Brilliant execution. I see so many knob-based inputs on home appliances where they have physical detents but the input encoder does not match the detents. Say you turn the appliance on, it starts at setting one, and you need to turn the dial to setting three. Any reasonable person would expect one physical click to take you to setting two, another click would take you to setting three. But I keep seeing devices where the detents are completely arbitrary and you have no idea how many “clicks” it takes to get to the setting you want. This makes the detents actively misleading.
Readit Newsjdcarter commented on SmartKnob – Haptic input knob with software-defined endstops and virtual detents github.com/scottbez1/smar... · Posted by u/e3a8
jdcarter commented on There's something off about LED bulbs nymag.com/strategist/arti... · Posted by u/brainfog
I had a similar reaction to the article.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).
jdcarter commented on There's something off about LED bulbs nymag.com/strategist/arti... · Posted by u/brainfog
I can't imagine paying $150 for a six pack, when Home Depot's private label LEDs are $12 for a six pack. I could replace it 10 times before I hit that mark - not sure it's worth that.
I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.
We got an Instant Pot and our Zoji rice cooker has collected dust ever since. It is great for brown basmati rice where the Zoji is weak and slow. Try 360g brown basmati rice (we don't bother rinsing it), 705g water, a quarter tsp of salt, 1 tsp of oil. Cook 23m on high and then let it sit for 10min before venting the rest of the pressure off. Remove lid, fluff the rice, and wait a minute or two before serving.
The one weakness of the Instant Pot is that most models won't go to 15psi and there is the odd recipe where a longer cooking time can't compensate. For example, there is a Modernist Cuisine recipe for pressure cooked root vegetables that uses a bit of baking soda to help bring a caramelized flavor to the party. Works great in a 15 psi cooker but is a disaster in an instant pot: the veggies just taste like baking soda. I suspect that stocks made in the Instant Pot might not be as good as well for similar reasons but haven't tried that yet.
I'm just the other way: had an Instant Pot for a couple years (which is great) but I bought a Zojirushi rice cooker and LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Japanese medium-grain rice in the Zoji is amazing. I cook 1-2 cups nearly every day to snack on.
jdcarter commented on Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode’s code quality github.com/norvig/pytudes... · Posted by u/wrycoder
Somewhat dumb question: I wonder what tool he used for the red font code annotations and arrows? What tool would you use, like Photoshop or something? And just screenshot the code from some editor or I guess Jupyter?
The red handwriting font is exceptionally good; I'd love to know what that is. It looks very natural, I assume with a ton of ligatures.
I have developed new muscles with dedication and effort, I had Adobe logo in front of me all the while, I was falling down and crying with pain but one look at Adobe logo would make me get up and get going with newly found vigor - just to kick Adobe's bucket and to embrace loving comfort of Affinity Suite.
Nah.. it was pretty easy to jump. Life is beautiful.
I used Photoshop and Illustrator for years and years (going back to 1990's) and switched to Affinity about 2 years ago. There's a lot of little details that are different--say, when you grab a resize handle, does aspect ratio stay locked or do you have to hold down shift?--but I found that it wasn't tough to retrain. Most things are where you'd expect. It's certainly not like Gimp or Inkscape, where absolutely everything is different and it feels impossible to get anything done.
Some of the strong points of this calculator is the main thing I use in RPN calculators with stacks. It's so helpful for me to duplicate a value and then operate on that, and be able to throw it away if I mess up, sanity check from where I started at intermediate calculations, etc. it's not identical, but many points others are mentioning in this thread are what I value from an RPN stack based calculator.
BTW, for anyone who is comfortable with RPNs, MacOS added the mode to their built-in calculator recently-ish. it's not terrible either. I've switched to it for my default experience. (even though nothing beats the HP 48g, as it's what I'm the most familiar with).
Also, on the article, really cool that someone added this on mobile. I love hearing about devs developing something that fills a niche and does so well. I feel like I'm out of ideas most days. Good for her!
For the HP48/50 fans here: try the HP Prime. The color display is amazing. It requires some relearning because the UI is different, but it still has full-featured RPN mode. The keys are good, too--it looks and feels like a proper HP calculator. I used a 48SX in college and 50G later, but the Prime is the one to have now. (It's also the one my daughter steals now that she's in more advanced math and science classes.)
jdcarter commented on Fear and Loathing in FreeBSD qorg11.net/tech_posts/fre... · Posted by u/vermaden
There was a BSD based smartphone [1], not sure it was any more open a platform than Android though.
Only the last Danger device ran NetBSD; all prior ones used a proprietary, in-house OS. It didn't run any of the normal BSD userland, however, as Danger had its own Java-based userland and UI layer.
Danger was bought by Microsoft, however, right around the time the NetBSD phone was going to market. AFAIK the tech didn't continue much past the Microsoft acquisition. (Source: worked at Danger on the NetBSD project, but left shortly before the Microsoft deal.)
jdcarter commented on MicroPython – Python for Microcontrollers micropython.org/... · Posted by u/Tomte
> "setup", "loop" and "delay" are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software
I agree with "delay", but why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
> why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner.
[edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]:
* primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
* means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
* means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Arduino only provides the first.
[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
A detailed analysis of Meow Hash: https://peter.website/meow-hash-cryptanalysis
It's not the highest of quality hash functions (see the SMHasher benchmarks), but it is fast. A great alternative is XXH3 (https://cyan4973.github.io/xxHash/), which has seen far more usage in practice.
I'm using XXHash3 for verifying data integrity of large (10+MB) blobs. Very fast and appears to work very well in my testing--it's never missed any bit error I've thrown at it.
Aside: when storing hashes, be sure to store the hash type as well so that you can change it later if needed, e.g. "xxh3-[hash value]". RFC-6920 also has things to say about storing hash types and values, although I haven't seen its format in common use.