palordrolap

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Looks like Guerilla Mail still exists. Been around for years at this point. No idea if there’s any controversy about them, but there are reviews out there giving them high marks.

I’m imagining that your first name is something like Vijay and your middle initial is J, and so no wonder you wouldn’t notice.

Fears grow? Really? That’s what it’s been about for decades at this point.

Funny. I had a boss who thought that use of initials was pretentious. Or maybe I’m putting words in his mouth and it was specifically my use of a middle initial he didn’t like. Harry S Truman’s name would presumably have given him a headache.

Either way, I countered that having a customised number plate on a car was surely just as bad, to which he had no answer.

• Partial tip: There’s often the suggestion of concentrating on breathing, usually with some kind of regular pattern. This is an alternative to try.

You’ll need to have been in bed for a while, mind racing. Take how extreme that racing is and then taking a similarly extreme, almost uncomfortably deep breath to match it. This requires having been in bed for a while.

Hold it for a bit. Don’t count seconds - avoid numbers. As soon as you get the vaguest hint from your body that you need to let it out and breathe normally again, do so. Try to relax as much of yourself as possible as you do that. This is not a “hold your breath till you pass out” thing. You want to go back to breathing normally.

If the breath was too deep and that freaked you out a bit, try going a bit more shallow on the next one.

This has sometimes worked for me, especially if I’ve been asleep already and can’t get back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ve tried a regular breathing exercise after that.

Other times I have got out of bed and done something mindless for a while until I felt tired again. No doomscrolling.

• More traditional tip: No caffeinated beverages for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. Yes, six. Nine’s even better.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Watched a few back in the day. Wasn’t really my jam - I was too old for it even then - even if the tangentially related _asdfmovie_s are somewhat entertaining when they appear.

Started by turning off adblocker, but not NoScript. Allowed everything except the obvious advertising domain “blogherads”, and no significant increase in usage.

Allowed that and it added a whole bunch of domains to the list, meaning that it polls all the other ad providers and tries to run their scripts. Tried enabling those a bit at a time and noticed nothing in particular. The ads did start taking up a small amount of extra memory but no runaway effect.

I didn’t get around to allowing them all, but I did notice that at one point I tried to scroll the page and it loaded ad section after ad section indefinitely as I scrolled.

If you have an extension that tries to load a page right to the bottom, then that would almost certainly cause a runaway effect. It would try to load an infinite number of ads below where you were viewing the page.

Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.

They’re doubling it every week, so a googol is only ~4 years off.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

In before you’re going to need a telemetry spoofer in order not to attract attention. On the other hand, it takes an extraordinary amount of government paranoia before they start going after random citizens.

So what you’re saying is that in order to not be fascists, the Dems would have to pull out some actually fascist dictatorial tricks in order to reset things?

I’m sure you can imagine how well that would go.

North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia’s effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK’s effort as a starting point.

But I wouldn’t try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn’t.

Also: something something falling out something something Windows.

Only one of the two candidates is talking about turning the US into a dictatorship with them at the helm.

Having read some of the comments from the interviewer perspective in this thread, I am glad they got you and not one of the yahoos other interviewers got.

I strongly dislike being sweaty and, if exercising, even walking somewhere, outside, dislike being at the mercy of the elements.

There’s also that one cannot simply exercise. There are necessary activities that need to be performed afterwards if not before.

Some people take jumping into a shower for granted, for example; they don’t even think about it, and just do it and it’s done before their brain even engages. For me that takes a lot of mental energy, which brings me onto another point:

I do not know how much mental stamina I have for a day, so I could start an activity and run out of steam before I’ve had chance to get to the end of everything, making for a very uncomfortable hour or two as I drag myself miserably through whatever else needs to be done.

As such I tend to want to avoid that happening, and it’s on my mind the whole time I’m doing something that takes time.

Throwing exercise into the mix only guarantees less time to be able do the things I need to, even if there are still many hours left in the day.

I figure this could be a case of needing to somehow force myself to do it anyway, but I do not know how to do that. And there’s that I would then need to keep doing that every day forever in order not to fall back to where I am currently, which seems both unsustainable and unpleasant.