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mostly_harmless
Joined 262 karma
Computer Engineering graduate from the University of Ottawa.

Creator of the OWL programming language (WIP) https://github.com/bsurmanski/wlc

Projects hosted at: https://github.com/bsurmanski

twitter: bsurmanski

Enthusiast of system level programming in C and graphic in OpenGL.

User of Arch Linux with Awesome-WM. Advocate of Vim and Zenburn.


  1. I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
  2. > you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter].

    This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.

  3. I don't hate Dyson because it's trendy, I hate Dyson because my $700 vacuum wont pick up cheerios; a common spill with toddlers.
  4. Somewhat related: I wanted to track watch time, and perhaps set a time limit with Plex and HomeAssistant. Has anyone come up with a solution I can cheat off of?
  5. It also ignores that they often own the suppliers. "Woops, our supplies raised the price, so we need to too."
  6. Maybe a dumb question, but why? I don't like that it exists, but isn't it self-contained? The main reason for cleaning it up seems to be quoted as [1], which oversimplfies to 'animals might eat plastic, and it affects them', and it will make microplastics. But these problems seem to be localized to the garbage patch. I could see it as a asbestos situation where its only problematic if you disturb it. Ongoing dumping seems to be a bigger problem as it's not localized.

    [1] - https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s435...

  7. I feel this way for photography, about filtering. If you take 1000 photos, only show people your 20-50 best. Now you are a good photographer.
  8. The most important part is this article is that this is the mean.

    The median net worth is $192,900 (as per the article).

    This just shows there is an extreme wealth disparity.

  9. Yes, but not directly. If you listen to the last FOMC meeting, Powell mentions there will likely be significant weakening of the labor market and a rise of unemployment. As well as his famous "there will be pain" remarks.

    I don't think he directly said "he won't stop until" though.

  10. If you look on their website (https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/) you can see there is a downward facing turbine hidden underneath
  11. supposedly about a 1/3 of mortgages are variable in Canada. But more importantly, fixed mortgages are almost all 5 year terms (or less). That is, every 5 years you have to renew your rate (even though the mortgage amount is for 25 years). That means every year, about 20% of homeowners are updating to the current fixed rate (assuming an random distribution of purchase date). Perhaps a big chunk renewed early in 2020, but by 2025/2026 all mortgaged homeowners will have a new higher rate.
  12. I don't know if it's moores law. except for servers, CPUs are mostly running near idle.

    My intuition would say tech saturation would make more of a difference. That is, worldwide pretty much everyone have now has adopted a computer and all businesses have automated the low hanging fruit.

  13. My theory behind this is there are many BTC holders with cap gains (or assets acquired through illegal methods) that can't easily cash out, and El Salvador's BTC support was a grab at capturing tourist revenue through state sponsored money laundering.

    Through that lens, it would be interesting to see if there was any anomaly in GDP, luxury goods sold, real estate sales, or tourism in the country.

  14. I think what's missing here is in case 1, it's not just the amount of money, but how much money is chasing each available good. You can imagine if the money supply doubles, a loaf of bread can be the same price as before if there are twice as many people demanding the same portion of bread (for a very crude approximation)

    Or to put it another way, maybe case 1 is demand-side inflation, and case 2 is supply-side inflation.

  15. and a commercial real estate crash would be bad for the company's bottom line
  16. For those questioning the feasibility, 100% electric school buses are already on the road in Montreal. I see them frequently, and they seem to handle our crappy roads and winters fine.
  17. I think with everything that is going on, everyone should be aware of the Russian book "Foundations of Geopolitics"[0]. It is a textbook that basically gives a blueprint on how they should take over the world. On how to deal with the USA:

    * Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics"

    [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

  18. One thing I haven't seen mention much is real estate. The "back-to-office" militants are usually corporate, and there's a lot of corporate money tried up with office real estate that would lose a lot of value if everything shifted to WFH forever
  19. This only makes sense if you have positive-risk-adjusted-return investments you've been waiting to make. If you already have too much cash with no where to put it, borrowing more cash makes no sense.
  20. "all that kenetic energy released when jumping off a building was formerly potential energy stored when walking up the stairs. How can that lead to life destroying conditions when life previously held that energy?"

    The rapid change in environments can make many species no longer suitable for their environment leading to extinction. Sometimes they can transfer to a new environment, or sustain at a degraded efficiency, but often they cannot if the environment change is drastic enough. This is happening everywhere all at once.

  21. There's a huge difference between warming over a couple tens of thousands of years (natural rate), and warming over a couple of decades (our current trajectory).

    That difference is the eradication of much of life on earth that is unable to evolve to a new environment. For example, insect numbers worldwide are drastically lower than decades ago, and insects are required for almost all pollination of plants and a key source of food for small animals. The "food chain" collapses if there is no first chain.

    Even a partial loss of ecodiversity can lead to further problems later.

    Our efforts are certainly not in vain.

  22. It looks like this is focused on primarily on executables, but there is a mention of libraries.

    I was looking into WASM libraries recently, specifically WebAssembly Interface Types (WIT), and my conclusion is that WASM libraries are experimental and poorly supported right now (unless you only have i32/i64/f32/f64 as parameters and returns).

    I couldn't find any elaboration in the documentation on libraries, what level of supported does this have? Is interface type implemented?

  23. > "We don't sell your data and never will."

    Because your data is now freely available on the blockchain, forever.

  24. I, and everyone else, has to pay taxes in USD. That will never replaced.
  25. Isn't that sort of the point of raising interest rates? Makes debt more pressing to slow down money velocity and loan creation? (Thus curbing inflation).

    Sure, if you push the rates too high, you'll hit deflation, but the point would be to strike the balance before that happens.

  26. > imagine if you could pay 10 cents to read an article or tip a web site.

    This doesn't need crypto. This can be done with something like Paypal.

    > How badly does this torpedo googles ad biz?

    A solution based on spite is a bad solution.

  27. This is a dumb comparison. An ounce as a unit is arbitrary. A Bitcoin as a unit is arbitrary (but arguably less so). I'm in a metric country so lets use that.

    1 kg of Rhodium is trading around $493,189 vs $66,787 per Bitcoin. Rhodium is 738% better if you equate 1 kg to 1 bitcoin! Wow, put all your money into precious metals!

  28. There is no 'true' value of anything. The entire fundamentals of trade depend on the fact that everyone values things differently.

    If I'm a rice farmer, maybe I want fish more because I have none, and likewise the fisher would want rice.

    In this case, my 'data' has absolutely zero value to me. What am I going to do with it? It's anonymised, so it's not really a security concern. And for the most part it's innocuous stuff like "I like video games". But maybe Google can use it to tweak for better ads, so they see value in it.

    On the otherhand, having a robust, availible, free magic box that answers any question I can possibly have (Google Search) has so much value to me.

    If you don't agree with the exchange, for the most part there are alternatives like duckduckgo (search) with the trade off of slightly worse results (arguably), or ProtonMail (email) where it will cost $12 per month.

    But for me, I consider it a fair trade.

  29. This is incorrect, that's not the reason they are linked. It is using the category box at the bottom of the page, and both Hitler and Gates were voted 'Times Person of the Year' at some point.
  30. It looks like it uses links in the 'category' box at the bottom of the page. Both MLK and Zuckerberg appear in the 'Times Person of the Year' category.

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