magnusmundus (u/magnusmundus)

magnusmundus commented on Fair Pricing kagi.com/changelog#6155... · Posted by u/CleverLikeAnOx

pbronez · 7 months ago

> you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results

And can do so by adding !g to a Kagi query, just like on DDG.

You know, I once ordered takeout from the other side of the country because I had too much privacy on my search engine...

magnusmundus · 7 months ago

That's funny. I'm curious now, do you live in a microstate, or an island? Or was it a case of an overly eager delivery platform?

magnusmundus commented on DHL pioneered the sharing economy (2016) flexport.com/blog/dhl-bil... · Posted by u/bpierre

lelanthran · a year ago

> So there’s a risk that you missed it but their dog will find it, and you’ll be on the hook.

No problem - you have a paper trail showing where you got it, that you were unaware of what was in it, and that you were not allowed to inspect it.

magnusmundus · a year ago

Literally every check-in form I've been through had some required checkboxes to declare that you've packed your luggage yourself, have complete awareness of what's in there, and claim responsibility for such items. There are also countless, very visible, posters in airports saying so. Your paper trail might be useful to law enforcement in prosecuting the people who handed you the no-no stuff, but it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility.

Anecdotally, I once had an outrageously difficult time explaining to a German customs officer that the bag I placed in the scanner had items belonging to both my sister and myself. It didn't help that we were travelling together, and she was also there to back my statements up. He simply would not accept the fact that there was an electronic device (e-book) that belonged to her, in a bag that belonged to me, which we forgot to take out before the scanner.

magnusmundus commented on 40 years later, a game for the ZX Spectrum will be again broadcast over FM radio racunalniski-muzej.si/en/... · Posted by u/markostamcar

nilamo · a year ago

The PS1 used CDs. Many games could be dropped into a cd player, and if you skip the first track (the data track), the rest of the game's music/audio could be played.

magnusmundus · a year ago

It was possible to do the same with some PC games! I have fond memories of listening to the soundtracks of Driver, and Knights and Merchants, on my little stereo.

magnusmundus commented on Keeping an ice cream factory cool spectrum.ieee.org/patryk-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

ec109685 · 2 years ago

I wonder what it actually means to reverse engineer a program written in Dutch to understand the operating system in order to collect metrics.

“Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.

Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system”

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

If my experience reverse engineering PHP written in Dutch is anything to go by, it means the function and variable names, comments, database columns, logs... would all be in Dutch -- or potentially worse, in Dutch but using English words. Which in turn means they sometimes won't necessarily have an accurate translation to English, in most cases a single translation at any rate, and you'd have to do a ton of disambiguation to make sense of anything.

magnusmundus commented on Tiger moth jams bat sonar (2009) science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/FergusArgyll

resolutebat · 2 years ago

Nice garden path sentence title there: both "jams" and "bat" have several completely different meanings and it took a while until my brain permutated the right ones.

(Tiger moth) jams (bat sonar).

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

I also had some fun thinking on a tiger moth jam, and how that may have batted a sonar.

magnusmundus commented on Python types have an expectations problem medium.com/@sgorawski/pyt... · Posted by u/sgorawski

lpapez · 2 years ago

I did that for Python, and now I do it for PHP as well.

Trivial to set up but ends up being a huge time saver, especially when reviewing junior colleagues code - don't even ping me to review your code until you've managed to convince the static analyzer it will work!

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

Re: junior colleagues, do you not instead arrive at "why does the static analyzer complain", or worse, an avoidance of proper types that you then have to point out in review?

magnusmundus commented on HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies forums.theregister.com/fo... · Posted by u/pjmlp

crazygringo · 2 years ago

> dont need a printer.

As far as I can tell, printing return shipping labels is the main reason to own a printer these days.

And even those often aren't needed, as UPS will sometimes scan a QR and print the label themselves. Or dropping off Amazon at Whole Foods.

But frequently enough there's no way around it. And if you don't go to an office frequently enough to use that printer, and buy things online (especially clothing) -- you still need one at home.

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

There are still other reasons to print stuff, and still preferably at home often enough. Hobbies (sheet music, game material), German bureaucracy, workflow preferences. However these companies made it completely impractical to own an inkjet printer which you might not use for 6 months at a time, and for some reason they aren't milking laser printers as hard.

Though, I'm pretty sure I'd just spring for a thermal printer if they made toner maintenance impractical too, personally speaking.

magnusmundus commented on Tabletop RPGs we played in 2023 polygon.com/23989775/best... · Posted by u/webmaven

baby · 2 years ago

What’s a tabletop RPG? Are these D&D games?

If so, which are the ones that don’t need a dungeon master. I’m not really attracted to those as I would think no one around me would want to sacrifice themselves to play that role.

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

D&D is an example of a tabletop RPG, yes.

> no one around me would want to sacrifice themselves

It's not so much a sacrifice as it is simply a different game. Some people enjoy coming up with stories more than exploring other people's stories.

magnusmundus commented on Antirez' tiny JSON selector library notes.billmill.org/link_b... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Mikhail_Edoshin · 2 years ago

'goto' is more universal and may make cleaner code even in loops. E.g. to loop backwards without 'goto' one has to resort to an idiom like that:

    for (i = n; i--; )

and I wouldn't say this idiom is that clear. You can get used to it, of course. Another interesting case is printing a list of items with separators. C loop constructs are biased cases of frequently used loops but they do not cover all the possible cases. 'goto' is unbiased.

A similar case are Python loops. There are “Pythonic” ways:

    for item in iterable
        ...

They look sweet but are useful only in some cases. E.g. if you need to modify `iterable`, the Pythonic way won’t work. There are Pythonic workarounds, but they may involve copying a whole iterable, which is hardly a good idea. But there is also a less Pythonic way:

    i = 0; n = len(iterable)
    while i < n:
        ...

This works all the time and serves all possible cases.

magnusmundus · 2 years ago

> This works all the time and serves all possible cases.

Unless you want the check to be always against the initial length of your iterable, rather than its modified state, you'd have to repeat the `n = len(iterable)` inside the loop, or introduce some syntactic caramel of the walrus kind (though I'm not sure if it would work here).