• 33 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My (red) state is one of those that changed the law to make it illegal for pornographic websites to be seen by children. To view them, you’d have to have some kind of central ID to prove that you are over 18. This is absolutely a precursor to having to have an ID to use the internet at all. Every bad thing that has ever happened on the internet will be used to convince legislators to enact a law like this. It’s only a matter of time.




  • In 2005 or so, I got a tip about an application called LaunchBar, which would later be copied by Apple to replace the Sherlock search tool, and later by Microsoft in its PowerToys suite. The machine learning LaunchBar used to tailor its responses based on my previous behavior was life-changing. Instead of configuring an application, I just had to use it to change how it behaved.

    This is how language models and AI are going to improve your products. Subtly. Behind the scenes. Slightly improving a thousand different use cases, only a fraction of which your regular usage patterns are going to intersect with.



  • Full results from the study, presented at the American Heart Association annual scientific meeting in Philadelphia and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggest the drug has other beneficial effects beyond the known health benefits from losing weight.

    The heart risk difference between patients who received Wegovy, known chemically as semaglutide, and those on placebo began to appear almost immediately after starting treatment, researchers said.

    So it’s not just from losing weight!

    The associated risk factors include inflammation, blood pressure and blood sugar control, all of which can impact heart health.

    Patients on Wegovy experienced decreases in C-reactive proteins, an indication of inflammation, similar to those reported with cholesterol lowering statins, which are known to significantly lower heart risks, researchers reported.

    That is really promising!






  • For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

    The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

    I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

    I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

    (If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

    I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.




  • Wow, the world is a small place! I recently faced this challenge when I was writing a script that needed to store rich text in a CSV. It just so happens that I was a technical writing student at the right time to have learned the conventions that were used before word processors. (This was a weird fluke, since word processors were had been in wide use for many years before I got to college.)

    What you need are the style rules that were used when typewriters were in use. If you find one, let me know! Below is an excerpt from ChatGPT that I vetted based on what I remember.

    1. Headers and Titles: Typically rendered in all caps to distinguish them from the rest of the text.

    2. Spacing:

      • Two carriage returns after a paragraph or section to visually separate content.
      • Double-spacing between lines was often used to make manuscripts easier to edit by hand.

    [I was taught to write papers with two carriage returns between paragraphs so that there’s an empty line space between every paragraph. The exception was the end of a section before a header, where we were taught to use three carriage returns for a double linespace. Headers had a linespace between them and the first paragraph of their section.]

    1. Emphasis: Since typewriters couldn’t italicize or bold text, underlining was the main method for emphasizing text.

    [I never learned an alternative for emphasis. It was used all the time for citations, so I always used underlining. Since I’ve never seen a text file that supports this, I don’t know what you should do here.]

    1. Indentation: A standard of five spaces (or one tab on some typewriters) was common for the start of new paragraphs. [Indentation depended heavily on what style your document called for. I almost always used block style or modified block style, so I never bothered with indentation.]

    2. Page Numbers: Often manually typed, either centered at the bottom of the page or in the top right corner.

    3. Footnotes and Endnotes: Numbered manually and typically indicated by a superscript numeral. The actual note would appear either at the bottom of the page (for footnotes) or at the end of the document/chapter (for endnotes).

    4. Tables and Columns: Creating tables was tedious. Writers had to carefully count spaces to align columns. Some typewriters had a tab setting feature to help with this.

    5. Citations: Followed standard style guidelines of the era (like APA, MLA, or Chicago), but were manually typed and often double-spaced.

    6. Bullet Points: Since typewriters didn’t have a bullet point function, a dash (-), asterisk (*), or number might be used to indicate list items.

    —— —— ——

    Numbered lists: I solved this by using this numbering format:

    1. One

    1.1. One sub one

    1.2. One sub two

    1.2.1. One, sub two, sub one.

    etc.

    For some modern things like links and tables, just borrow from Markdown.