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Do aliens exist in our planet?
  • I like this explanation. I don't think we can do a lot better than this one at this point.

    I think a fun next step is "forget what's real, I want to write a story with humans interacting with aliens that's consistent with what we see now." What do you have to invent to make it work? Nothing really works for me. But stuff like the dark forest is good. I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it.

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    What is something you SHOULD cheap out on?
  • I bought some $50 open back headphones a while back and they a just worlds better than anything I'd had before. Is there a step up from there that'd similarly rock my world?

    My mic is pretty similar. $100 got me an SM58 and it's wonderful. You have to basically eat it and I can peak it if I'm loud. But it sounds so much nicer than most things. I know there's a few steps up from there. But I don't sing so think I'm fine.

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    Those who know
  • I feel lucky to have avoided this so far. It's really not like this on my team. I write a fair bit of code and review a ton of code.

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    TIL that in January 2014, a seven-year-old girl named Charlotte Benjamin wrote a letter to Lego, pointing out the lack of female characters compared to male ones.
  • I love that proco being a pig is treated as mildly weird. His relationship with the fascist government is more important to the plot than that he is a pig. No one else is an animal. It's just a thing that happened to him. You can tell it's a big deal to him, but no one else really cares. You could remove him being a pig and the story still works fine. It just makes the regret and inadequatecy more obvious.

    I think I like Howel's Moving Castle more. But it's close. That one gave me a whole author.

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    What is the largest file transfer you have ever done?
  • When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I've ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

    It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I'm guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn't good.

    Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let's found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let's go with 14 shelves.

    Let's guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let's guess 240 tapes per shelf.

    That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn't that much these days. I mean, it's a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it'd be 60 petabytes.

    I'm not sure how you'd transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you'd probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.

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    What is the largest file transfer you have ever done?
  • Not looking at the man page, but I expect you can limit it if you want and the parser for the parameter knows about these names. If it were me it'd be one parser for byte size values and it'd work for chunk size and limit and sync interval and whatever else dd does.

    Also probably limited by the size of the number tracking. I think dd reports the number of bytes copied at the end even in unlimited mode.

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    What was the path like to your current career, and what parts would you recommend for or against another person following?
  • Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It's been good. I'd recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

    I'm a software engineer because I'm bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can't write. Didn't want to follow in my mom's footsteps but I just can't so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

    I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

    I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

    These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It's honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

    While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I'm proud of it. It's no google, but it's honest.

    Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don't deserve it. It's been good. But I got lucky.

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    Disney+ terms prevent allergy death lawsuit, Disney says
  • I was curious. Looks like Florida has about the same population as Sri Lanka. Similar to Romania for the EU folks. While I could find them both on a map I couldn't tell you anything going on their. Much less news from a year ago.

    Maybe its fair to bump the populations some because Desantis was a Republican presidential hopeful. But I couldn't tell you the names of the folks who lost the last Tory leadership election.

    So, yeah, comment checks out.

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    GitHub Profile Roast 🔥🔥🔥
  • It's cute. Maybe my favorite use of ai I've seen in a while.

    I wish it looked at contributions instead of just the profile page. Much more accurate roasting.

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    You should make a new programming language
  • I work on a language for a living. It's fun! It's a job. But it's fun.

    I'm not super involved with the traditional language parts. The design and parsing and optimization. I spent most of my time on the runtime. We're embedded in another big system and there's a lot of things to make it nice.

    I spent the day wiring up more profile information for the times the runtime has to go async. Then I'll fix up some docs generation stuff. Eventually I'll get back to fun shadowing edge case in the new syntax I'm building.

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    Thou shalt not roast thy master
  • What a fun tool! It only looks at your public projects rather than your activity. I think. But it really is neat. Good use of ai. Nik approved.

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  • http:// scifilists.sffjazz.com /lists_books_rank1.html

    I've always loved this list of sci-fi books. The 2000s web design compells me.

    A while ago I tried to read the ones I hadn't. It was a lovely tour. My biggest surprise was enjoying Childhood's End.

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