Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

Elsewhere on Fedi:

  • 2 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • I enjoy Sara Cox’s evening drivetime show. I sometimes wish I didn’t, but when you’re doing yet another 4-hour slog up the M1/M6 in evening rush hour traffic it’s perfect company.

    And Zoe Ball can be OK in the mornings, although I’ll often tune into something with a bit less chatter unless I’m feeling particularly enthusiastic. Other than those two shows, R2 doesn’t really do it for me. And yes, Jeremy Vine is utterly off-putting.



  • It’s a little more than 100€

    It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”







  • It’s a very flexible language so can find a niche almost anywhere. I know of fintech companies that use it extensively for their back end data processing systems, and I’ve seen some really interesting stuff done with Clojure and Apache Kafka. They’re a good fit for each other - Clojure, as a lisp, is optimised for processing infinite lists of things and Kafka topics can be easily conceptualised as an infinite stream of data.

    Also, when combined with Clojurescript, it provides a single language that can be used full-stack, so could drop in anywhere that you might otherwise use Node.

    But I think one of the best things about it is the way it forces you to re-evaluate your approach to development. It’s a completely functional language so you have to throw away any preconceptions about OO and finding new ways to resolve old problems is one of the things that should be a joy for most developers, even if it has no practical application.



  • Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.



  • You don’t need a desktop for CAD anymore.

    Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

    So OP needs to decide if they’re going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it’s a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.



  • With flying cars we’d have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.

    Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we’d take these two ton death machines and say “let’s put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from”? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.

    The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it’s a completely different scenario. And that’s what we’d have with flying cars. At least I hope so!



  • You might enjoy Peter F Hamilton’s books Pandora’s Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained. It’s somewhere between space opera and hard sci-fi but there are significant plots and sub-plots involving alien creatures ranging from the vaguely comprehensible (to humans) through to creatures that are almost beyond our ability to understand.