[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 50 points 1 month ago

is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

If you browse through it's not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There's a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean "yes." He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it's only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 61 points 1 month ago

Nobody plays by the official rules, because the intention of the game is to bankrupt other players, knocking them out of the game. Not being allowed to play anymore is not fun. So, people tend to change the rules up to make it harder to get knocked out, which in turn leads to games becoming extremely long.

Basically, the game is crap.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 54 points 3 months ago

Might be valid advice for some regions, I don't know. But mushrooms tend to vary quite a bit in appearance. Sometimes ribbed species don't have very visible ribs, or younger mushrooms don't quite have all the characteristics of their mature form. If you really want to get into picking mushrooms, there's often local groups you can join with a resident expert who can tell you which ones are safe.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 64 points 6 months ago

Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package?

No. His normal salary is around 300k a year. This $193 million figure was the presumed valuation of a stock/options package he received ahead of the IPO. It doesn't cost the company anything to pay him in stock, so it doesn't affect the profit/loss calculation.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 61 points 8 months ago

Email is kind of an oligopoly though, if you're not one of the big guys it can get pretty frustrating to run an email server. Even if you do everything right, sometimes you just get randomly blacklisted anyway, you're at the mercy of the big email providers.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 71 points 9 months ago

What he means is, if you want to download the document from ISO that describes the standard, you have to pay a fee. Here's their store page: click.

It's about 190 USD for a 38 page document describing the rules of the standard. There's another document with extensions for a similar price. Quite pricey for a PDF file obviously, and the RFC is free to download.

On the other hand, no one in the history of time has gone "hmm, I don't know how ISO-8601 works, let me go buy this document from the ISO store to figure it out." Most people just call datetime.isoformat() or whatever their library function is called.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 75 points 9 months ago

It's pretty common even in academic literature to treat implied multiplication as having higher precedence than explicit multiplication/division. Otherwise an expression like 1 / 2n would have to be interpreted as (1 / 2) * n rather than the more natural 1 / (2 * n).

A lot of this bullshit can be avoided with better notation systems, but calculators tend to be limited in what you can write, so meh. Unless you want to mislead people for the memes, just put parentheses around things.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 62 points 10 months ago

Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don't give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don't know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that's the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that's it.

I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it's idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 49 points 1 year ago

Not exactly, the guy who runs it became a brave employee shortly after starting it. but they claim to continue to run it independently.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 57 points 1 year ago

Same with JK Rowling, Kanye West, Notch, etc. It's literally so fucking easy for people like this to remain loved by everyone. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. Give nice polite interviews about your job, stay out of politics, let a boring publicity agent manage your social media for you, and enjoy your billions of dollars in peace.

Why is it so hard?

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 68 points 1 year ago

I kinda skimmed it. So from what I understand, they put a cooling layer behind regular solar panels. Panels get less efficient when they heat up so keeping them cool is where the extra efficiency comes from. The cooling layer is inspired by how plants cool themselves, it seems sort of similar to sweating in a way. Water moves through by capillary action, absorbs heat from the panel, and evaporates. Additionally they discuss:

  • using salt water as input water, which will result in some clean water output. It seems you need to kinda flush the cooling layer at night to get rid of salt crystal build up, but this could be a nice bonus in less developed areas.
  • use a condenser down the line to recover heat energy from the evaporated output water. Has the potential to raise total efficiency by a bunch of you can use the warm water for heating and the PV generated electricity for power.

They claim the cooling layer doesn't add much extra cost (6 months extra operation to recoup your investment). I wonder what the lifetime of the cooling layer is compared to the photovoltaics themselves. They use some natural fiber I think so maintenance could be an issue.

[-] sushibowl@feddit.nl 68 points 1 year ago

How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn't have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you'd have a case. From the success of Baldur's Gate 3 the most you could conclude is "people will still buy a game that doesn't have microtransactions," which is not particularly revelatory.

A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I'm pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur's Gate 3 and probably go "man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money."

And it's probably true.

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sushibowl

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