This feels like a fun lightweight version of one of our products, vTime XR https://vtime.net/vtimexr which lets you chat with people both in VR and on mobile. It is amazing how much better chat is when you can face people and speak to them. When you throw in VR it gets pretty exciting too. Thanks for sharing.
1 in 1,000 people in the UK have died after contracting COVID (this number is rising).
2 people out of thousands vaccinated yesterday had an allergic reaction that they recovered from (both people carry EpiPens and have a history of allergic reactions).
Monitoring systems mean we know about this, so bottom line is everything is going well so far. We will obviously want to continue to monitor.
1 in 1000 deaths is of the entire U.K. population, not just of those who have contracted the virus. The death rate is roughly 1 in 28 for those who caught it.
I and a huge amount of other people are living in a flat which currently has a value of £0 and am currently waiting to find out how much remediation works are going to cost to make the building I live in safe. As it is deemed unsafe by retrospective government fire and safety requirements, it is impossible to get a new mortgage for and therefore impossible to sell. The remediation costs are likely to be in the 10's of thousands of pounds.
The building may have been built to meet the requirements at the time (12 years ago) and then again it may not have. The guidelines have also obviously changed since Grenfell. But as it stands right now, all costs are to be passed onto the leaseholder i.e. the person who owns and lives in the flat i.e me. I moved in one year ago, had all the survey's done, used a solicitor and followed all procedure. Other people are in even worse positions, if they can't afford a bill of £50,000 their only option maybe bankruptcy, if they are in various legal professions or an accountant this means automatically losing their license to practice. Other people who have used the governments partial ownership scheme, where you buy 25% of a property and then rent (paying 25% less rent per month) are being asked to pay 100% of the remediation costs. For a lot of people the costs are more than the 25% stake in the property they own.
Some property developers followed the guidelines at the time so say it isn't their fault. The government says it followed the standards at the time so it isn't their fault. The building inspectors which failed to properly inspect properties (when there were actual issues outside of what has been changed retrospectively) seem to have immunity against legal action. The cladding companies who made unsafe cladding are trying to weasel their way out of responsibility by saying it is safe in the right circumstances. It feels like there are a few slices of blame to dish out. But one party who has had NO involvement in any of this is the people living in the flats.
The most sensible option I have heard suggested so far is that the government pays to clean up this entire scandal, and then puts a levy on property developers making flats so they get a percentage back on each new development to slowly recoup the money. But instead of that, the government is making various noises about wanting to protect leaseholders whilst simultaneously not doing anything concrete, even though as I write this people are already filing bankruptcy, giving up their flat which has all the money they have ever saved in, and on top of that, the remediation work in subject to VAT so the government brings in tax for all work done to fix up this mess. You can track huge sums (millions of pounds) being donated/pumped into the conservative party by property developers, and of course members of the conservative party also have shares or other stakes in property development companies.
Colour me amazed! I saw a video of some buskers which someone shared a week ago and the tune I know but couldn't remember where it was from, it is a waltz and I thought maybe Swan Lake or Nutcracker but after listening to the soundtracks it clearly was not. At some point I was going to work out the melody on the piano (very basic strap line) and use that to search (there are a few sites which offer this and I have had luck with it in the past). But I just tried humming to Google, I have a sore throat after a minor op, have not long got up, and can't hum or hold a tune to save my life, but low and behold it offered up 3 results and it was the second one.
The Second Waltz, Johann Strauss.
Okay, a very famous piece of music, and a very recognizable melody, but I just thought my warble was so far off that most humans wouldn't be able to tell me what it was!
I remember, when starting university, with no real programming knowledge, making a little game in my spare time (a clone of Pang if you know it) but it was before I knew what a linked list is. I implemented things like the balls which bounce around the level in an array, and just gave that array a max size. I was very unsatisfied by this, and then later finding out about linked lists was an ah-hah moment, very satisfying.
Next project was making a "Countdown" game, where you are given 9 pseudo random letters and have to make the longest word you can. I found a dictionary as a text file, so could see if the word you entered existed. The game was on Gameboy Advance, so not a huge amount of space or very fast CPU. As you can imagine, walking the entire dictionary file from start to end looking for a word was far too slow. So there was another ah-hah moment when binary search was introduced.
Next I worked on a rendering engine for this device called GP32, you basically got a pointer to the screen buffer and could put what you liked in it, so I learned how to write polygon fill routines, back face call, etc but didn't know what perspective projection was or how to find out about it. I finally found a book, Game Programmers Black Book or something like that, which explained perspective projection, at least to some extent, another ah-hah moment (previously I was dividing my XY by Z as I knew I wanted things smaller in the distance but this doesn't give a nice result by itself).
These are just very early examples when I first started programming, when information was harder to find, and when a lot of games development involved DIY, if you want a polygon you need to pixel fill a polygon! Even when PS2 came out you still had to write ASM render programs to take an array of vertices and transform them, their UVs, etc and send them to the Graphics Interface.
But I haven't found later tech developments have stopped me finding and needing to use other algorithms and structures. Just last week I had to diagnose a crash which resulted with the target device and debugger showing a nonsensical callstack, so I enabled the profile options in GCC/Clang so I had an epilogue / prologue for every function that is called, so I could store my own call graph history, and then, on crash, display it nicely, with indentation etc. This allowed me to see what happened just before the crash (turned out to be a system UTF16 conversation routine stomping over a pointers boundaries as the NULL termination of the string was incorrectly done as if the string was a normal char*, effectively NULL terminating half of a UTF16 pair, which wasn't treated as a terminate, so the actual bug was bad string termination done by the off the shelf engine we use). As the profile code ran twice for every single function that was run, it had to be pretty efficient, using appropriate data structures, etc.
So I guess the point of this post is to say I believe having a good knowledge of algorithms and data structures always seems beneficial to me. The extent which some companies push them is too much for me, but I don't think this should lead to us thinking it is all pointless. There is a nice balance out there.
I don't think it is: perhaps your browser or image view is struggling to display such a large image. I say this as for me it displays identically to how the website displays on my phone.
I have an Early 2011 MBP which I stopped using precisely because it couldn't get Mojave and therefore couldn't run the latest Xcode and therefore couldn't build for iOS 13. When I searched it sounded like any hacked upgrades would leave the graphics in a pretty poor state and it sounded like it just wouldn't be worth it. So I am curious on your results?
The two issues I have with Google search recent: first, I often get results, when searching for something technical which look like they have huge potential, a sentence with my search terms in, amongst a technical looking paragraph, with a URL, at first glance, that looks good, I click on it and it attempts to take over the browser with spam, redirects etc, I then realize the domain had random characters before the end, but I wonder how such terrible results end up on Google. I want to ban these sites from my searches. Secondly, unrelated to this extension, recently, Google have started popping up a box with other search terms I may be interested in, just after the search loads, within the search results, and the amount of times I have gone to click, only to be last minute intercepted by a link in this box which suddenly appears is unreal. Anyone else get that?
To your second point, yes, all the time and it's infuriating. You either need to slow down how you use the search results page, or they appear from nowhere just as you're trying to click the second link.
What's worse is I then berate myself mentally as I know that Google has some metric on how many times these suggestions get clicked, and there's some product owner somewhere saying "wow!, x% of users use these suggestions, let's keep this feature!"
Never experienced the latter; but couldn't agree more on the first issue. Actually if you'd not articulated it I'd have thought it was only me. These (farm?) have super awesome titles and content description but then takes to (ph|f)ishy pages. Usually happens to me when I search "[Ebook Title] download". Interestingly of the late I don't see a lot of them after coming to Europe (and see Google mentioning some GDPR compliance related omissions).
To be fair, over here in the UK, we have MPH for roads, stones and pounds for peoples weight (kilograms are becoming more popular, in particular for the under 25s), feet and inches for peoples height (meters becoming more popular for under 25s). So we have a bit of a hybrid really, I am 36 so get a bit of both, but my parents need everything converted to "old money" as they call it, they can't imagine what 25cm length is, they would need it in feet and inches. It is less stubborn for them, more, "why bother"? They can get by as is and have other things to occupy their time than trying to work out what familiar distances and weights are using a different scaler. Given that roads are still imperial as are lots of other things (mattress sizes, timber sizes, etc) it isn't like if they switched to metric it would even fix anything useful.
I think the important distinction here is that the UK is definately on the path to transitioning away sensibly in that imperial units haven't been taught at any school at any level for many years. All product units (litres, kgs etc) in shops are given in both metric and imperial, with the metric part required by law and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.
In an odd way, the US is fully metricized: they’re one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Metre, and redefined all of their legacy units in terms of SI ones [1]. SI units are used directly in the sciences and most products have the SI equivalent listed alongside the traditional measure. I understand that industries with international supply chains, like the auto industry, are also mostly metric these days.
There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change?
> and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.
And also because that's what was used to actually design the container. Milk bottles in 1 / 2 / 4 / 6 pints (imperial pints, not US pints), 454 g jam jars.
>• Beer served in pints by on-licenses, millilitres by off-licences
Sure but a pint is defined as 568ml. The only one that really is quirky is how people haven't yet grasped kilometers yet they're the easiest to grok, it's just 1.6 * miles.
_Personally_ the only time I care about mpg is when looking at how far I can travel on a tank of fuel. Or, when the fuel warning light comes on (you have 5L of fuel left, how far is that going to get you).
In essence I'd argue that most of the use of the any fuel efficiency metric is to simply rank cars, rather than to ever back out a genuinely useful cost/distance number. At which point furlongs per quart would be as effective as anything else...
Canada has gone mostly metric, now, but growing up on a farm a few decades ago, I definitely got a hybrid. People's heights and weights were imperial, other things were mostly metric. Gravel roads were miles, highways kilometres. Oven temperatures were Fahrenheit, human temperatures Celsius. The really perverse one is that when referring to gallons, we had to specify US or imperial.
Heh, it’s funny you use the past tense when listing those.
- People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches.
- Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may have switched to kilograms, but I’m pretty sure asking someone how much they weigh in kg would result in a blank stare while they try dividing by 2.2 in their head.
- The entire official highway system has moved to kilometres, and you’ll pretty much never see a sign in miles. But... the grid system for gravel roads (from the Dominion Land Survey) is in miles and obviously we can’t go around changing everyone’s property boundaries, so they’ll stay in miles forever. Most rural folks know the 1 mile x 2 mile grid, and directions from one farm to another will almost always be (2 miles east, 3 miles south)
- I think oven temperatures remain in Fahrenheit because of our collective shared culture with the US. Most recipes you’re going to find have cooking temperatures in F. More things have shifted towards C though; growing up I recall house temperatures to generally being in F, and now they’re frequently in C.
Well, I've found most people younger than me do seem to know their height/weight in metric whereas I don't have a clue even though I use metric for just about everything else. There may still be a bit of an urban/rural divide to it as well as age and perhaps, province or region.
