_Wintermute (u/_Wintermute)

_Wintermute commented on Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions vale.rocks/posts/unicycle... · Posted by u/edent

nickcw · 16 days ago

I think the best heckle I had while riding my unicycle was from a policeman who shouted "Are your brakes working?"

(In the UK you are required by law to have working brakes on a bicycle. My unicycle had no brakes at all! Though slowing down was never a problem with the fixed wheel drive.)

_Wintermute · 16 days ago

A fixed wheel counts as a brake, though I've only seen the law in relation to bicycles which require 2 working brakes not sure how this applied to unicycles.

_Wintermute commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx

UniverseHacker · 23 days ago

Doing computational biology for several decades in about a dozen languages, I do think R is a much better language for data science, but in practice I end up using Python almost every time because it has more libraries, and it’s easier to find software engineers and collaborators to work on Python. However, R makes for much simpler cleaner code, less silent errors, and the 1 indexing makes dealing with biological sequences much less hassle.

_Wintermute · 22 days ago

In my experience R is king of happily chugging along spitting out nonsense results when it should have errored 100 lines ago.

_Wintermute commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx

blubber · 22 days ago

"The reason you can use this simpler syntax in R is because it’s non-standard-evaluation ..."

So it actually is about Python vs R.

That said, while this kind of non-standard evaluation is nice when working interactively on the command line, I don't think it's that relevant when writing code for more elaborated analyses. In that context, I'd actually see this as a disadvantage of R because you suddenly have to jump through loops to make trivial things work with that non-standard evaluation.

_Wintermute · 22 days ago

The increasing prevalence of non-standard evaluation in R packages was one of the major reasons I switched from R to python for my work. The amount of ceremony and constant API changes just to have something as an argument in a function drove me mad.

_Wintermute commented on UK full fibre availability rises to cover 81% of UK premises thinkbroadband.com/news/u... · Posted by u/ksec

wdb · a month ago

I live in Central London and I don’t have fibre they have been talking about for the last 6-8 years that we will get it. UK lives in the dark ages internet wise

_Wintermute · a month ago

It's because you're in London. I have family in rural Cumbria with full fibre, yet none of the flats I've rented in London have availability.

_Wintermute commented on It's the Housing, Stupid ofdollarsanddata.com/its-... · Posted by u/throw0101c

cjpearson · 4 months ago

There's a common view that home-ownership is important because a home is the most expensive asset most people will ever own and its increasing value is key to their comfortable retirement. But this view of a home as an appreciating asset is incompatible with increasing housing affordability.

There are definitely downsides to renting such as landlord issues or missing out on mortgage subsidies, but maybe a higher proportion of renters could lead to improvements in affordability. And if the well-off are renting as well, there's also more hope for better legal protections for renters.

_Wintermute · 4 months ago

I don't see how I could ever afford to retire whilst still having to pay rent in the UK.

_Wintermute commented on Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England news.sky.com/story/facial... · Posted by u/amarcheschi

anonymousDan · 4 months ago

I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.

_Wintermute · 4 months ago

If you've ever had to deal with the UK police as a victim of a crime, you'll quickly find out they're pretty useless at obtaining CCTV footage. I was asked to get it myself, to which the business who owned the CCTV told me they would only hand it to the police, so nothing happened.

_Wintermute commented on Honesty Boxes in Scotland (2024) awayfromtheordinary.com/2... · Posted by u/NaOH

graemep · 4 months ago

Depends where you are. it is known in the US, and its popular with people from the rest of the UK.

It does not seem to be much known in Asia, apart from as the source of whiskey.

I do not about the rest of Europe, but my feeling is that it is not well known.

I have been quite surprised how many people (from Asia and Europe) can visit, or even live in, the UK and not go out of London.

While Scotland is not unknown, there are certainly a lot of people who might visit who have a low awareness of what is there, and articles like this show some very attractive aspects of Scotland.

_Wintermute · 4 months ago

The coachloads of Chinese tourists that I see every summer make me doubt this.

_Wintermute commented on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors? washingtonpost.com/world/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

Luc · 5 months ago

> Fabian Cancellera was widely suspected of mechanical doping

I don't think the opinions of these fringe conspiracy theorists were ever widely held. Not in the cycling world, not among people with an understanding of physics, and not among the general public.

_Wintermute · 5 months ago

I think it was largely pushed by Phil Gaimon who was trying to get into the news to sell his new (at the time) book.

_Wintermute commented on Rotring 600 Ballpoint Pen shellshore.com/review-rot... · Posted by u/Alupis

christophilus · 5 months ago

Or if you occasionally spill coffee or any other liquid ever. I sometimes hand-write recipes. Fountain pens + sloppy kitchen meal prep are a bad combo.

_Wintermute · 5 months ago

You can get some very permanent water-proof inks. Platinum Carbon black is my favourite.

_Wintermute commented on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds npr.org/2025/07/24/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/andsoitis

com2kid · 5 months ago

This is true to an extent and I'm very fond of the saying, but beyond a certain point you can indeed outrun a bad diet.

I used to spend ~4 hours a day training martial arts (kickboxing, BJJ, etc) during which time I could eat almost anything I wanted without gaining weight.

I'm sure if I had downed a cheesecake a day it would've been bad for me, but I was able to get away with a level of excess back then that I am unable to today.

So you can indeed outrun a bad diet, it just takes more running than most people want to do!

_Wintermute · 5 months ago

Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.

u/_Wintermute

KarmaCake day1645April 3, 2015View Original