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What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!

For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.

1/ pick a sunny day

2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun

3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.

    {“twelve”:180.00}
4/ sort the hours by dict.get

Voila.

As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)

For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P

I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!


You could make either method more secure by hashing the encoded time and displaying that.

Make sure to use a cryprographically-secure hash function and a strong salt.


Here in Singapore on many sunny days, the bearing is largely the same hour after hour. The sun just changes apparent altitude.

Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction. Then follow GP's instructions. Never mind that we've reinvented the sundial...

> Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis [...]

You mean place a stick flat on the ground? (Singapore is pretty much on the equator.)


The closer you are to the equator, the taller the stick needs to be. If you're really close, the height requirements diverge, and the stick is at this point technically more of a space elevator[1] than a stick.

But don't lose hope, just tell Bezos that Musk wants to fund your space elevator, and vice versa, to goad one of them into funding your $10tn near-equatorial sundial boondoggle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator


So much of this was backed up by Snowden, not just in the machinations of each of the CODENAMEX operations but also in the attitude that the TLAs felt entitled to implement them in the first place.

There’s been some pushback since then, but nothing to give any confidence that CODENAMEY, CODENAMEZ, and many others have have sprung up.


That’s a pretty compelling argument, but what if I went round to AWS’ house, peeked into their kitchen, and saw a crate of photos on their table with me in them?

I’d absolutely say:

“Hey, that’s me! Give me those right now!”

I’d also be pretty angry if they told me:

“Sorry we’re storing those for Corp Inc. Go ask them.”

To refute my own point though, this only sounds annoying because the data processor is being irritating by manually referring me to the data controller. In practice, it would be trivial for them to automatically forward communications between me and the controller.

That’s what feels is amiss with the top level article.


Exactly! A stack of PRs is really the same beast as a branch of commits.

The traditional tools (mailing-lists, git branches, Phabricator) represented each change as a difference between an old version of the code and the proposed new version. I believe Phabricator literally stored the diff. They were called “diffs” and you could make a new one by copying and pasting into a <textarea> before pressing save*.

The new fangled stuff (GitHub and its clones) recorded your change as being between branches A and B, showed you the difference on the fly, and let you modify branch B. After fifteen years of this we are now seeing the option for branch A to be something other than main, or at least for this to be a well supported workflow.

In traditional git land, having your change as a first class object — an email or printout or ph/D1234 with the patch included — was the default workflow!

*Or some other verb meaning save.


Having the competence to put together a good patch used to be a proxy that you were motivated to stick around and fix any regressions you caused and that you were worth investing in, as a community member.

Or, to put it another way, in the old days in order to be a 3k-LoC PR wielding psychopath intent on making your colleagues miserable with churny aggro diffs from hell you at least had to be good at coding.

Nowadays, you only need to do the psychopath art — Claude will happily fill in the PR for you.


Flip it round: if you have $999,999,999 then would it not be rational to expect random violence against oneself? I’m not saying it’s justifiable, just that it is prudent to expect to be targeted by crazies.

Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?

To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.


What I love most about Iosevka — and there are surely many things more than just one thing to love — is that it is not merely defined as a typeface using a fount encoding, but it is defined in a programming language. Of course it shows up in its router-sign aesthetics, but knowing how it is all defined is a huge part of its charm. A kind of Esperanto of faces.

Wow, thaHt’s soELP interestiIMng… weA wouLIld lovVEe toTR heaAPPr morEDe aboINut thaUSEAST1t topic!

(With apologies to Mr Justice P. Smith, sort of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithy_code )


I know it’s not quite the same thing as an OS vendor, but culturally, if you’re having trouble empathizing with the ick in this thread then imagine if the initial implementation was available only for account holders with Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, or MySpace.

I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.

You can use a heat pump for any realistic output temperature but the efficiency goes down the higher the temperature difference has to be.

As long as sun and wind aren’t the main energy sources there, it might be economical but I wouldn’t exactly call it reasonable.


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