monotremata @ monotremata @kbin.social

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142

Joined

2 yr. ago

putting the "ad" in "advent calendar"

Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis, but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.

On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language--it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.

Oh, I literally misread it as OpenSCAD. Laughing at my stupid brain right now.

I'd say it's more like Premiere vs ffmpeg.

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

I still use reddit for some of the niche community-based subs that haven't been replicated here, like What's That Book?, a place where a while bunch of readers and librarians try to help people find books they remember a bit about, but not the title or author. That one is a lot of fun because people are so excited when they get an answer, and because the community is strong enough that most people do get answers. It seems like it would be hard to recreate that experience here. Similar is the Learn Math subreddit, where people ask about things they aren't understanding or can't figure out in their math studies, at pretty much any level, and the community comes up with multiple explanations and thoughts. The variety of questions and the in-depth answers are remarkable.

Generally it just feels a lot smaller and a fair bit more homogenous here. I like this site too, but it kinda feels like what reddit used to be is just gone now.

The only real objection I have to this as a term is that it's too easy to confuse with "rubber ducking": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberduckdebugging

https://youtu.be/ReruwpFs3Y?si=YM9HhBiwGh3G2zFT

I wouldn't really call it a favorite, but I definitely ended up liking Nier: Automata pretty well after bouncing off it really hard when trying it at a friend's house. That's because we were trying from the start, and it starts with a section that's about half an hour long, with only two checkpoints, vastly harder than anything else in the game, and in which the first half isn't even the same genre as the rest of the game. It's seriously one of the worst intros I can think of in a video game. The rest of the game is, y'know, a pretty good third-person action RPG.

Was it possible that she meant that regular drug testing with Vyvanse is a standard for her hospital/clinic/whatever? There doesn't seem to be any national standard for this, but googling brings up a bunch of other folks who have been required to have regular drug testing with this prescription at the VA specifically. So she might have been telling you the truth that she's expected to require this. It might also mean that your next doc would make the same demand.

That doesn't make it any less invasive, obviously, and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with your reaction to the demand. But it might be worth talking with the doctor about your reaction to this situation before you decide to entirely cut off communications with them (whether that's with this doctor or the next--it seems like this may not have been the first straw with this particular doc), because it's possible that neither of you has much alternative, and if the doctor is sympathetic there may be ways they can make the imposition less onerous.

It all kinda sucks, but, y'know, that's true of most US healthcare and often particularly for the VA.

Yeah, you're right. This is something I was taught at one point, and I guess I never questioned it because it sounded plausible. Sorry! I have updated my comment to reflect this.

It's also because the bacterium in question is anaerobic, so it dies in an oxygen environment; rusting consumes oxygen, so it helps preserve the bacterium longer out of soil.

Edit: I had always been told this, but evidently it isn't true. The rust does not seem to have any effect on the bacterium that causes tetanus. Apologies for spreading misinformation.

I do a lot of this stuff with the HP48 Units menu (albeit at this point via an emulator on my phone).

Shaders are terrific fun. I highly recommend ShaderToy if you want to experiment with them; it makes the loop between changing the code and seeing the effect very tight. I also recommend the YouTube channel "Art of Code" for good examples, well-explained.

I dunno, I prefer swipe typing and this doesn't seem like it would work with that.

To me the biggest barriers to long-form typing on the phone are that so many websites screw up form handling for long-form content, and that the cursor maneuvering is still pretty broken.

Websites do weird things when you're typing. Sometimes the input field won't scroll, so you can't see what you're typing. Other times it'll force-scroll to put the current line you're working on at the very top of the screen, so you can't see anything you wrote previously. At least they finally fixed the weird behavior where if you deleted more than a few characters it would start jumping around in the text and duplicating huge sections of it--I think it was around Android 9 that they finally fixed that.

As for moving the cursor, the "swipe on the space bar to move the cursor left and right" works, but trying to go back further, like going up a few lines, is very, very difficult. The cursor will scroll the text box if you move to the edge, but there's no delay in the scrolling, so instead of scrolling a couple of lines and then pausing briefly to give you a chance to stop there, it just immediately scrolls again on the next frame of rendering, so effectively your choices are "scroll within the few lines of text still visible" or "jump all the way to the beginning of your text." Anything else you need to scrub through character by character using the space bar control, which is very slow.

Basically, I don't think the issue is the keyboard itself. I think the issue is that Android has never prioritized long-form text entry, and so it's just very buggy.

Is it just me or is this article only three sentences long?

It is, at least in part. This story cites a Washington Post article, which in turn brings up Project 2025.

An excerpt:

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

They explain earlier in the article that the use of the Insurrection Act would be in order to deploy the military to put down civilian inauguration day protests. It's a little oddly written, in that it makes it sound like this is the main thrust of Project 2025, though they do eventually mention:

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.

In any case, yeah, they're not bothering to hide any of this. They know they control the media that their side hears.

Source article (as linked at the start of OP's article): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/

3blue1brown is a great call.

I would add Applied Science and NileRed (who does chemistry experiments) as possibilities if OP likes their voices. Their content is very methodical and uniform. My cat likes their videos, which seems like a pretty good metric for this use case.

I also love vihart, who does math videos, but her stuff is a little more varied, including some music, so OP might want to evaluate her during the day before trusting her channel for sleep.

Jeremy Fielding has a great voice if you want videos about engineering and how to salvage motors out of washing machines and treadmills.

I'll consult my subscription list and add more if I find any.

Edited to add:
Carl Bugeja (electronics)
CGP Grey (mostly history)
DIY Perks (various projects)
Henry Segerman (math art)
OskarPuzzle (designs for 3d printed puzzles)
Razbuten (video games)
Sabine Hossenfelder (physics)
Stand-up Maths (math)
Steve Mould (explanations of unusual everyday things, I guess? kinda hard to summarize)
Technology Connections (as others have mentioned)
Tim Hunkin (makes weird mechanical art and explains machines)
Tom Scott (videos about unusual places and bits of history)
Two Minute Papers (advances in AI and computer graphics)

Edited again to add: Breaking Taps. This one is mostly microscopic fabrication stuff, so, various kinds of microscopes, vapor deposition, etching, etc.

The timeline should be at the bottom of the editor window, if you're in the default design workspace. If you started in the mesh editor workspace then "design history" might be turned off, in which case you wouldn't have a timeline. It looks like this:

https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/ENU/Fusion-Assemble/images/animation/timeline-groups.gif

If some of the icons are highlighted in yellow, those have errors, so, things like broken projection links, or missing objects for some operations. You can usually fix those and patch things up.

Edit: oh, sorry, just realized you were working from someone else's file. That might not have design history turned on. The person who told you how to edit the extrusion operation has the right idea.

Did you get any warnings or errors when you changed the parameters? Are any of the elements in your timeline highlighted in yellow?