Religion. Ruins. Everything. Every. Time.
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HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Today I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL that in 1975, after Gillette introduced a two-blade cartridge razor, Saturday Night Live aired a fake commercial for a three-blade razor. Gillette introduced one in 1998. In 2004, a satirical ...English8·10 days agoBlades vary greatly between brands. Get a sampler pack from eBay to find ones you like. Then buy them in bulk. 100 blades will generally cost from $8-$14, depending on the brand. Some, like Feather, are more expensive.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•At some point, kids watching older cartoons will no longer understand why putting a thermometer under a desk lamp was a way to skip school.9·20 days agoWait til the OP learns about the Easy Bake Oven.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as ‘A1,’ like the steak sauceEnglish73·1 month agoI call BS.
I’m Canadian and my parents immigrated here from England before I was born. I have a UK passport as well as a Canadian passport.
I’m not English-Canadian, I’m just Canadian. No one hyphenates in Canada, and you cannot say that Canada has any more unifying cultural heritage than the USA.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml•Ford CEO Farley: Lasting 25% tariff on Canada, Mexico would 'blow a hole' in US auto industry71·2 months agoThis article is over one month old. No much has happened since then, including Trump’s newest tarrifs against all foreign autos.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato You Should Know@lemmy.world•YSK about SomaFM, an independant non-commercial internet radio with really nice and diverse curated channels7·2 months agoGroove Salad plays constantly on all the Nest devices through my from morning to night.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Why Great Engineering Orgs Thrive on "Normal" EngineersEnglish10·2 months agoIn the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.
It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn’t standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don’t come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.
Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that’s already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that’s down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it’s going to someday become an urgent priority that can’t wait any more.
So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn’t understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.
The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, “to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs”. It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.
You can’t just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It’s going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.
And that’s all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can’t meaningfully add resources, scope’s already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.
And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can’t you just go faster? Can’t you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?
That’s a little confused. From what I remember, it’s the server that matters, not the domain when being blocked. If you self-host this is a problem, but not if you use your own domain on a commercial service.
The “MX records and such” are all a function of domain management. You’ll have to do this whether or not you self-host.
Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.
As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org•Do people really pronounce it this way...?9·5 months agoIt seems more rikely, if hit by an IBM truck in 1985 that he would be ebcdic’d to Seattle.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why did it take so damn long for humanity to "learn" how to draw/paint realistic images?591·7 months agoTake a look at this:
This is in the Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, and it comes from an ancient Roman Villa in Rome. Probably painted in the first or second century CE. There’s walls of this stuff in the museum.
It’s not realism, but minimalistic sketches that, in many ways, outdo realism in artistic quality. To me, this looks more like something that you might find in Leonardo’s sketchbook than on the wall of on ancient Roman Villa from 1200 years earlier.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•When can we expect 500TB drives to be available?English53·7 months agoThis is true, but…
Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.
So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.
You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.
And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.
Same curve.
Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.
The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.
Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.
Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.
While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.
I used KDE Connect on Ubuntu with Gnome. No issues.
Old school Unix guy here…vi,awk and sed are all that you need.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•Someone needs to train an LLM AI on Trump's speeches. I bet the random gibberish output would be hilarious.19·8 months agoBack in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.
Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.
I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.
I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.
HamsterRage@lemmy.cato Today I Learned@lemmy.world•TIL the theme to Sanford and Son has lyrics. And they were sung by Ella FitzgeraldEnglish4·8 months agoAlso, the final note on the bass is a mistake, but they left it in.
I cannot express adequately how different blades are from each other. Some are smoother than others, some are sharper and some improve after a few uses. Some last longer.
I have fairly fine whiskers, so I don’t need a crazy sharp blade like Feather. My skin is also a bit sensitive, so a smooth blade is best.
For me Big Ben, blades made by Lord in Egypt are really good. One of the versions of Shark, also made by Lord are pretty good too.
I find Wilkenson Sword blades to be horribly scratchy, and the name for some of the Gillette blades. Voskhod aren’t bad, except they are Russian.
You don’t realize how different they are until you try.