mirth

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and yet I participate

Web: http://mirth.sdf.org

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Last Notes

2026-05-09 14:24:14 UTC

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The magic (and part of the trouble) is the behavior is implemented as massaging points around in high dimensional space with implements with data-derived shapes. The human-visible primitive operations are more like "giant matrix multiplication" than anything we would recognized as part of a hand built algorithm.

2026-04-21 01:21:15 UTC

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Possibly, many PC laptops can use just about any PCIe 2230 shaped card. Some have firmware restrictions on what they'll accept, but these things fail often enough that if so someone will already have complained on the internet. Intel AX210 cards should be pretty widely compatible even if the BSD drivers don't have support for the newest modes. Actually just ordered one for an old laptop here with failing WiFi.

2026-04-20 19:48:18 UTC

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Is it worth replacing the WiFi card? Newer cards tend to perform better and I think use less power, I don't preemptively swap but enough of mine have failed that I've seen the difference even in pretty old laptops.

2026-03-04 20:39:36 UTC

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With kernel and maybe mesa from backports, and browser as flatpak, not much reason not to use stable.

2026-02-10 18:13:43 UTC

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My main problem with doing high-mass things in space is we have no likely path to low/no carbon launch so it's going to a lot of emissions. For things like imaging, positioning, communications relays it's arguably so useful as to be worth it (weather forecasts save lives) but that's a whole different scale compared to manufacturing, datacenters, permanent habitation, etc.

2026-02-10 16:31:00 UTC

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Ah, you've been spared the endless and in my opinion pointless debate about whether space data centers can work at a technical level. Even if they are economically and technically workable they're a bad idea, there's no reason to spend energy on irrelevant minutia.

2026-02-10 15:32:57 UTC

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When I argue that the question of should we build space data centers does not depend on whether it is feasible or economical, this is what I'm talking about. Even if one wants to build massive solar AI compute farms it is almost certainly better to do it here on earth.

2026-01-20 17:50:50 UTC

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The letter at a time model is a little bit tedious for extended writing but adding a few word suggestions similar to phone keyboards would pretty much close the gap. I don't enjoy typing on touch screen tablets, graffiti evolved with word suggestions might end up being similarly fast and a lot more pleasant.

2026-01-20 17:46:51 UTC

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Graffiti is a gem of an engineering solution that recognizes some hard truths in HCI about predictability that to this day a lot of people fail to recognize (see also jamming modal and voice interfaces into every appliance).

2025-09-06 23:43:32 UTC

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I've only done OEM parts from regular suppliers the three (?) time I've replaced drain pumps. They seem to have a highly variable reliability, I heard that there was a period where many pumps were defective in a way that made them fail prematurely. The one failure I tore apart was similar to the picture you posted with fragmented magnet. No idea why.

2025-09-06 22:43:23 UTC

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It's kind of remarkable those drain pumps are at all reliable for what they cost. Moving seal etc.

2025-08-14 15:02:52 UTC

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The first one is the 1993 Grolier that @npub1xw4…apvw posted. It feels like in the following 30 years the scale and distribution of encyclopedia-like knowledge has advanced light years but the soul of the presentation... Just gone.

2025-08-14 14:39:30 UTC

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Hmm...
"This multimedia reference brings you all 21 volumes of the renowned Academic American Encyclopedia on a single CD-ROM. There are over 33,000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including science, world history, music art and much more. New feature included are multimedia maps, knowledge explorer audio-visual essays, movies, narrated animated sequences, timeline and a knowledge tree."
...
"Right now, the Simple English Wikipedia has 272,091 articles."

2025-05-01 23:56:27 UTC

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Those machines are so pretty. The one really unfortunate thing is they predate Haswell Xeons and never got updated.

2025-03-17 15:02:55 UTC

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Delightful. I hope where you are it's a chilly week, I imagine all that hardware is putting out a lot of heat.

2025-03-11 16:55:08 UTC

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Tear-off menus and palettes. Another UI approach some classic Mac apps used that could be of use.

2025-02-24 17:16:15 UTC

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also the UI for trace precedents / decendents

2025-02-24 17:09:54 UTC

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Oh you're in for a treat. Or nightmares. There are some other functions down that road you might find useful: if, index, array formulas in general...

2025-02-24 04:54:09 UTC

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Do you have a stack for passing multiple arguments? vlookup or similar is useful.

2024-08-31 20:09:10 UTC

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Cool idea. Opens an opportunity to put unit tests that run when they open the PR.

2024-08-18 15:22:23 UTC

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It might be the nostalgia but I enjoy this visual style a lot.

2024-08-08 00:25:00 UTC

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Ubiquitous smart phones, phone cameras that match a film point and shoot, video calling, global mobile messaging (WhatsApp mostly), full disk encryption, TLS deployment, all day battery in laptops, workable speech to text, the list goes on. We're in a way better place than 20 years ago.