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Comment Re:Just shows he does not really understand hardwa (Score 1) 82

From 2004 to 2007 I had a system with ECC memory (dual Opteron). I checked the MCE logs regularly and it seemed that every day or so there were errors that ECC RAM fixed. If it had been plain parity RAM the problem would likely have gone unnoticed that potentially propagated errors.

That made me realize that even with good components shit happens and a bug-free program can still crash due to memory errors.

Comment Re:Please do. Post-1982 pennies sound funny. (Score 1) 245

Sales tax has nothing to do with the cash payment. The sensible thing to do is to round towards nearest divisible-by-5-cent number. That's what other countries do.
So if you buy an apple and with sales tax it's $1.02 you pay $1.00 in cash. If it's $1.08 then you'll pay $1.10 in cash.
Or you can pay exact value with debit/credit card.

Comment Re:Developers Developers Developers (Score 2) 104

I do building automation stuff. A customer wanted an Echo in each room. I tried integrating it to our system using the home automation skill set. It worked 80% lights on, lights off, turn thermostat up: OK. Turn thermostat down: "I've added chopped potatoes to your shopping list". I also had trouble getting it to trigger on the word "alexa" (I don't have a strong accent). This was for a hotel with international customers. That made me realize that Alexa was not ready for use in hotel rooms.

YMMV

Comment Re:Can it be switched off? (Score 1) 50

The video titles are sometimes translated if the creator has dumped translated titles (and sometimes subtitles). And there is NO option to deselect that because Youtube knows best. The problem is that the translations are sometimes hilariously wrong or misleading.
For one Italian/Tuscan cooking channel I want the original audio and then whatever subtitles they have. If Youtube doesn't make the dubbing feature user-selectable I have no way to verify what is actually being said, and I'll end up with weird stuff such as adding a small goat (caprino) and a rocket (ruccula) to the plate,

Youtube creators cannot be trusted to provide translations or dubbing, because they trust auto-translation or too-cheap translations agencies.

Comment Re:Space for another? (Score 1) 24

We (Findx) didn't remove search terms. We did add synonyms and word variations (with lower score of course).

We shut down in 2018. I would say that our downfall was that the team was too small (there's a lot of work in making a search engine), and that we didn't have a large enough user base to use user clicks to rank results

Comment Re:Oh lawd, not the formal methods bullshit again (Score 1) 239

I took a course that involved formal proofs of correctness. I've never proved any of my programs correct, but the course changed the way I think about programs. For subroutines and leaf functions I keep in mind pre- and post conditions, loop invariants, object invariants, etc. Sometimes I even write the pre and post conditions as comments. That had reduced the number of bugs in those areas and helps focusing on the higher-level problems.

YMMV

Comment Re:I've always felt like languages... (Score 1) 35

My pet peeve with auto-translations is that they often misses the context, so homonyms get translated incorrectly. But something worse is what google-translate is obviously doing: when translating from language X to language Y and it doesn't have a direct translation for a word it goes via English hoping for the best. Where I encounter that most of the time is when youtube translates Italian cooking shows to English/Danish/German and the results can be hilarious. Eg:
  - Caprino, literally "small goat" but in this context it's a type of goat cheese. Translation "Now add goat to the pasta..:"
  - Or: "rucula" where it sometimes misses the context up and you end up with instructions to add a rocket to the dish. Nice try, Werhner von Braun.
And then there's when I suspect the language model google-translate uses simply removes stuff it doesn't understand / doesn't exist in English, eg. German modal particles. At least it should mark that in the output.

Comment Re:Questions (Score 1) 203

Yes, we have cold winters, but we also know how to make heat pumps work. Most of the installations have the heat source from the ground which has a relatively constant temperature of 7-9C independent of the air temperature. For those that use the outside air as a heat source the heat pumps are sized accordingly, and they work efficiently (COP>1) down to -20C.

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