I think if a country is vehemently an international or foreign website it should be on them to block their citizens access, not on website operators to somehow try to geo-restrict that region from access.
That could lead to tons of countries having their own internet firewalls similar to China, if that's what they want to do. Which I probably wouldn't like.
But the alternative of being liable for any new legislation, fines, etc, from any country in the world just because I operate a small website on the internet seems at least equally bad.
We still have a large toshiba CRT as our primary tv. I always use composite cables for the old Nintendos but use component cables for hooking up a computer to watch something modern. It also has S video but I've never used it.
An old video game just looks and feels right on a CRT in a way that it doesn't on a modern hd tv, to me at least. That doesn't necessarily mean it looks "better", however you might define it.
It's like listening to a record. Records are lower quality than CDs or other digital options due to limitations of the analog technology, but they can still be a real joy to listen to on an older stereo system. There is a certain warmth, a little bit of crackle or pop, maybe a different dynamic range and other things that make a record sometimes more enjoyable, even though the "quality" is technically far lower. I think sometimes we can get lost in the technical specifications of pixel density or color range or audio bitrate and end up missing out on things that can prove the human experience.
A couple other random things about CRTs: there are so many that are 4:3 or standard aspect ratio instead of the widescreen that dominates today. Watching something 4:3 that fills the whole screen (without the black letterboxing of a widescreen) feels so good and makes me miss the aspect ratio. On the flip side, I also want to find one of the HD CRTs that is widescreen to run some of my more modern devices through.
I have to work with some closed source external tech at my job right now and I hate it so much. Probably more to do with the specific tech than the open/closed factor, but it feels really bad whenever there's an issue or an improvement that could be made but I'm not allowed to fork or directly change the dependency.
I honestly feel so burned by it that I will think strongly about ever joining another company that isn't using more open source tech.
I have no opinion on datastar, and I support things like tailwind selling pre built tailwind components to make money (not that I use either, but idea wise I'm happy for them). But sometimes working with closed source is a real pain.
Sounds like what you are really trying to say is "I want to change teams".
Or maybe "I want to work on ____ new project, and my working this would be beneficial to the business because ____". But you have to have a real case for it and for why you are the right person for it
I love plaintextsports for baseball already. Baseball is a game that serializes to text very well (and radio) vs other sports. Bringing it to the terminal is cool too.
Yeah Im just now realizing how the baseball scoring conventions are basically a DSL for a baseball game. There is a standardized way for expressing what happens in a game. I wonder if this has been leveraged in any interesting programs.
There's a standardized way to express what is happening in the game too- you'll often hear on the radio and television broadcasts the play that just happened using numbered positions on the field. 1 is pitcher, 2 is catcher, 3 is first baseman, 4 is second, 5 is third, 6 is shortstop, etc. so you'll hear something like "6-4-3 double play" which means the ball was fielded by the shortstop (6), thrown to the second baseman (4) for the first out, then to the first baseman (3) for the second one.
Makes it easy to visualize the game if listening on the radio.
When I coach my youth teams, I always list their positions by number. I derive some minor benefit from doing that, but I'm also hoping that by having them learn the position numbers, it will make it easier for them to enjoy audio broadcasts of baseball games. There's a special kind of fun in listening to those.
I think we are saying the same thing. This is the same as scoring the game they are just saying it out loud. Maybe my example didnt pick the most illustrative details.
Retrosheet is a project which reconstructs historical baseball games from old newspaper accounts, scorescards purchased at estate sales, and other means. They actually have an ASCII scorecard format:
Originally to parse these out people used MS-DOS utilities written by the guy who made the Diamond Mind Baseball game. There's a more modern set of utilities called Chadwick now so you don't have to use DOS.
In baseball, the baserunners are allowed to advance to the next base at any time the ball is "in play" which includes when the pitcher (vaguely similar to bowler in cricket) is holding the ball.
When a baserunner tries to advance without the ball ever being hit, this is called a "steal."
When the baserunner and batter are coordinating so that the batter will try to hit the ball during a steal, this is called a "hit and run." The idea is that the infielders will be getting in position to get the runner out, so won't be in good position to play a ground-ball hit by the batter.
So consider a play where a batter strikes out, then the baserunner is thrown out trying to advance (a strike-out throw-out double play). If it's a swinging strike, that might be a failed hit and run, but if it's a strikeout looking, then it's almost certainly a failed attempt at a steal (with the minority of the time it being the batter missing the signal for a hit and run).
I should acknowledge that 2 strikes with fewer than 2 outs is not considered a good count to try a hit and run; unless a poor batsman is up next you are often better off having a fresh count with the next batter. On the other hand a hit and run is really only effective when it's a surprise.
It doesn't really matter. But it's a datapoint that, say a batter has a lot of strike outs looking, they may have a poor sense of the strike zone. Or if a batter has a high swinging strike out rate then it says that their pitches are deceptive and have a lot of movement.
In baseball you DO differentiate between whether you struck out swinging or looking.
It matters for the pitcher because if you can disguise your pitch well enough that it looks like a ball coming in but is actually a strike, so that the hitter doesn't even try to hit it, that is a great signal.
As a batter, you typically* want to swing at strikes, so you want to know if you are letting hittable pitches go by. From the time baseball players are like 10 years old, you'll hear coaches and parents yelling "be a hitter, don't strike out looking!".
* there are always situations you probably don't want to swing, like if you have 3 balls and no strikes, you usually want to not swing, and assume you'll get another ball and will get walked to get on base. There are a lot of other situations where you do or don't swing, and the strikeout looking vs swinging measures that.
I do dev work for a marketing dept of a large company and there is a lot of talk about optimizing for LLMs/AI. Chatgpt can drive sales in the same way a blog post indexed by Google can.
If a customer asks the AI what product can solve their problem and it replies with our product that is a huge win.
If your business is SEO spam with online ads, chatgpt might eat it. But if your business is selling some product, chatgpt might help you sell it.
I think it’s going to be even worse - companies are going to go to ChatGPT with lawyers and say you are making false/unfair claims about our product. We should be able to give it this copy with correct information to consume.
They have many ways to manipulate the LLM's results, for example they can use a lot of the same mechanisms that are used to block or filter out inappropriate material.
I once had to migrate a good number of web properties off of Cloudflare for a client. They were an agency that had used it as a go-to for many years and many clients, until the CEO of the company stated publicly that they would no longer use cloudflare as a political thing (there had been a news story that Cloudflare was providing ddos protection for some Nazi websites and refused to take them down, or something similar enough).
My takeaway was basically that people use Cloudflare a lot because it is a strong service with a ton to offer at a very low price point. It's a bit like gmail - just very convenient and offers a lot for free or very cheap. Switching at that scale made a significant increase in their monthly bill.
I do applaud people who go out of their way to create alternatives to major services like cloudflare, gmail, chrome, etc. As an individual it can be hard to do though, or at least not always the path of least resistance.
A real improvement to the documentation or readme is welcome, even if it is only a minor improvement. I have put in small grammar PRs on some documentation myself.
On the flip side, I used to get a lot of spam PRs that made an arbitrary or net neutral change to our readme, presumably just to get "contributor" credit. That is not welcome or helpful to anyone.
Chagas disease is the one that scares me, since it seems easy to contract and not know it. Rabies is definitely more lethal but hopefully you could recognize the exposure event and get treated.
Worth noting that many human cases of rabies infection involve bat bites, which (especially from vampire bats) can be hard to notice at all if they happened very suddenly or while you were asleep. The scarier thing is that once the virus is inside you, the arrival of symptoms can only mean that it's already too late for prophylaxis.
I remember the case of a woman in California, a teacher, who picked up a stunned bat that had accidentally flown into her school room one day. While she carried it over to the window to release it, the bat bit her without her even noticing. Weeks later she was diagnosed with rabies and died soon after. Only after the diagnosis did anyone make the connection to the incident with the little bat.
Edit: As for chagas, it's scary but not something worth blowing too far out of proportion either. I live in a country where chagas is endemic and even here it's exceptionally rare outside of deeply rural areas with lots of poverty and extremely low quality housing. The housing is a key transmission factor actually, since the bug tends to infect people with the parasite while they sleep, and it more easily enters barely-together rural shacks than it does properly built houses and apartments.
Having a library on location at a school is valuable. You can do research, you can discover new books, you can have a quiet place to study... I have loved every school library I've ever been in.
Any library is a nexus of knowledge and learning. They should be in schools.
The libraries in the schools I attended were primarily used to detain misbehaving students in quiet. The public library was much larger and was indeed worthwhile as a library per se. But our school libraries were small and poorly funded. That was fine: they still served a useful purpose.
It appears that today's school libraries and libraries in general have become a means for activist liberal political groups to introduce children to political/social ideas that, perhaps, those children are not yet prepared to deal with (YMMV). As a child I went to the public library for science and they had it in spades. Nowadays the science is still there but the librarians would rather you read something else.
My inclination is to de-fund any organization that pursues a political/social agenda by taking control of established institutions of government (schools, libraries, etc.). If necessary, I would de-fund the institution being abused.
That could lead to tons of countries having their own internet firewalls similar to China, if that's what they want to do. Which I probably wouldn't like.
But the alternative of being liable for any new legislation, fines, etc, from any country in the world just because I operate a small website on the internet seems at least equally bad.
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