cam_i_am

I'll never forget dialling into a work meeting with the corporate infosec team who we needed some guidance from.

Their rep shows up and it's a fem-presenting person with pink cat-ear headphones.

I'm like oh fuck they sent the big guns, this is exactly who we needed to talk to. And I was right, we got exactly what we needed.

There's more to it than that. Firstly, at a theoretical level you dealing with the concepts of entropy and information density. A given file has a certain level of information in it. Compressing it is sort of like distilling the file down to its purest form. Once you reached that point, there's nothing left to "boil away" without losing information.

Secondly, from a more practical point of view, compression algorithms are designed to work nicely with "normal" real world data. For example as a programmer you might notice that your data often contains repeated digits. So say you have this data: "11188885555555". That's easy to compress by describing the runs. There are three 1s, four 8s, and seven 5s. So we can compress it to this: "314875". This is called "Run Length Encoding" and it just compressed our data by more than half!

But look what happens if we try to apply the same compression to our already compressed data. There are no repeated digits, there's just one 3, then one 1, and so on: "131114181715". It doubled the size of our data, almost back to the original size.

This is a contrived example but it illustrates the point. If you apply an algorithm to data that it wasn't designed for, it will perform badly.

Emacs or vim?

What about the public service? I don't know about where you live, but in my country the public service doesn't care what degree you have, just that you have one. Look into the graduate programs of your local/state/federal governments.

Beefy

There's also one called "Personal blocklist" which is very handy.

And last just as long.

The engineering department at my uni had a tensile strength testing machine which says "Made in the GDR" on it, a country that hasn't existed for 40+ years.

Have you tried SwiftKey? I find it to be a waaaay better keyboard than the stock one, and it does support having a number row.

In general it is often true that a motor and a generator are two sides of the same coin.

If you put a current through a wire you can make a magnet move which can be used to spin a motor. And symmetrically, if you spin a wire and make its magnet move near a wire you can induce a current in the wire.

Depends on the exact wiring and stuff but yeah sometimes you can damage a motorised device by manually spinning the thing without turning it on.

I have to know, what sort of toys are you talking about? That your dad had?

after covid started

Because of Marie Kondo right?

in the most morbid way

... oh 💀

I got my maternal grandma's ancient le creuset enamel pots when she died. They're in perfect condition and we use them all the time.

She loved to cook, my mum hates to cook, and as luck would have it I married a woman who loves to cook. So the pots are in good hands 🥰