Take a look at this:

This is in the Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, and it comes from an ancient Roman Villa in Rome. Probably painted in the first or second century CE. There’s walls of this stuff in the museum.

It’s not realism, but minimalistic sketches that, in many ways, outdo realism in artistic quality. To me, this looks more like something that you might find in Leonardo’s sketchbook than on the wall of on ancient Roman Villa from 1200 years earlier.

The reason for leaving in the password.trim() would be one of the few things that I would ever document with a comment.

Isn’t the one on the left Samus from Metroid?

A female character!

This is true, but…

Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

Same curve.

Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.

I used KDE Connect on Ubuntu with Gnome. No issues.

Old school Unix guy here…vi,awk and sed are all that you need.

You might want to think about it a bit more before putting it to work. The comment with the streams example is far, far better.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s there were “Travesty Generators”. You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

Surprisingly, they would generate “brand new” words that weren’t in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn’t get any more gibberishy that the source.

I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump’s gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.

Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zC8eSSvnYXg?si=cqs53b_6ggLjU7NP

Also, the final note on the bass is a mistake, but they left it in.

Anubis and Thoth weighing the heart of the dead to see if it is as light as a feather before letting them into the afterlife.

I love the idea that there’s no “do this, do that”, or a concrete set of rules or commandments. But the idea that if you can look back on your life, and if your heart isn’t weighed down with the burden of all of the things that you did that know we’re just wrong…then you can go on to the afterlife.

It’s just no much more of a reasonable, adult approach to morality.

The travel eSIMs are a bit different. My Orange plan covers Turkey and the UK, which I specifically wanted, and probably Switzerland as well. For my wife, I needed to get a “world” plan that covered Turkey, otherwise the Europe plan would have covered the UK.

But that’s an important point. The travel plans are NOT the same as regular plans in some ways.

I would have a couple years ago. In a flash. We replaced our phones a while back specifically to have eSIMs. It truth, considering the cost of Canadian roaming plans the phones have already paid for themselves.

Both of our old phones were single SIM, so using a local SIM would mean disconnecting our Canadian numbers which would put us out of touch with people back home. Which means that this card wouldn’t have work for us either.

I was at the point of looking at buying a portable WiFi hot-spot, when I found out about eSIMs. So we went that route.

I have an Orange eSIM with a France number that I have kept alive by reactivating it at least once every 6 months. It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges, so that’s easy to do. Having the same number all the time is convenient, but more importantly I have gone through the hassle of providing passport info to Orange, which is a government requirement if you want a number for more than a couple of weeks. I think that’s an EU thing.

The local number is good for calling hotels and for making restaurant reservations. Just having that is a game changer.

For my wife’s we don’t need a number, so I just use Nomad for her data only eSIM, and get a new one each time. The cost is about $12-15, and you get whatever carrier you get, but the service has been good so far no I keep using Nomad.

We can text each other using WhatsApp, and you can even use WhatsApp for voice calls. The sound quality is acceptable.

We bought phones that support eSIM because we do a lot of travelling. Canadian mobile companies charge usurious rates for roaming: $15/day! Times two phones. I can get 2 weeks of data only for Europe for about $11 total on an eSIM. With voice it goes up to about $25. Total.

It has changed our lives when we travel.

It’s just a modern version of “Fuzzy Logic”

That’s nothing. I throw up a little in my mouth every time I see “cheque” misspelled, “check”.

Les Nessman comes to mind.

I’m not sure if traffic is “convenience” at this point. At least where I live, it’s a nearly essential piece of functionality.

In fact, for local driving it’s often the only reason to use a map app. I already know how to get to most of the places I want to go, I just need to know the best route to avoid traffic now.