic goes big, he goes right to the line. Anything more, a decibel or two over that, and it would be hard to use. Then he goes down, he goes soft and his whispering and he's barely talking, he goes right to the line. Anything past that line, you wouldn't be able to use it. He knows where the lines are. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life'."

Maybe Cage can contribute to the sound design problem actually.