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Comment the power! (Score 4, Interesting) 95

I am one of those users hated by all sides of the editor war, because I prefer emacs but use it almost exclusively as a plain text editor, like using a nuclear plant to charge my phone. Because I have never found another editor that does automatic C++ indentation anywhere close to as intelligently. Press tab, and it inserts the correct number of *spaces*, the end. If the indentation isn't what you expected, 99% of the time it's a missing parenthesis or bracket. There are plenty of linting tools out there to auto-indent a file, but none that will do it as you type so far as I have ever found.

Comment Re:Anything you can do Argon do better (Score 1) 114

The problem with using them for cooling is the freezing points: 62K for nitrogen and 85K for argon. (Annoyingly, that means you can't even use LN2 to cool LAr, because the argon freezes at the LN2 boiling temperature!) Among other things, that eliminates the vast majority of superconductors, which are the whole reason MRI machines need to be cooled.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 150

Here's the thing, though. Take two students, Alice, who has already mastered the course content, and Bob, who has mastered the prerequisites but know nothing about the class. Each does all of the homework. Alice gets perfect scores on every lesson, while Bob makes several mistakes, and uses the feedback from those mistakes to learn the course material. At the end of the course, both Alice and Bob ace the final exam, and both leave with an equal mastery of the material.

That's why grading homework has always been stupid, because it punishes students for not knowing the course material before taking the course! Shouldn't two students demonstrating equal mastery of course material after at the end of the course receive the same grade? (I know exams are not a good way to demonstrate mastery, but that's beside the point here.) In fact, if I knew nothing else about them other than their performance in this class, I would hire Bob, for demonstrating an ability to learn.

Comment "intended for AI" (Score 1) 146

I can see arguments on both sides of the overall ruling, but I'm really scratching my head on including projects "intended for AI" in the ban. There's tons of AI-oriented projects that could benefit from the open source community: harnesses, sandboxing tools, MCP servers, skills, etc. Hell, any and all tools that facilitate running open weight models on your own silicon should be a priority for the OS community, before even more of the world is gobbled up by OpenAI and Anthropic. Yes, I know "open-weight" models don't mean anything resembling "open source". But a true open source ecosystem for everything-but-the-model? Yes, please, and yesterday.

Comment Re:Phishing Tests (Score 2) 84

Except the bad grammar, obvious "Nigerian prince" story, etc. have always been deliberate. It's a low-pass filter for intelligence. They don't want to waste time on someone who falls into the first layer of their scheme but then quickly realizes the mistake. They want the elderly and the stupid, to maximize the number of compromised accounts per time invested in the con.

Comment Re:States (Score 3, Informative) 48

Yes, and those orbitals are defined by the electrostatic potential energy of the nucleus. And they're not really orbitals, they are complex wavefunctions. In a magnetic bottle, the potential is defined by the shape of the electric and magnetic fields. In 1D, a bit like a guitar string, where the wavefunction must go to zero at the trap's boundaries, but the string can vibrate in harmonics of the fundamental frequency and still satisfy the boundary conditions.

Comment Re:Fascinating!!! (Score 1) 132

I don't know about the others, but Uber and Lyft are an absolute win for travelers due to universality. Before them, if you're in a foreign city and need to schedule a taxi, hopefully you're in a nice enough hotel that the receptionist will do it for you. Otherwise you could google around, find some listings with little more than a phone number, find that half of them don't actually serve your area (assuming you even know what neighborhood you're in), have no idea if they'll actually stick to the reservation and frequently won't have anyone manning the phone at 3 AM, and on and on. Sure there were plenty of perfectly decent taxi companies, but discoverability if you aren't a local was impossible. It's probably one of the few cases where a printed yellow pages actually worked better than the internet.

Now? Any city in the US and most of the world, one app is all you need. Any price difference is almost immaterial to that convenience. AirBNB doesn't have that, because there are dozens of hotel listing aggregators. They have to compete on either price, which they can't do, or providing some service or experience that hotels don't.

Comment Re:AirBNB decides to commit retnal market suicide (Score 1) 132

It's not about cleaning before another guest shows up, it's to prevent dirty dishes sitting in the sink growing mold for a few days before they can get cleaned. And most places I've stayed want you to strip the beds you've used mostly as a way to indicate which bedding needs cleaning.

Comment Re:VRBO (Score 2) 132

Sure, you're supposed to be renting a private home, just like Uber was supposed to be ridesharing with someone who was already going that way anyway. In reality Uber is a taxi company, and the vast majority of airbnbs are dedicated rental properties, most handled by a company that does rental management and not the owner.

Comment it cuts both ways (Score 1) 152

If you buy a movie or (old) game on physical media, you only "own" it as long as that media lasts. So what about downloads? When I buy a game on steam or PSN, I can re-download it as many times as I want. That's one of the benefits I get in exchange for sacrificing my right to resell. There's no way they can make a law that would compel digital storefronts to keep downloads available indefinitely, that has a real cost. But with current storage costs, it would cost me about 5X as much as my gaming rig to keep a copy of every game I "own" on-hand, and I'm not an edge case.

Comment Re:And this, kids... (Score 1) 58

For those that don't want the hassle of a pi-hole plus maintain blocking when you're not on your home network, nextdns is fantastic. I ran a pihole for years, on an actual raspberry pi model B no less, but now I'd rather pay a few bucks a month to let someone else deal with it so I can waste my time tinkering on something new.

Comment Casual gamers? (Score 1) 53

What "casual" gamer has a PC capable of running GTA 6? Even before the AI hardware apocalypse, a PC with specs comparable to a PS5 cost at least 50% more than a PS5 did, and you have to deal with way more driver/config issues. Casual gamers play on consoles, or play Candy Crush on their phones.

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