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flamingo_pinyata @sopuli.xyz
Posts 15
Comments 314
Progress: the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, spans across 26 lanes making it the worlds widest. The freeway is broken down in to 12 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes.
  • Well, that's the thing you could have it if you invested all the money that currently goes into highways. The amount of money is always limited (everybody hates taxes for a reason), so building large quantities of both is impossible.

    Roads are always going to cost more in the end, but they're easier to build incrementally. Boiling the frog situation.

    Even if policy of your local government changes (which is at least a little up to you) you will still have to suffer the current situation and keep driving for a while before a better system is built. But that's no reason to throw good money after the bad.

  • Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks
  • It's insane how much write-only documentation is produced by big companies. Usually there is some kind of regulatory reason - like some documents have to be preserved for 40 years. Luckily it's not mandatory to keep paper archives any more (if you live in a sane jurisdiction of course) .

  • Telegram says it has 'about 30 engineers'; security experts say that's a red flag
  • It's not even about the quality of individual people. The organizational structure of large companies encourages pointless work.

    Internal mobility and cross department collaboration are frowned upon. So you get many people doing duplicate work, new ideas don't propagate, and even if someone has an idea it's quickly shut down.

    The only way to achieve anything substantial is to be both: 1. assertive and energetic, and 2. at the correct level of hierarchy. And make no mistake even if you pull a miracle there will be no reward. Maybe a 3% raise at the yearly review.

    Sorry for the rant, I currently work in a company like this.

  • Cursed wretched marketing
  • I think it's a bit of both. The light blue color used is so called "complement color", meaning it's exactly the opposite on the color wheel to the Coca Cola red. Black and white pattern suggests to our brain to play with contrast. And of course we all know Coca Cola from all the marketing.

    Btw, After staring at it for a while I can kinda switch between red and white at will. Anyone else?

  • Did people really commonly believe in the inevitability of the "divine right of kings"?
  • There is a misconception that "divine right" of kings was a long standing tradition. It's a product of state centralization in 16-17th century Europe.

    The hereditary rule of kings had to be justified somehow so a legal fiction of divine right was established. As to how many people actually believed in it we can't really know, however there was pushback almost immediately, for example Republicans in English Civil War, Dutch Republic, various Italian and German states... Meaning to say It wasn't a universal concept even during the peak of its popularity.

    Earlier Medieval states often operated as elective monarchies, especially those of Germanic origins. Holy Roman Empire held on to the elective monarchy from 962 to 1804. In contrast France, despite common origins, slowly moved to the "divine right" concept, and pretty much pioneered early modern absolute monarchy.

    There is much more to be said for states in the rest of the world. Although monarchies, Japan and China had completely different justifications as to why the king is a legitimate king (and fall very much in the divine right category). Then were are various Native American nations with government systems which seem unusual from today's perspective.

    All this is to say that while some type of monarchy was the most common system before the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't universally accepted. And even when it was it wasn't necessarily of the divine right kind.

  • China starts smartphone inspections to boost 'anti-espionage efforts', raising fears among expatriates and foreign business people about arbitrary enforcement
  • That's just so impractical. The point of business travel is to get something done. For that you need your devices, and access to relevant data and systems.

    Setting up a clean device for every trip where you cross a controlled border is such a hassle it wouldn't really pass in any company. Well with the exception of defense companies, I could understand them being paranoid enough.

  • Surely "1337" is the same as 1337, right?
  • Just reminded me of an argument trying to explain that arithmetic with floating point numbers is not always correct to a coworker who was a mathematician just starting in software dev.

    In a mathematicians mind the fact that an arithmetic operation can produce inaccurate result is just incomprehensible

  • What are some marketing tactics that you dislike ?
  • Cold calling. And other proactive forms of sales when they seek you out and actively keep trying to convince you that you need their product.

    Bonus points if the sales person is unable to actually explain the product and keeps talking about "we don't sell products we sell solutions"

  • Server migration finished / Palvelimen siirto valmis
  • Please consider adding one more tier between 1€ and 5€: maybe 2 or 3.

    1€ just seems too low and while 5 (well 6.05 with tax) is not too much on it's own, it all adds up with other Patreons for those of us trying to keep the monthly bill down

  • How do you pronounce a name you haven't heard?
  • I think it's because writers take care to make the pronunciation guessable form the spelling. English is infamous for it's very inconsistent writing rules, however there are "rules". More like heuristics, but usually it's possible to write a word in such a way that others can guess the pronunciation, unless that specific word already has an accepted official spelling that is different.

  • Start ups when that VC funding kicks in
  • Wow you're lucky. I've always wanted a job like that.

    And for a while I had something similar but unfortunately rotten. We had a ping pong table, afterwork parties, no overtime, lunch, even a swimming pool. And we could use all of it.

    However we were seriously underpaid, I got an 80% raise just by saying hello in another company. No remote work without any reason at all (most of my team was in other countries). And awful decision making by upper management.

    Made me cynical if something like it is even possible. Glad to hear it is.

  • Like you never forgot a platoon in a foreign country

    Full story is even wilder and includes an army of gangsta rap fanatics

    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU9TGhrQnCc

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    Aircraft carried aircraft carrier

    There's more on this guy's Instagram page, so inconvenient to share... https://www.instagram.com/aircraft_experiment_amit_rana/reels/

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    www.the-express.com Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks

    Southern Alamance Middle School in Graham, North Carolina has taken drastic steps to reduce the time kids spend outside of class.

    Middle school removes bathroom mirrors to stop kids from making TikToks
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