FriendOfElphaba
@FriendOfElphaba@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on US Question: What happened to the HHS recommendation to the DEA to reschedule cannabis by the end of the year? 10 months ago:
This isn’t the kind of thing you forget like missing a birthday. It’s a major directive from one institution to another, and it’s entirely possible it’s just being slow walked. These are all handled by working groups who may not be motivated to get it done.
I’m not sure if the situation might change if Trump gets re-elected.
- Comment on Ok everyone, time for a round of... koon-ut-kal-if-fee / pon farr / illogically take a life. 10 months ago:
The great thing is that when you get with one of them you don’t have to worry about wearing protection. You’re going to get Vulcanized.
- Comment on New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion 11 months ago:
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
- Comment on Voyagers writers and Memory Alpha don't know when Voyagers final 3 episodes are set. 11 months ago:
Worst. Episode. Ever.
- Comment on The Battle of the Ovaries 11 months ago:
Apparently these pitched battles have been happening monthly for years.
We need to bring everyone together and realize they all live in an us-terus, not a you-terus. Our slogan will be “Peace, period.”
- Comment on Only Surak Can Judge Me 11 months ago:
The traditional hand sign indicates that Vulcan culture is primarily straight, but kinky.
- Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (08 Dec 2023) 11 months ago:
Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.
And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…
But, again, that’s my point.
- Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (08 Dec 2023) 11 months ago:
I see this argument a lot.
I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.
I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.
The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.
- Comment on Rule of Acquisition #10: Greed is eternal 11 months ago:
I saw James Cromwell, the actor who portrayed Zefram Cochrane, on a flight into Albuquerque about a decade or so ago. He was wearing a colorful kufi hat, and he’s so god damned tall I could easily see him from like three rows back. I was 99% sure it was him, and when I saw him again picking up his luggage I became 100% sure. He’s a freaking giant.
I have a very strong introvert aspect to myself. I very badly wanted to tell him how much his portrayal of Cochrane influenced my life and my career, but I chickened out. For the record, I am a research scientist who now works in big tech.
I think what I loved about him was his flaws. I especially loved how his self-awareness of the chasm between the person he saw himself to be and the legend that grew around him caused him to freak out and panic. I also really understood his whole self-destructive and self-sabotaging stage. And despite all of that, he won through, and Starfleet was the end product.
I love what you’ve written and I think it speaks to the ethos Roddenberry built into his universe to show us what is possible, but I really loved the idea that it grew from this flawed human before it blossomed.
That’s not to say the vroom vroom person was correct. Quite the opposite. A mirror universe Cochrane reimagined as Elon Musk would have lead to… probably the mirror universe but worse. It was more about the struggle possibly being worth it, despite how you feel about yourself and even if the end is something you can’t even imagine.
- Comment on call the doctor, the CS doctor 1 year ago:
It’s 0-255 when you’re indexing like that. 11111111b = 255.
- Comment on call the doctor, the CS doctor 1 year ago:
Perchance programming with pointers has plunged as a percentage of programmers.
But thank you. I was hoping someone would notice that.
- Comment on call the doctor, the CS doctor 1 year ago:
When you’ve eaten more than 50% of the hamburger, do you claim to have eaten one, or do you claim zero? Are you useing standard founding or are you using floor()?
- Comment on call the doctor, the CS doctor 1 year ago:
This.
One of the reasons indexing starts at zero is because back when we used to use pointers and memory addresses, the first byte(s) of an array were at the address where the array was stored. Let’s say it is at 1234. If it was an array of bytes, the first data element was at 1234, or 1234 + 0. The second element would be at 1235, or 1234 + 1. So the first element is at location 0 and the second at location 1, where the index is actually just an offset from the base address. There may be other/better reasons, but that’s what I was taught back in the 90s.
Counting always starts at 1 (if we’re only using integers). You don’t eat a hamburger and say you ate zero hamburgers.