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Similar to an old idea I had about how every programming language needs three books:

1. Basic introduction.

2. Reference tome, which has absolutely everything.

3. Cookbook with style advice for the more advanced student, which assumes you've read 1 and can look up various details in 2.

These days, 2 would be a wiki and 1 would likely be a bunch of pages on that wiki, but it's still good if you have someone sit down and write 3.


Back in my day, the 3 books for programmers were Knuth vol 1, Knuth vol 2, and Knuth vol 3. ;)

Most german speakers will look back at the 2000 pages of "Java ist auch eine Insel" in terror, but it was actually all three books in one.

I think you're describing the the Diátaxis framework [1], which would further split your (1) into fully guided tutorials and discursive explanations.

[1]: https://diataxis.fr/


> the misses would rather have an induction burner, microwave, and an ice chest running off a solar panel.

Those would definitely be hits.

Also, solar panels are old. Bell Labs demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell in 1954. At some point, you're just trying to split (possibly nonexistent) hairs for an aesthetic, as opposed to making a principled stand against technology.

https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2009/04/bell-labs-silicon-solar-...


Ah, sans-serif, where you can't tell the difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" because who needs letters that don't collide, right?


There are many sans-serif fonts that distinguish the lower-l and upper-i. For some reason they aren't as popular as the ones that do not. Perhaps the popularity of Helvetica (and other neo-grotesque typefaces) caused this.


OK, let's do this:

It isn't a hard drive. What's being driven, your mom? It definitely isn't a hard disk in most cases, either, because SSDs are so common.

It isn't a screen. What's being screened out? Is it a monitor? I don't know, is it? Are you monitoring things? If not, then it isn't.

It isn't a mouse. Mice have tails, and also are small living mammals with respiration and without buttons.

It isn't a touch pad. It is touched, but it's also stroked and tapped, so calling it merely a touch pad is inaccurate.

My point, of course, is that language is purely convention, and trying to nitpick all of those conventions quickly leaves us with nothing. There's polysemy and semantic drift and as long as there isn't confusion there also isn't a problem.


"Rate Limit Exceeded"

Does anyone have an archive?


Forgetting the infelicities of Patrick Russ is reasonable because he's both dead and his estate isn't (to my knowledge) funneling money from the sale of his books to odious causes. Would that I could say the same about other authors.


There's two maxims:

You get what you pay for.

If you're the customer, you're the product.

"You get what you pay for" means if you buy proprietary software, you get software from proprietary vendors who act like modern proprietary vendors act these days, which is using every avenue to maximize profits. There's no recourse, because it is proprietary and, therefore, belongs to the software maker, and not you. It is not your property, it is theirs.

Which leads into...

"If you're the customer, you're the product" because customers are valuable products. You willingly bought the service, so your data is data from someone who is interested in the company and probably willing to buy more from it and its partners if the company can target you. Your data, therefore, has resale value, making you a product to be sold.


> In 2020, Congress passed the No Surprises Act, which banned surprise balance bills for most parts of emergency care. But by necessity, it exempted ground ambulances from the law: actually restricting the practice would have rendered much of the EMS industry insolvent.

Right, but air ambulances are subject to the No Surprises Act, and we somehow still have those.

Also, ERs are subject to the No Surprises Act, and they do some pretty damned expensive things. Plus, if you're seen by an out-of-network practitioner in an in-network hospital or ER, no you weren't: No Surprises Act forces them to accept QPA and not balance bill. Somehow all of those out-of-network anesthetists and radiologists are still in business.

Here's a PDF about the No Surprises Act:

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/a274577-1a-training-1-bal...


There are a couple of games like this on Android I play:

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.vayunmathur.gam...

https://github.com/plhosk/wordtracer

They're both on FDroid


Yeah, I got "TUNS" as a bonus word.


Yeah tuns (a word well known to homebrewers) is not as esoteric as yttria (a word known to.. chemists?)


Yttrium is a chemical element with the symbol Y and atomic number 39 :)


Not sure how to vote for it, though.


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