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Most ultramicrotomes have an advancing method that is dependent on thermal expansion, easiest way to get a linear progression without mechanical backlash becoming a nuisance without some huge clunky gearbox design.

olympics considered harmful.

when will the world realize that these 'olympic sprints' to meet goofy expectations for the IOC are ridiculous and damaging on the long term?

seriously. almost every visited city is worse-off for years after the games; it's only ever accommodated because of the accompanying rockstar status and the money injection for the in-seat politicians, almost none of which actually sticks around to provide improvements for the city or its' people.

it's a gross abuse, it results in gross abuses towards the people, and it fucks up a city for years .

Example : What did Rio's new anti-poverty highway walls enable for locals? How did the promised lagoon clean-up go?

(hint: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-rio-de-janeiro-lake-recove... )

the walking city thing is a nice concept for LA -- how many homeless encampments are getting torn down to accommodate this? How much worse does traffic get in the interim for those living here? Who's going to care enough to listen to complaints during the olympic-cash-season?


LA is not one of those cities. It already has the sports venues and dormitories. As a resident, accelerating Metro projects is helpful.

>Recording data on and around you especially without their consent is not something I'm okay with.

fulfilling that request would make nearly all 'connected' devices untenable.

I absolutely agree with you , but from this point how does that actually happen? how do we shift away from minuscule connected devices that sense everything about the world around them when they come effortlessly cheap and absolutely invaluable?


>The problem with making hard things sound accessible for wider audiences, is that people who understand the hard stuff natively then cannot separate the layman’s explanation from the technical capabilities of the person making those explanations.

it can also be the case that the 'laymen explanation' is actually patently wrong -- not just over-simplified or 'dumbed-down'; wrong.

some things just require a certain level of background knowledge; this is why generally any 'celebrity scientist' explanation of anything with the word 'quantum' in the subject line is generally just down-right wrong.

there is no decent metaphor by which to onboard a laymen in certain technical topics.

that isn't to say that the 'wrong' answers don't have value in educating the laymen, but the liberties that some experts take in 'wrongness allowance' is quite different from one another.

personally I think it's the responsibility of the explainer to step aside at some point and say : "Look, this is wrong, but without the background this is as close as I can get you to understanding this thing, so just don't take what I say as gospel from this point forward." -- the reason this is important is simply due to the fact that the laymen doesn't stand a chance at finding out which parts are wishy-washy by themselves without some further guidance.

not mentioning where the fairy tale begins is what leads people into thinking that there is actually an alive/dead cat out there somewhere. they grasp the metaphor itself rather than the statistics concept that is being explored.


You’re conflating entertainment shows with university lectures.

The point of videos like the aforementioned isn’t to give people a background into game development. It’s to give people who have no experience an overview for entertainment purposes.


>The vast majority of people still running Windows 10 won't even know what an EOL date is or why they should care

Microsoft has been doing a lot in recent years to make people care, including (but not limited to) pop-ups near EOL that throw a scare into people.[0]

[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-received-a-not...


Users are probably so use to dismissing all these pop-ups of things like the ghost of clippy trying to trick you into using one drive that they don't even know what pop up #6446 says.

>Windows will go on

undoubtedly

>...and get better

well that would buck the entire constant downward UX trend that has happened ever since data exfiltration became the actual revenue stream for Microsoft.

I get the "I hate new windows version Y" statements are getting old, i've been reading them for at least as long -- but it doesn't make the points that they extrapolate upon wrong. Windows has long been trending 'anti-user' , and has recently met a threshold that has thrown a lot of long-time users off the scent -- especially since other OSs have never been better/compatible/capable.


yeah but the prompt itself generally adds sufficient randomness to avoid the same verbatim answer each time.

as an example just go ask it to write any sufficiently average function. use different names and phrases for what the function should do; you'll generally get a different flavor of answer each time, even if the functions all output the same thing.

sometimes the prompt even forces the thing to output the most naive implementation possible due to the ordering or perceived priority of things within the requesting prompt.

it's fun to use as a tool to nudge it into what you want once you get the hang of the preconceptions it falls into.


serious question: why would there be?

I can understand the curiosity -- I think it's fascinating -- but to me it strikes me as the same kind of question as "Yeah, I know James Bond is a secret agent, but is there any way I can get a copy of his itinerary?"


> serious question: why would there be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

It's not an hypothetical question but a real military strategy.


AIUI it was Bloomberg that first reported on it.-

But, who would go out on such a limb to actually confirm such a thing ...

It is, however - a near-certainty that it exists ...

... as are China's efforts to develop their own chipmaking capabilities.-


>I don't understand why you would not want them to clean your room as it's included in the price.

answering for myself, having been in too many hotel rooms in my lifetime:

it's easier to ask for towels and toiletries than deal with binding arbitration after having things stolen from your room. I can make my own bed.


with the money and power that's floating around the general US political sphere one would think they'd spend a few bucks more to distance themselves from one of the largest sociopolitical scandals of all modern history.


Lol. He chartered it. He doesn't even own it. It doesn't reflect poorly on him at all. Do you check the history of every taxi you hire to make sure nobody evil ever used it?


I'm willing to bet the user you quoted isn't running for any sort of election.


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