robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@freemo

Mechanical compasses of that sort are more complicated, at least because you need a vertical reference and a gimbal with 2 degrees of freedom.

Also, that's not very accurate if you don't know your longitude: the isolines of vertical strength are amusingly curvy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/World_Magnetic_Inclination_2020.pdf

BTW I wonder how many sports trackers use the magnetic field to simplify their motion tracking, and then work very differently sufficiently far north or sufficiently close to the equator. (E.g. for breaststroke in swimming pools oriented east-west in Switzerland keeping a running average of the magnetic field direction at wrist is a more reliable way of counting lengths than what Garmin was doing up until something like 1-2 years ago)

@lauren

The comparison to children feels somewhat offensive to me (as a former child).

@foone Doesn't your phone have a commutated DC motor (for vibration)? :)

@lauren @dalias @mark

Another option would be to make country of some responsible entity legible via caller ID (or at least make it legible whether that entity is local or foreign), no?

@b0rk

BTW re contents of worktree, I've once tried to cobble together something that would "backup" the worktree into a commit without affecting the checked-out branch (so that I can e.g. run it in a build script so that every built binary could point at its exact sources, at least until the repo gets gced). I failed to find a solution that would be racefree and would produce a commit (instead of a naked tree object) -- anything that I could find involved using `commit` and "manually" reverting everything it has done, incl. changes to index, or making a naked tree and trying to make the commit object by hand.

@b0rk

Using the latter didn't cross my mind previously. I think that I'd usually anyway check out the branch to be moved first (for no good reason) and then `git reset` is more natural, given that it explicitly handles the index and worktree.

I continue to find it weird that git has the reflog, which is a nice universal undo mechanism for lost commits, but none for lost contents of the index or worktree.

Yearly reminder: today's the day when the Swiss authorities break the noon quiet period.

@ZachWeinersmith

Them being perfect squares is a bummer: that teaches that correct solutions are neat and round, which isn't really a good heuristic (and is somewhat subtly distinct from the "simple conceptually" heuristic, which IMO is good).

I'd also consider showing the 9-year-old a slide rule and explaining how one can use it. I'm not too sure about it though (on one side: neat device, gives intuitions like "square root will have half as many digits", requires manual sanity checking; on the other might seem magical for someone who doesn't have the concept of a logarithm).

@lcamtuf I'm curious how that varie[sd] with tenure. Do you have some intuition?

@Neblib @whitequark

It might be. My native tongue (Polish) has verbs that declinate by gender of subject. I think that makes me prefer picking different genders in setups where there's more than one participant (because it's more effective than in English at disambiguating them).

@freemo Does this cause you to also automatically trust new company keys signed by that key (but not keys signed by them in turn)?

@timClicks An often overlooked point is whether a sandboxed thingy is a trustworthy source. IMO not universally: if you sandbox something that parses unsafe input and is written in an unsafe language, output of that sandbox should still be considered untrusted (because an attacker who can get code execution in the sandbox can inject arbitrary output).

@timorl wo?

@freemo What kind of wild animals would you say have lots of variation?

@erin

tell people "please lobby for your instance to have a subscribe feature and use it instead"? though that's somewhat pushy

@tubetime

Ah, it's at least partially about leaks, which might create a water path between stator winding and ground. See e.g. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0306/ML030650924.pdf

@tubetime Generators often do the same with stator windings: they are basically pipes and distilled water is passed through them. I'm not entirely sure why conductivity of that water matters (after all its share of current will be very small, and it being AC would seem to obviate worries about corrosion). It seems that here the internal pipe is insulated?

I realized today that this is a good alternate way of looking at what voltage dividers hanging off a power rail do: they are like a voltage source of the expected voltage with an internal resistance equivalent to a parallel connection of the divider's resistors.

@tedherman @danluu Do you ever worry about the handbrake getting stuck in the applied position (e.g. in winter)?