𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
  • 7 Posts
  • 721 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • I agree with you, but kinda don’t?

    The important thing is to engender a culture of engagement, and a big factor of that is getting people to the polls. Yes, I think voting for Trump is a vote to end Democracy in the US, but I think we should separate the messages. There are two distinct ones:

    1. It is important that you vote.
    2. It is important that you vote for Kamala.

    Point 1 is the more enduring one; point 2, this election, ensures we continue to have point 1. But I don’t believe we need to stop reinforcing the first point, especially because if 100% of the US voted, Kamala would win handily. That’s why Republicans are so keen on voter suppression. People, in general, will be more receptive to message 1.


  • Your use case is obviously different, but I’ve gone years between system upgrades. I mostly do OSS coding, or work stuff; not gaming. The only case I can imagine needing to upgrade my little Ryzen with 16 cores - a laptop CPU - is if it becomes absolutely imperative that I run AI models on my desktop. Or if Rust really does become pervasive; compiling Rust programs is almost as bad as compiling Haskell, and will take over my computer for minutes at a time.

    When I got this little micro, the first thing I did was upgrade it to 64GB of RAM, because that’s the one thing I think you can never have too much of; especially with the modern web and all the shit that brings with it; Electron apps, and so on, absolutely chew up memory. The one good thing about the Rust trend is better memory use, so the crappy compile times are somewhat forgiveable.


  • I do however have to think of my wife who loves the oracle because it is zero hassle for her.

    Oh, yeah. The a Leva of not a good option. It’s not quite as manual as pulling shots fully manually - the lever has a big spring that controls the actual pressure, but you have to charge the lever, and the common complaint in reviews on RoastMaster (back in the day) was that it requires upper body strength, and many women found it hard to work.

    There’s nothing automatic about it.

    I also thought about just getting the grinder first as then if she feels confident to do her grind and tamp herself it’s fine but if not she can continue to use the standard grinder.

    Have you considered the DF54? It’s getting quite good reviews, and the price is reasonable.


  • For a slightly more manual espresso maker, I’ve had my Elektra Micro Casa a Leva for nearly 20 years now, and will probably never replace it. It’s simple enough that, of anything goes wrong, you can fix it yourself. It’s a beautiful machine, and the steamer is peerless. The boiler is capable of continuous operation of pulling shots and steaming, limited only by the amount of water in the boiler, which is fairly large. It heats in a few (5?) minutes.

    It’s solidly made. The entire machine is brass and steel, with only the gaskets and the drip tray being non-metal. Oh, the lever handle grip is plastic(?), as is the grip of the portafilter it comes with; but the first thing I did was replace the portafilter with a naked portafilter with a wood handle, and I’ll eventually replace the lever handle with wood - it just screws off. It will certainly outlive me. My niece has her eye on it, when I die, and I don’t doubt it’ll last for her as well. I’ve replaced the heating element once, at its 20th anniversary, and the gaskets every year or two. There’s really nothing else to wear out.

    Looks like they’re running a bit more expensive now; I paid closer to $1000 new when I got mine. The current price is a bit shocking; maybe they’re less in Europe, since they are made in Italy.

    The downsides to the machine are first that the portafilter is smaller (49mm), while the standard in the US is 52(?); it makes for fewer accessory options. Second, if you do run low on water, you have to completely depressurize the boiler to add more water. There’s no reservoir. It’s literally a tank with a heating element that you fill and seal, and then pull either hot water or steam out of. So if you need to fill it, you turn it off, open the steamer, and wait until the pressure drops. It’s an inconvenience I only ever encountered when we have a house full of guests, but it is then an inconvenience.

    So, aside from the eye-watering current price, it’s a fantastic machine.









  • I just might. But this isn’t something I’d want to do myself if someone else has already done it. Sometimes writing a bit of software is its own reward, and sometimes you find out too late that someone else has already done it, better, and you could have spent your time on another project.

    Memory Alpha isn’t complete on this topic, BTW. There are some species which, probably by virtue of being unnamed in the series(es) are not listed. There are several neuro-parasites which are arguably intelligent that show up only on the neuro-parasite page which go unlisted on the list-of-species page (the flying pancake parasite from TOS being a memorable one). But not all neuro-parasites are left off (Trill Symbiotes have a more palatable name, but they’re basically voluntarily adopted neuro-parasites).

    I think the progenitor line was a sort of ret-con to explain something about the series that people had been wondering about, not something about the universe Roddenberry had imagined. Sort of like the rather weak (but still funny) answer Worf gives about smooth-forehead Klingons. There were plenty of prosthetic-forehead aliens in TOS, and several that were even less differentiated: Romulan, Klingons, and Vulcans could all - and sometimes did - easily pass for humans with no more than a hat.

    In any case, my question wasn’t about in-universe theory; I’m more curious about whether my perception of TOS being more alien-diverse is accurate.




  • Opening an office is a completely different thing; there is an enormous difference between offshore contractors and offshore employees. That much, I’ll agree with.

    In the US, though, it’s usually cost-driven. When offshore mandates come down, it’s always in terms of getting more people for less cost. However, in most cases, you don’t get more quality code faster by throwing more people at it. It’s very much a case of “9 women making a baby in one month.” Rarely are software problems solved with larger teams; usually, a single, highly skilled programmer will do more for a software project than 5 junior developers.

    Not an projects are the same. Sometimes what you do need is a bunch of people. But it’s by far more the exception than the rule, and yet Management (especially in companies where software isn’t the core competency) almost always assumes the opposite.

    If you performed a survey in the US, I would bet good money that in the majority of cases the decision to offshore was not made by line managers, but by someone higher in the chain who did not have a software engineering degree.


  • Thing is, outsourcing never stopped. It’s still going strong, sending jobs to whichever country is cheapest.

    India is losing out to Indonesia, to Mexico, and to S American countries.

    It’s a really stupid drive to the bottom, and you always get what you pay for. Want a good development team in Bengaluru? It might be cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Want good developers in Mexico? You can get them, but they’re not the cheapest. And when a company outsources like this, they’ve already admitted they’re willing to sacrifice quality for cost savings, and you - as a manager - won’t be getting those good, more expensive developers. You’ll be getting whoever is cheapest.

    It is among the most stupid business practices I’ve had to fight with in my long career, and one of the things I hate the most.

    Developers are not cogs. You can’t swap them out like such, and any executive who thinks you can is a fool and an incompetent idiot.




  • I’m 100% with you. I want a Light Phone with a changeable battery and the ability to run 4 non-standard phone apps that I need to have mobile: OSMAnd, Home Assistant, Gadget Bridge, and Jami. Assuming it has a phone, calculator, calendar, notes, and address book - the bare-bones phone functions - everything else I use on my phone is literally something I can do probably more easily on my laptop, and is nothing I need to be able to do while out and about. If it did that, I would probably never upgrade; my upgrade cycle is on the order of every 4 years or so as is, but if you took off all of the other crap, I’d use my phone less and upgrade less often.

    The main issue with phones like the Light Phone is that there are those apps that need to be mobile, and they often aren’t available there.