ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
Now and then I need to print sensitive documents like account recovery codes, and I don't trust internet-connected devices like basically all modern printers. I decided to see what kind of printers were out there that didn't need internet connectivity. There are a few that one can supposedly use over USB, but the printer I settled on was actually a USB receipt printer intended for point-of-sale use. The output is plenty big enough for notes, shopping lists, and recovery codes, and it's easy to operate, so I bought one.
It's been a lot of fun playing with this printer. It's really fast, and there's no ink to deal with. The best part is the document length is unlimited; it's just continuous paper on a roll with no page breaks. So longer-form documents come out as a looooong narrow page.
What has been interesting has been seeing the software bugs this exposes in common software. One would think that page size is completely arbitrary and it should be possible to print in any dimensions, but no.
- Chromium can't print pages longer than about a meter. It also (unrelated to the printer; I just discovered this during this exploration since I don't ever use Chromium at home) cannot print from reader mode.
- Firefox tries to be extremely clever in how it parses the paper size, and ends up barfing when it encounters the description of the receipt paper size. It falls back to treating the document size as A4 with the narrow column of text centered, which means the only visible portion of the document when printed is the blank left side of the A4 page.
- Many programs (Obsidian looking at you) can't print natively, falling back to a PDF renderer from which one is supposed to print. The trouble is that Obsidian's PDF renderer only allows common paper sizes like US Letter and A4. There's a community plugin for printing, but with this printer it only succeeds on every other attempt.
- Many websites can't render properly in a narrow window or document. Combined with Chromium not printing from reader mode and Firefox failing completely, I haven't figured out how to print blog posts and essays formatted nicely.
I'm not sure what I expected given that I was doing something unusual, but I also expect software to be getting better over time so I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Still, it works for what I really need it for, and maybe I can figure out how to work around these bugs.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any children's media from 20+ years ago where the main character really loses something at the end. There are a lot of stories with a loss at the beginning (Batman, The Land Before Time, The Lion King, for example). Let me do an informal survey:
G:
- Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971): happy ending
- Robin Hood (Disney, 1973): happy ending
- The Fox and the Hound (1981): loss
- An American Tail (1986): happy ending
- The Land Before Time (1988): happy ending
- The Little Mermaid (1989): happy ending
- Aladdin (1992): happy ending
- The Lion King (1994): happy ending
- Toy Story (1995): happy ending
- Babe (1995): happy ending
- Mulan (1998): happy ending
PG:
- Jaws (1975): loss
- Star Wars (1977): loss
- The Empire Strikes Back (1980): loss
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): happy ending
- The Return of the Jedi (1983): loss
- Ghostbusters (1984): happy ending
- The NeverEnding Story (1984): happy ending
- The Karate Kid (1984): happy ending
- Back to the Future (1985): happy ending
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1986): happy ending
- The Goonies (1985): happy ending
- Stand by Me (1986): loss (I think)
- The Princess Bride (1987): happy ending
- Willow (1988): happy ending
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989): happy ending
- Home Alone (1990): happy ending
- My Girl (1991): loss
- The Iron Giant (1999): loss
- Spirited Away (2001): loss
I'd do a more thorough survey but I'm tired. The basic story, though, is that G-rated movies have always had happy endings without much real emotional impact (The Fox and the Hound being a notable exception).
If you're looking for kids' movies with depth, I'd recommend Studio Ghibli. There's not a lot you can do about your kids' peers liking saccharine trivialities but it doesn't hurt to try introducing something more interesting.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2mo ago
I just would have zero care that someone told me they thought about and planned to do a school shooting but didn’t. It’s not like they were stopped - they just didn’t do it.
I had the same reaction - who cares? This might really be a class thing. I think it's more about thinking of a gun as a legitimate tool than it is about how she planned to use it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
This study has quite different distributions from the one atelier posted above, and yields about a 1.2% chance with a randomly sampled pair that the woman is stronger, compared to 7.11% with the other study. 1.2% is very small! I wouldn't want those odds in a fight. And if the distributions are truly normal, then the fatter tails on the male distribution mean the upper end is basically 100% men.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
There's still a surprising amount of overlap. With a randomly sampled man and woman, the woman has about a 7.1% chance of a stronger grip.
- Men: N(48.6, 8.5)
- Women: N(32.9, 6.5)
- Difference: N(48.6 - 32.9, sqrt(8.5^2 + 6.5^2)) = N(15.7, 10.7)
- CDF at 0: 7.11%
And who must have used that teacher status to get to know her, as a teacher, prior to graduation.
That is important context and completely changes my view. If it's true, then the charges, with potential for a 20-year sentence, are completely appropriate.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
Yes, the law applying to this case seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
It makes sense to prevent sexual relationships between a teacher and their students. The 90 day limit should be even longer for such cases, at least a year. It's way too big a conflict of interest to allow that for teachers. It's also a breach of trust of the teacher's position. However, the fact that this law applies to any teacher and student regardless of whether the teacher ever taught the student seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
9mo ago
One difference is that people can act on predictions of real-world events like elections. The information that the prediction market reveals has value. There's not really anything you can do with knowing which football team will win the Super Bowl.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
The whole point of prediction markets as a concept is to aggregate information for the benefit of non-participants. All the participants are playing by the same rules (which don't prohibit insider trading) so I have no sympathy for anyone on the losing end of those bets.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
- Living a life of virtue
- Discovering or creating something of lasting importance to humanity
- Living a life devoted to God
- Giving life to your children and descendants
- Planting lupines in your neighborhood
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
Not at all.
This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
An engineering organization doesn't have to accept the default compiler behavior for a language. They can use linters and other tools to restrict (or expand!) the kind of code that's acceptable. And they can have a culture that values thoroughness or that values moving fast and breaking things.
I think the best argument for something like Rust is that it makes it easier to guarantee quality where it matters to the organization. If quality doesn't matter to the organization, whether explicitly through tooling and coding standards or implicitly through seeing what gets people promoted or fired, then people will circumvent safeguards whatever language it is.
Yes; I bought paper that's supposed to have at least a 5-year lifespan before fading, and I'm keeping a skeptical eye on how the printouts actually fade. I'll probably get a USB laser printer eventually but the shopping is such a chore.
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