Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: EMACS or death

"*No* possible editing power or functionality is possibly worth making me learn a new UI in the 3rd decade of the 21st century."

Well said.

Hence vi. That was what was the available editor when I started using Unix.* IME one of the best things about it are ex mode commands for making bulk changes. The notation has passed into common use here with expressions such as s/emacs/vi/g

I've just taken a quick look at your preferred tilde and rebounded promptly: grey on medium blue. These old eyes prefer the contrast of black on white with white on black as an acceptable alternative. I do take your point about CUA. It's been built into many GUI interfaces, at least to some degree, for a long time except those which seem insistent into drifting off into realms unknown.

* Not strictly true, the first Unix box was supplied without a few things including vi & C shell but had the Rand editor which I've never seen since. First day in a new job where it was vi rather than Rand was a slight panic,managed by vague memories of ex commands and an after-work dash to Dillons. The hastily bought book on vi is still in my bookshelves.

Re: EMACS or death

As an nvi users, yes. Very briefly.

Re: String theory has taught us….

I read elsewhere that the 2nd paper was suggesting that fluctuations in successive weighing of the standard 1kg mass might be the basis of a test. I'm not sure what you'd weigh it against that wouldn't be subject to the same fluctuations.

Re: Oppenheim proposes to overcome the barrier with the idea of "wobbly spacetime"

"This is ample proof that we live in a giant cosmic jelly."

What flavour? And are you going to trifle with it?

Re: Understanding

It sounds as if he's saying it's monotonic but not rectilinear. Even a non-mathematician like me can grok that. Doing it 4 dimensions - maybe a bit trickier.

And if you want a physical representation, think of an old surveyor's tape (it's probably an old surveyor who owns it). It's a bit stretched in places - the tape, not the surveyor (well, maybe the surveyor as well). As you trace along the tape the numbers get bigger all the time (monotonic) but sometimes the next number is further away and sometimes it's closer (not rectilinear).

Now you can roll it up but keep it safe - I may need it later to explain the difference between accuracy and precision.

Re: Information evaporation

It's not necessarily as easy as you might think. I have the Yorkshire part of Domesday as image, as an old translation from the Journal of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society and a massive Penguin paperback translation of the whole thing. The translations don't necessarily agree with each other while reading the original as image isn't easy and even then you're stuck with medieval administrative Latin. Then there's a paper of Stenton's from the 1920s where he argued that's what's written down might have been a misreading of the originsl notes...

I think some of what you list still falls into the busy-work category and some of the payments stuff could and probably already is be automated away. Then the more of these you have, the bigger the office to put them in and the more HR and facilities stuff you have and more layers of middle management. That quotation I picked out really says it all.

"Or you are one of those types who could live without art?"

I can live indefinitely without pop but then I have a problem defining that as art.

Re: We are overdue an adult conversation about immigration

The actual best time was when Blair thought it would be a good idea for half the population to have degrees and burdened graduates with student loans to finance that. The next best time has been ever since.

Re: We are overdue an adult conversation about immigration

The root of this seems to have been Blair's notion that half the population had to go to university irrespective of whether vocational courses would have been better, This was far too expensive so student grants were replaced with student loans which doesn't really seem to relieve the public purse of the burden, at least in the short term, and burdens the student with debt. At the same time it raises the employment requirement to degree level where it was otherwise unnecessary and the two combined ensure that many youngsters, unwilling to take on the debt, are shut out of careers that they could have taken up a generation or so ago. OTOH we have a lot of graduates with degrees of no interest to employers.

It looked like a stupid idea at the time and has fulfilled that promise.

Re: If it works ...

"I do wonder what specific type of AI they are using for this though (surely not LLMs ...)?"

Whatever they're using it has to br branded as AI fo scientific PR reasons.

Re: Even if they find it

If it weren't for the conspiracy nuts, yes.

For the vast majority of us over 65s (the occasional rock star excepted) it has no effect on natural selection, unfortunately.

Re: Business model

"Society as a whole is not set up to cope with people NOT dying, pension plans, superannuation, have limited capacity and are already straining in various countries around the world."

"It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment.

So financially speaking, it's unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate." Yes, Prime Minister.

Why the joke alert? There's nothing remotely funny about our situation.

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

"To be fair, I don't think those are questions raised by the posts being refuted here, just misinformation about operating temperatures that he appears to have debunked well."

He quoted a price for one alternative without without a comparison.

"A valid criticism of heat pumps may well be their high up-front cost, and also their applicability to old housing stock or existing hot water and central heating systems, which can be very expensive to overcome."

Unless there's a huge rebuilding of our housing stock (and just think of the carbon footprint of that) retro-fitting to old housing stock is a significant factor. A reasonable analysis has to start with what we've got and what we've got is a very large number of housed which were designed with other heating systems in mind.

As it happens my house was built to take a solid-fuel fired boiler and converted to combi later. It still has the cupboard formerly occupied by a hot water cylinder, the header tanks in the roof-space and some of the plumbing to connect them. It would need some plumbing work but would be feasible to refit those and going back to the header tanks might even mitigate Yorkshire Water's sometimes variable supply pressure.

But houses built from new to take combi-boilers won't have those. Getting them all into place will be difficult. There probably wouldn't be a space for the cylinder and unless some sort of collapsible header tank is devised there'd need to be some surgery on ceiling joists and if lofts are insulated at ceiling level there's a risk of freezing the tank and pipework. The alternative would probably be to use an ancillary electric heater for DHW. Reality is a bitch and which I suppose is why my original question about DHW provision went unanswered.

One point - I do understand that a heat pump can pump heat out of cold air - it's just a matter of supplying enough air. But how do they cope if clogged with snow or ice? It's not an idle question as the only feasible place to fit one here would face the wind direction from which most of the snow comes.

Re: Hope this goes well

And parcel gilding which applied a mercury & gold mixture to base metal and then evaporated the mercury.

I still have my doubts about amalgam as a filling material.

Re: Since then it has banked double-digit revenues.

I looked at one of those but bought a Brother multi-function laser instead. It was bigger but worth the space.

Re: "HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers"

Colour doesn't necessarily mean ink-jet. In fact it hasn't for me for quite a while. But sometimes print is needed and sometimes it needs to be in colour. One thing that's easily missed is that if you only need occasional prints laser excels at this even more than for a heavy printing load because you don't spend any of your toner on cleaning cycles let alone ditch half full cartridges because they're irredeemably blocked up.

And no, I don't want a trip into town every time I want to run off a couple of sheets of print. (Admittedly it would probably be quicker than waiting for an ink-jet to clean itself up.)

That quality was what the HP brand traded on for a long time. The fact that they're still in business underlines how long a brand can last in the general public's eyes. Maybe the continued life of the old stuff helps with that. There must be offices with HP lasers running smoothly although in their lifetimes a few generations of ink jets have been bought and died.

It once stood for Hewlett Packard and obviously once they'd gone a new backronym was needed.