Soundbars are usually a marginal improvement and the main selling point is the compact size, IMO. I would only get a soundbar if I was really constrained on space.
Engineering tradeoffs--when you make speakers smaller, you have to sacrifice something else. This applies to both soundbars and the built-in speakers.
I agree that speaker tech has progressed slowly, but cars from 20 years ago? Most car audio systems from every era have sounded kinda mediocre at best.
IMO, half the issue with audio is that stereo systems used to be a kind of status symbol, and you used to see more tower speakers or big cabinets at friends' houses. We had good speakers 20 years ago and good speakers today, but sound bars aren't good.
On the other side being I needed to make some compromises with my life partner and we ended up buying a pair HomePod mini (because stereo was a hard line for me).
They do sound pretty much ok for very discreet objects compared to tower speaker. I only occasionally rant when sound skip a beat because of WiFi or other smart-assery. (Nb: of course I never ever activated the smart assistant, I use them purely as speakers).
I already think that markdown is barely ok for writing documentation, and the experience of plugins in mdBook is why I tell people not to use it (edit: it = mdBook). The base flavor of mdBook is minimalistic. Maybe that’s a good thing, that you’re given a minimalistic markdown as a starting point? But if it’s minimalistic, then it’s certainly missing some things that I’d want to use in the documentation I write, and the experience of using plugins is, well, not very good.
My current recommendations are MkDocs (material theme), Jekyll, and Docusaurus. Hugo gets a qualified recommendation, and I only recommend mdBook for people who are doing Rust stuff.
Can you speak on what features were missing ootb and which plugins respectively gave you trouble? I'm not sure how "people who are doing Rust stuff" would specifically get more out of it either? Are you implying you cant just use the tool/plugins without familiarity in Rust? This is not my experience.
What is missing from markdown?
mdbook also uses in some parts the GH flavored one, so you can create notes [1] and similar. On top of that, you can add support for Mermaid.
Personally, I don't think you need more than that for 90% of the documentation, but I'm happy to hear more about your use case.
Markdown is devalued as a format because of the bizarre shortage of Markdown VIEWERS. You find Markdown documents in every open-source project, and you always wind up viewing them with all the embedded formatting characters. Why?
Why provide documentation in a format that is so poorly supported by READERS? Or, to respect the chicken-&-egg problem here: Why is there such a shortage of Markdown viewers?
Every time this comes up, respondents always cite this or that EDITOR that has Markdown "preview." NO. We're not editing the documentation; we're just reading it. So why do we have to load the document into an editor and then invoke a "preview" of it? Consider how nonsensical the term "preview" is in that case: What are we "previewing" its appearance in, given the dearth of Markdown readers?
It worked out well for Europe because the country that took over its position of leadership position post-WW2 (USA) was aligned with it in all ways (politically, culturally, scientifically, economically), and so (western) European countries could still enjoy all the benefits. It will not be the case this time around, because the next generation of innovation and leadership is going to come from China.
I think that is the most likely outcome. However, if the decline starts occurring too rapidly, I do think violent far-right (and perhaps far-left) paramilitary action could become a major problem, like in 1920s/1930s Germany. Tons of time spent lurking in far-right extremist communities out of morbid curiosity, and the spread of far-right ethnosupremacist sentiment on basically every social media platform, has me concerned.
Yes, nearly all of them absolutely are. (I have talked to many of them and they really truly are.) That fact does genuinely assuage my concerns. Still, I do wonder if a future charismatic far-right politician who does not come across as a loser could do far better than previous generations ever could have predicted. The worst possible person at the worst possible time.
> England “gave up” scientific and technological leadership during the 20th century. (That’s a tongue-in-cheek take on it, don’t read too much into it.)
Was forced to give up, due to the economic devastation of WWII, might be more accurate (though of course there were other factors too).
I feel like I grokked Perl enough and I still write Perl code, but I also think that there are some technical reasons why it declined in popularity in the 2000s and 2010s. All those differences between $ % @, the idea of scalar or list context, overuse of globals, and references. These features can all make sense if you spend enough time in Perl, and can even be defended, but it creates a never-ending stream of code that looks right but is wrong, and it all seems to create a lot of complexity with very little benefit.
I think a reasonable solution is “people who find the answer should observe that the question was asked eight years ago, and certainly double-check the answer”. If it’s a question about company internal codebases or operations, then you should have access to see the code or resources the answer is talking about.
I have an overly reductive take on this—it’s Unix environment variables.
You have your terminal window and your .bashrc (or equivalent), and that sets a bunch of environment variables. But your GUI runs with, most likely, different environment variables. It sucks.
And here’s my controversial take on things—the “correct” resolution is to reify some higher-level concept of environment. Each process should not have its own separate copy of environment variables. Some things should be handled… ugh, I hate to say it… through RPC to some centralized system like systemd.
> Langan has not produced any acclaimed works of art or science. In this way, he differs significantly he differs significantly from outsider intellectuals like Paul Erdös, Stephen Wolfram, Nassim Taleb, etc.
Paul Erdős is the only outsider intellectual on that list, IMO.
Can you even be called an "outsider" when everyone who recognizes the name associates it with "eccentric but well respected mathematician who was well liked enough in the community that people would regularly let him sleep in their homes for days on end"? According to his wikipedia page, Erdős collaborated with hundreds of other mathematicians. That's the very opposite of being an outsider IMO.
Engineering tradeoffs--when you make speakers smaller, you have to sacrifice something else. This applies to both soundbars and the built-in speakers.
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