“Maybe one of the smaller countries… like the Vatican! … Wait.”

Yeah… This maybe isn’t the nicest way to phrase it, but I’ve seen similar situations. Usually people are just kind of talking behind people’s backs, but sometimes it gets nasty :(. Frankly people kind of get bullied all the time everywhere. It’s maybe not as violent as playground bullying but people will be shitty to people at work, school, whatever. Do your best not to be a part of it, try to be self aware if you might hurt somebody else’s feelings, and try to stand up for people.

This article mentions that one of the factors is that late at night you have fewer hormones suppressing appetite so you would potentially eat more. That makes sense as a reason you would gain weight. It does say that you burn fewer calories at that time too (which might mean you convert more of it to fat at that time, and if you don’t burn those excess calories later you’re going to be stuck with it…)

But I don’t understand what you’re saying. It almost certainly takes more energy to convert calories to fat and then back to usable energy for your body to use… So what? If you eat 2000 calories, turn some of it into fat, and then burn 2000 additional calories later (in addition to the energy spent converting it to fat) you’re technically going to be burning more calories than you’re eating and you will lose weight.

I’m sure there is an effect of when you eat and how that makes you store fat and how that can unintentionally cause you to consume more calories than you think… but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense to me thermodynamically.

Why does that matter? If I burn 2000 calories a day, why does it matter if I burn them at a lower rate while asleep? I’m still going to burn more later, no?

Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.

The abysmal adoption of DNSSEC is just embarrassing, and I haven’t heard any good arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. There’s one blog post that gets passed around as justification for not adopting DNSSEC, but it doesn’t really go into any technical detail and is mostly just the author saying “I’m scared of governments and TLDs”… which is maybe fair, but you still have to trust them for regular CA certs and everything, so why not make thr base secure?

Honestly, I might care slightly more about DNSSEC than IPv6 adoption… IPv4 exhaustion and NATing everywhere sucks, but the fact that you can’t trust DNS is like… insane.

DNS setups can get fairly complicated with enterprise VPNs and stuff, but the main thing is probably just that DNS is built entirely around caching, so when something does go wrong or you’re trying to update something it’s easy for there to be a stale value somewhere. It’s also really fundamental, so when it breaks it can break anything.

Overall, though, DNS isn’t terribly complex. It’s mostly just a key-value store with some caching. Running your own nameservers is pretty cool and will give you a much better understanding of how it all fits together and scales.

This is sort of how everything works, unfortunately! Guaranteeing 0% of something is really hard. Your flour probably has a small percentage of bugs in it, for instance. Urea is a relatively small molecule that I imagine you can find tiny amounts of pretty much anywhere. I would be unsurprised if there was at least one molecule of urea in literally anything you eat!

That said, dear god I hope I’ve never been in a pool that’s 10% urine :(. Those kiddie pools at the water park are probably like 90% urine, though. Sometimes I wonder if by volume adults pee in the pool more than kids, though. I have a suspicion a good chunk of adults think it’s fine or will do it secretly anyway.

That’s very different than every grocery store, though. Might also be different in Canada.

I’ve got bad news for you…

Sometimes your place of work might have electronics recycling bins or something, but for the most part you’re expected to go to a special eco centre to recycle large electronics and batteries and stuff like this. Often you even have to pay a fee for them to take these items, which seems incredibly stupid to me because it just encourages everybody to throw them out with the normal trash.

You may find some stores in some places that will take this stuff, but as far as I know this is not commonplace in much of North America. There are also some services where you can pay a fee for somebody to collect an item. We did that for a swollen lithium cell recently.

Hey, you appreciate your monkey’s paw wish and enjoy your android.

Of course, but it’s somewhat nasty when all of a sudden is_even doesn’t do what you expect :).

You know, I was going to let this slide under the notion that we’re just ignoring the limited precision of floating point numbers… But then I thought about it and it’s probably not right even if you were computing with real numbers! The decimal representation of real numbers isn’t unique, so this could tell me that “2 = 1.9999…” is odd. Maybe your string coercion is guaranteed to return the finite decimal representation, but I think that would be undecidable.

This is such a weird take to be honest… it’s weird to want CS lecturers to work in their free time, it’s weird to expect their applications to be better, and it’s weird because this is something that many lecturers and programmers already do… so I don’t get it, and it feels disrespectful to all of the volunteer foss maintainers?

I feel dumb saying that books aren’t ergonomic… But they aren’t! I hate holding them open so much. This should be a minor complaint, but it’s a huge benefit of ereaders to me.

A lot of open source projects do have windows versions, and the big projects that come to mind like blender or Firefox definitely do… but there’s a a lot of little pieces of software that don’t. One example that comes to mind for me is the Dino XMPP client… Linux only for now, unfortunately!

There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.

I think this comic might have been from the era when you did have to pay for new versions of OS X… they stopped doing that around Lion I think in 2011 or so.

AM transmitters / receivers are far easier to construct than FM ones, though. If I was in an emergency situation where I couldn’t communicate with anybody I think I might be able to at least make an AM receiver, even if there aren’t very many components around… But I would need a reference to have any clue how to approach an FM one, and you’d definitely need more components available. Frequency modulation is quite a bit more complicated. If you want to transmit, CW is probably your best hope?

Realistically, though, almost anybody in an emergency situation is doomed if the only thing that would save them is building any kind of radio. It’s not a skill set that most people have… Which I guess is why you might advocate for everybody’s phones to be able to act as FM receivers in case that’s the best way to get an emergency broadcast, because then they would have a device that’s capable of it on hand. You’re probably better off if you have a dedicated emergency radio, especially if you might lose power for an extended period of time, though.

It’s not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won’t be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.