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Some laptops will map 789uiojkl to the keypad with fn

I doubt it; you can insert unicode symbols with Win-. now, so the alt keys aren't as important.

Personally I used to see coworkers with 65 or 60% mechanical keyboard and I have no clue how they could code without arrow, home, or page up/down keys. They must have been really committed to vim keys or something.


Fun fact about Win-. (the emoji keyboard): this is an Input Method Editor, something formerly used by writers of ideographic languages for example, so now we all have no excuse not to test our Win32 code for IME support.

alt-255 alt-255 alt-30

alt-30 alt-255 alt-30

new friends can't triforce


What a blast from the past. This was my introduction to alt codes.

I don't think math is going out of business

Seconded. Math does nothing for you by default but it makes almost everything else easier, to the point of making the impossible possible.

I have found several points in my career where taking the extra time to learn math fundamentals (particularly linear algebra) has paid off when learning something more high level. People often say that the math in machine learning doesn't matter and you can staple python libraries together but I've made convincing arguments in product design meetings based on how the mathematics of certain algorithms lends itself to our particular use case and how it helps scalability

Thirded. I just got back from a customer visit. They were trying to do something where the back of the napkin math said it would take a couple dozen CPU years to solve. I recognized a simple (in the math world) transformation we could do and the could run the whole problem in under 10 min.

Coding the transform isn’t trivial, so we’ll get some contract dollars to solve it, but it will still be done faster than the naive approach.

These are pretty sophisticated customers, but they don’t have a deep math background. Without that you wouldn’t find the “obvious” solution.


If you can recall it, do you remember the math problem in question? And could you loosely explain how you transformed it?(just with general concepts or keywords for my own curiosity. I love math, and seeing how different problems can relate to each other in unexpected ways. For example, when the sum of two quadratic roots gives the width of a given rectangle. Like this problem: A rectangle has an area of 32ft² . Its width is 4ft less than its length. What is the width? A = l(w) and 32 = l(l - 4). I’ll spare you the work shown, but l = 8 and l = -4. … (8) + (-4) = 4 = w

Roughly it can be viewed as a change of coordinates and then recognizing the symmetry. Say you had a 2D function of x and y and transformed it to r and theta and then noticed that it was independent of theta. You go from an 2D problem to a 1D one.

In this case we’re transforming a 7D problem into a sum of a discrete set of 2D problems. With more algebra we could get it down to a 1D problem but that would take more human work that wouldn’t be paid off later in CPU time. If their project ends up scaling and the 1D transformation makes sense, we’ll do it.


What field of mathematics is this?

I worked for a large company and started seeing opportunities for automation immediately. I proposed some solutions to my boss, and he told me that he agreed that these tasks could be automated, but that we have 10,000 other tasks that could be automated, and each one takes a few months to get the resources provisioned and also set aside developer (me) time to get it done, which could be spent on other projects.

What was interesting to me was the self-fulfilling prophecy of dysfunction: because there was so much manual process and red tape, the cost of fixing a particular problem is larger than than the benefits (i.e: time spent on the task exceeds time saved by automating it).

But because the tasks do not get automated, the amount of time required to fix things increases bit by bit due to the processes in place. The cost of fixing a task increases marginally every day, and so the cost/benefit ratio increases every day, becoming further justification NOT to fix things. At a certain point you have to look at the bigger picture and recognize that there is a much larger problem in your company than a few excel spreadsheets that could be better automated.


So much feel this and have seen it many times. A complete unwillingness to spend a few hours to save hundreds of hours later, because too much is urgent. It's a little bit like a thrashing OS, too many competing resources so the result is everything slows to a crawl or breaks.

I've clawed my way out of situations like this but it does require some heroics in the beginning and probably longer hours than your role requires. I am the kind of person that will ask to slow a project down or delay it if it means we get a chance to do things correctly and in a maintainable way, but certain types in management will not really understand enough to completely buy in.


I know that feeling all too well. And it's such a hard truth that devoting just a little time, letting some projects slip just a bit, to fixing those systemic problems could make lots of others go away, it's just next to impossible to get people to want to change. I've found because people don't want to, they want to keep doing what they're doing and are scared of anything new because that may mean either they'd have to retrain, or more pathologically, that their position is threatened.

It all comes down to the people. The right people can make all the difference in something like that, the wrong people make it miserable for the rest.


But it's not a Macintosh; it's a Raspberry Pi emulating a Macintosh


Why do they not have that right?


why would they have that right?


Rights must be negated, not affirmed


Yeah technically they aren't trying to circumvent anything your browser is doing they are just serving you videos with ads in them instead of videos and ads served separately


Or take an old laptop and use as a seedbox


You don't have to download all files in the torrent. Most torrent clients support partial downloads and you would only seed those parts. The main concern would be that you would be undoubtedly distributing copyrighted material


Did the laptop not have any kind of serial port to write to?


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