• 20 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • Maybe a little, and I personally try to reserve it for times when it means damaged to a significant degree but well under 50%, but then I also try to remember that language changes, English moreso than most, and I probably use a hundred different terms in ways that are inconsistent with past usage.

    That said, I get a stronger sensation of that when people overlook the awfulness that should be inherent in the word “enormity.” 😂




  • I’ll borrow this from my contribution to a discussion yesterday, but Shakespeare coined fewer phrases than you’d think, and probably not very many words at all (though certainly more than the average schlub):

    Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.

    He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.

    As a further aside, he’s one of the best-researched non-noble lives of his era, and the “Authorship question” is the equivalent of History Channel Ancient Aliens “documentaries.” It’s titillating nonsense put out by snobs who can’t fathom that their literary idol was not an elite (while still definitely privileged compared to the truly common person).





  • Part of the problem is that we are on US Constitution 2.27 (version 1 was a buggy mess and quickly re-written). Unfortunately, the v2 underlying engine was only built to be compliant with the “Democratic Republic 1787” set of standards. It was almost immediately patched in the 2.10 release to be compliant with the DR1789 revision, but required a major rework to be compliant with DR1865 and another for DR1920. subsequent point releases have generally been performance tweaks and bugfixes.

    However, now it turns out that bad actors have exploited unpublished vulnerabilities that were open secrets within the dev community, and those bad actors are now largely in control of the production instance. The Steering Committee is supposed to bring on new members in 7 quarters, but it remains to be seen if the userbase will care enough make the right recommendations.


  • The whole issue here is that the American constitution is high level framework written in the legal jargon of three different centuries. It’s only viable if either (1) no one really cares about how the Federal government handles itself (1789-ca1850ish), or (2) there is a a tacit agreement that legal precedent and custom are actually important to get on with the business of governing (1865-2025).

    The 14th amendment is extremely clear, with the sole exception of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Unfortunately, that one’s only “very” clear, and requires some very basic understanding of the legislative history and customary usage in a legal context. It basically means literally everyone present in the country with the exception of those with diplomatic immunity, invading armies, and (at that time) members of Native American tribes. There was no real regulation of in-migration when it was signed, but the debates were very clear that even “undesireable” people who could not be trusted to assimilate would be citizens merely by being born here, and no one challenged the point.

    If you don’t understand anything about the history, though, or if you want to willfully ignore it because you have an idiotic textualism approach that would make Antonin Scalia cringe, then you open that back up for litigation. Then there’s the issue of Trump declaring everything an emergency and pretending that some dudes who want to cook some french fries or a single mom hoping her kids won’t get shot by a cartel are somehow equivalent to an invading army. It’s facially absurd, but the constitution being what it is, if they challenge it, then the courts have to at least consider it.

    With the ascendancy of originalism at the Supreme Court, and with the right wing deciding to push a “unitary executive” theory to its ad-absurdum conclusion, they might get what they want and largely dismantle the checks and balances in the system without an official “coup” at all. This would remove the predictability that allows a system to chug along and slowly but inexorably change with the times (hardly good enough for true justice, but it at least sets some sort of floor for awfulness), and it would also seriously weaken the guardrails to having free and fair elections at all.





  • That is nice. White Alps are good switches. I have a Focus FK-5001 with them that I think I’m about to completely hand wire to both convert to USB and to make all the extra keys fully programmable. It’ll mean giving up the built-in calculator though. The other option is to hope that re-insulating all the jumpers will keep it from shorting on the steel plate, then re-installing the PCB.

    In the same auction I got a FK-7000P with a trackball where the arrows would go, but that means the arrows are on these awful little flaps with mouse microswitches. It also needed a complete re-cap, so I just harvested the switches for a DIY build sometime down the line.


  • I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

    It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.





  • I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.


  • PDM is the current buzzword for lower-end CAD. Alibre just added it. OnShape tries to embody it. Solidworks hobbyist options only continue to exist in order to market it. Even the Ondsel startup that hired some FreeCAD devs built their (failed) business model around bolting PDM on.

    This looks like it’s taking a more traditional “cloud storage” model and replacing it with something more PDM-like so they can sell to low-end corporate users, and the hobbyists just get rolled in because ain’t nobody maintaining something just for the freeloaders, who can be forced to get used to it anyway and might push for it if they ever get work in the field, simply because they know it.

    My guess is it’s not inherently worse than what it’s replacing, but it’s likely complicated and kinda clunky for a random person designing gears and project enclosures.