Most common example would be a bicycle, I think - your pedals tighten on “in the same direction the wheel turns” as you look at them. So your left pedal has left-hand thread, and goes on and comes off backwards.

The effect of precession also means that you can tighten the pedals on finger tight and a good long ride will make them absolutely solid - need to bounce up and down on a spanner to loosen them.

Fake mews, surely? And yeah, this looks better than my Monday.

Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…

A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.

Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.

“One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:

• can’t have the same character more than twice in a row
• can’t be one of the ten-thousand most popular passwords (which is mostly a big list of swears in russian)
• all whitespace must be condensed into a single character before checking against the other rules

We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.

As an example of a language that many people are familiar with, which is likely to be in long-term use where maintainability is most important, and which can almost read like pseudocode anyway, sure - probably the best ‘real language’ choice.

You can write an unmaintainable fucking mess in any language. Rust won’t save you from cryptic variable naming, copy-paste code, a complete absence of design patterns, dreadful algorithms, large classes of security issues, unfathomable UX, or a hundred other things. “Clean code” is (mostly) a separate issue from choice of language.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like this book. It manages to be both long-winded and facile at the same time. A lot of people seem to read it and take the exact wrong lessons about maintainability from it. I think that it would mostly benefit from being written in pseudocode - concentrating on any particular language might distract from the message. But having a few examples of what a shitfest looks like in a few specific languages might help

My old job had a lot of embedded programming - hard real-time Z80 programming, for processors like Z800s and eZ80s to control industrial devices. Actually quite pleasant languages to do bit-twiddling in, and it’s great to be able to step through the debugger and see that what the CPU is running is literally your source code, opcode by opcode.

Back when a computers were very simple things - I’m thinking a ZX Spectrum, where you can read directly from the input ports and write directly into the framebuffer, no OS in your way just code, then assembly made a lot of sense, was even fun. On modem computers, it is not so fun:

• x64 is just a fucking mess

• you cannot just read and write what you want, the kernel won’t let you. So you’re going to be spending a lot of your time calling system routines.

• 99% of your code will just be arranging data to suit the calling convention of your OS, and doing pointless busywork like stack pointer alignment. Writing some macros to do it for you makes your code look like C. Might as well just use C, in that case.

Writing assembly makes some sense sometimes - required for embedded, you might be writing something very security conscious where timing is essential, or you might be lining up some data for vectorisation where higher-level languages don’t have the constructs to get it right - but these are very small bits of code. You would be mad to consider “making the whole apple pie” in assembly.

PS3 most certainly had a separate GPU - was based on the GeForce 7800GTX. Console GPUs tend to be a little faster than their desktop equivalents, as they share the same memory. Rather than the CPU having to send eg. model updates across a bus to update what the GPU is going to draw in the next frame, it can change the values directly in the GPU memory. And of course, the CPU can read the GPU framebuffer and make tweaks to it - that’s incredibly slow on desktop PCs, but console games can do things like tone mapping whenever they like, and it’s been a big problem for the RPCS3 developers to make that kind of thing run quickly.

The cell cores are a bit more like the ‘tensor’ cores that you’d get on an AI CPU than a full-blown CPU core. They can’t speak to the RAM directly, just exchange data between themselves - the CPU needs to copy data in and out of them in order to get things in and out, and also to schedule any jobs that must run on them, they can’t do it themselves. They’re also a lot more limited in what they can do than a main CPU core, but they are very very fast at what they can do.

If you are doing the kind of calculations where you’ve a small amount of data that needs a lot of repetitive maths done on it, they’re ideal. Bitcoin mining or crypto breaking for instance - set them up, let them go, check in on them occasionally. The main CPU acts as an orchestrator, keeping all the cell cores filled up with work to do and processing the end results. But if that’s not what you’re trying to do, then they’re borderline useless, and that’s a problem for the PS3, because most of its processing power is tied up in those cores.

Some games have a somewhat predictable workload where offloading makes sense. Got some particle effects - some smoke where you need to do some complicated fluid-and-gravity simulations before copying the end result to the GPU? Maybe your main villain has a very dramatic cape that they like to twirl, and you need to run the simulation on that separately from everything else that you’re doing? Problem is, working out what you can and can’t offload is a massive pain in the ass; it requires a lot of developer time to optimise, when really you’d want the design team implementing that kind of thing; and slightly newer GPUs are a lot more programmable and can do the simpler versions of that kind of calculation both faster and much more in parallel.

The Cell processor turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. The resources needed to work on it (expensive developer time) just didn’t really make sense for a gaming machine. The things that it was better at, are things that it just wasn’t quite good enough at - modern GPUs are Bitcoin monsters, far exceeding what the cell can do, and if you’re really serious about crypto breaking then you probably have your own ASICs. Lots of identical, fast CPU cores are what developers want to work on - it’s much easier to reason about.

Got this installed on all my work machines - if you’re wanting to stick a screenshot on Jira or Slack with a couple of arrows, wavy lines, or a bit blurred out then it’s dead quick and has just the functionality that you need. Yes, it’s simple and lacks a lot of ‘power tools’. Sometimes that’s just what you need, tho.

We’ve a few rescue cats - we got them all when they were about three / four years old. We kept them inside initially for six weeks or so, made sure that they’d got used to living in a new house before we let them outside.

The one which had been abandoned and had been living outside for a few weeks (a boy) stopped using his litter tray completely, as soon as he was allowed outside again.

The other two, both girls but a ‘smooth’ changeover, took a bit more time to get used to being outside. One transitioned off of her litter tray after a couple of months by herself; the other took more like four months, and she was a bit of a fair-weather pooper for a while as well.

My take-home message would be that cats generally prefer to do their business as far away from where they live as possible. Only possible bit of advice would be to wait until the weather’s getting better in case your cats dislike the wind and the rain. I believe forest cats love the frosty weather anyway, though?

Think you’re understating it there. Network call takes milliseconds at best. Function call, if the CPU has correctly predicted the indirect branch, is basically free, but even if it hasn’t then you’re talking nanoseconds. It’s slower by millions of times.

I prefer the must of white grapes for wine making than the must of red grapes.

Cat food is enriched with the amino acid taurine, which they can’t produce themselves. Dog food is not. Feeding cats exclusively on dog food will kill them eventually, via blindness and heart disease.

Not a disaster if they steal it from the dog once or twice, but it cannot be their long-term diet.

Not all of the light would have been wasted on the wall. If your wall is painted green, then the ‘rest of the rainbow’ (red, orange, yellow, blue, violet wavelengths) would be absorbed and converted into heat. Paint is quite rough on a microscopic level, and the green light reflected would be scattered in every direction.

Things that have a colour do so because they reflect those frequencies. Mirrors reflect pretty much all frequencies of visible light with very little scattering - that’s the definition of the word, really.

If you had a black feature wall behind your lamp, such that very little was reflected off it into the rest of the room, then with a mirror there would be about twice the photons illuminating the room. If your wall was pure brilliant white, much less of a difference. Your eyes don’t perceive ‘twice the photons’ as ‘twice as bright’ - they scale from absorbing thousands a second when fully dark-adjusted at night, to trillions per second at midday - but you might find it a bit easier to eg. read a book elsewhere in the room.

Light output from the lamp doesn’t change, but depending on the colours of things in your room, the light output that is useful for seeing might do.

The sound will eventually dissipate in the air as heat. The light will be absorbed into surfaces, like any other radiation, as heat. Still 100%, but with a couple extra stops along the way.

That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.

Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

• Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
• Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
• Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.

‘Whom’ would be correct if we suspected it belonged to an individual, but ‘who’ is correct for a group, and we’re asking specifically about nations. Also, no-one would be confused by this, which makes your misguided, ill-mannered pedantry triply unnecessary.

Division is defined as the inverse of multiplication. The answer to one divided by zero is the same as asking which number you would multiply by zero in order to get one. No number has that property, not even infinity. So the answer is undefined.

One divided by ‘epsilon’, where epsilon represents a very tiny number, approaches infinity for ever tinier epsilons, so in some maths contexts infinity makes sense. But in general it’s a meaningless question, and so can only have a meaningless answer.