One fact that I found unintuitive (while we're at cars doing things they can't):

If you could drive your car straight up vertically, you'd have to cruise just for an hour or so at 100 km/h (<65 mph) until you reached space. It's not that far.

However space is not orbit. Space is easy, orbit is hard. https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Which is weird, because "X", "10", "XI", "XII", "12", "XIII", "13" are all unambiguous, while "11" could be read as "II" = 2 depending on the font. In other words, they switched exactly as to maximise ambiguity.

iPhone 4 was a tempest in a teapot. But yeah, the circular mouse and the butterfly keyboard...

Having said that, it seems obvious that there is a tradeoff between repairability, price, and compactness. And Apple offers devices on different points on that triangle.

Fast user switching turned into excruciatingly slow user switching.

I've started multiplying with "x" here... 10 mm x 10 mm = 100 mm^2.

Although there is a "clear" way of representing the functions, I have come to think it might not be as clear to many people.

For instance

(3m+5m)(2m)/(2(2))=5m^3

Indeed. I seem to recall reading that among all addictions, gambling addiction had the highest suicide rate. I haven't been able to find a good source on that lamentably, but it seems plausible to me in the sense that many other addictions (alcohol, sex, heroin, etc.) have some sort of end-point built in at which you stop, and typically have only harmed yourself.

With gambling you can gamble away your kid's college savings, or the retirement savings for you and your spouse. Seems that you can wreak havoc beyond yourself even more so than with other types of addiction.

More than end-point, it's about harm throttling. Cigarettes will kill you, but there's only so many cigarettes you can smoke per day.

Limit gambling to symbolic amounts (maybe a monthly limit of the minimum salary in that country), and see how it goes.

You might even have gambling companies lobbying to increase the minimum salary!

How do you define "gambling" though - the YouTube ads I see for crypto trading apps and outright betting apps look very similar. Mind you I don't gamble or "invest" in crypto...

One thing the UK did was to ban gambling companies from accepting credit cards.

> Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve.

That strikes me as unlikely, actually: that the amount of water to fall (per area) across rain showers ("when it stops") is normally distributed. Why would the author think that?

Also, not much of "the math that explains" the CLT in the article. The basic conditions are:

The samples you add together must be

- sufficiently independent

- sufficiently well-behaved in the sense of not having huge outliers (finite variance is good enough for this)

Not sure either condition holds for rainfall.

Datapoint: During the pandemic, I had to use an old 2004 Powerbook G4 12" (256 MB RAM, OS X Leopard). Everything sort of worked and was even reasonably snappy. But open one website, and the machine went down. Unusable. Even if, indeed, I just wanted to read or look up a few kB of text. So painful.

One tool I've found useful in low-power/low-bandwidth situations is the Lynx web browser [1]. Used to be installed by default in most Linux distributions but I think that's probably not the case anymore. Wikipedia says its also available on OSX and Windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Links is a bit more usable than lynx, I found.

Not supported on OS X for some time.

Chawan is nice

https://chawan.net/

If only there was browser-as-a-service. That would load the pages over it's fast connection and show them to you.

I feel like there already was one, on HN a few years ago. If I remember right, they were hoping to charge $20/month.

Edit: Ah, this was it: https://mightyapp.webflow.io/

It’s the speed of the JavaScript compiler, on those old browsers they were expected to handle a few kilobytes max of event listeners. The chrome vs Firefox browser wars sped up JavaScript compilation by 10x at least

Yes I was alive for that. Just said that because that Mac could take up to 1.5GB of RAM

> Apple software. It's buggy, uses proprietary formats that you can't export

Buggy sure, but proprietary formats? Calendar entries can be imported or exported as iCalendar .ics (RFC 5545), contacts as vCard .vcf (RFC 6350), photos as .jpeg or .heif (ISO/IEC 23008-12), books use the open .epub (ISO/IEC TS 30135), iTunes dropped DRM for purchased files in 2016 and uses mp4 (ISO/IEC 14496-14:2020) (though not sure what Apple Music streaming uses). TextEdit uses .rtf (a closed Microsoft format), and Pages, Numbers, Keynote use their own formats (as other office software does), but they import and export to many common formats. Notes imports and exports markdown (and you can always print/export as pdf).

What are the "proprietary formats that you can't export"?

ETA: Oh, Messages, yeah. To export those, you have to copy/paste a conversation, or use a 3rd party app, fair enough.

iMessage lives as a sqlite db at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db , I wouldn't call a sqlite db proprietary per say.

sqlite is a database. You can store things in more or less proprietary formats in it, just like any other database.

Oh, that contains an ELI5:

> Plain Language Summary The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.