Interesting, the Devonian also appears to be the period at which fish started sporting limb like appendages and muscle structures, and other animals started to explore land. Perhaps unlimited body growth doesn't work well for animals not entirely supported by water.

Interestingly, the limbless boa constrictor's growth slows, but never stops.

some of us are anti-capitalist

I was going to ask more about your philosophy, but after collapsing all of the other replies, I got to see what you were replying to.

I fear the page formatting caused an entirely respectable joke to be lost to many people

This whole thread is utterly ridiculous. I can't take anyone seriously who is sitting here saying they can't take someone else seriously over this, or even saying anything at all about it as though it were the tiniest bit significant.

It's like Vance on Zelensky's clothes. Exhibiting high ignorance and triviality while in the very act of presuming to accuse someone else of being unserious.

I believe they are implying that the US itself isn't in a healthy state. Economic disparity mostly, but also politically, socially, and likely physically. I think many would agree.

I can second this, Termux + Emacs turned my phone back into a personal computer.

It is helpful to add extra keys to your touch keyboard, which you can do by editing your termux properties file (see https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard). Helpful when you don't have a hardware keyboard available.

This seems like a terrible analogy, as a vitamin is something you can't live without, while pain killers mask the problem. I'd think one would want to be a vitamin and not a pain killer, but the opposite suggestion is being made. Maybe that's why this hasn't stood the test of time.

> a vitamin is something you can't live without

They are talking about vitamin supplements, not literal vitamins that you need in order to live. Vitamin supplements do not survive in a budget reduction spreadsheet - they're easy to let go of for a while. On the other hand, if you're in pain, you need painkillers, and you're not going to be thinking about your budget, you're just going to go get some to get rid of the pain, even if it's just a temporary fix (and even better for the business if it's just a temporary fix - recurring revenue!).

That's the whole thing, the whole "solve a real problem" thing they keep talking about for startups.

Thanks for the clarification. I got what they were going for it just didn't hit right.

I think supplements would have been a more effective word choice for the analogy for me, as vitamins reference something that is required for life.

You don't need vitamin supplements. You don't need to waste money on vitamin pills. You just need to eat food, and ideally avoid wacky diets like only eating meat or only eating plants or anything like that.

Eat a balanced diet, go outside sometimes, and you'll be fine.

One single cherry tomato contains enough vitamin C to last you for a week. If you take a vitamin C tablet too, you're just making your pee more expensive.

Some people really do need to supplement things because of idiosyncratic metabolic issues (particularly for B12) or just not having access to enough (RDAs for vitamin D are a joke and normal Western diets can easily be out of whack in terms of omega fatty acid balance).

Vitamin C is presumably not saving any meaningful number of people from scurvy in the developed world, but it does seem to be at least a darn good placebo. There's more to health than avoiding deficiency diseases; and we're talking about typically pennies per day here anyway. A small amount compared to the food it's supplementing.

I'm curious if this method could be used along with super critical CO2 turbine generators. In other words after extracting the energy stored in compressed CO2, if you could then run it through a heat exchanger to bring it up to super critical temps and pressure and then utilize it as the working fluid in a turbine.

It looks from the diagram that a turbine is the energy extraction mechanism? As you'd expect.

Correct, going from cold compressed liquid co2 though. For supercritical CO2 one would then heat up the gas and use it as a working fluid to turn the turbines further.

If you could reuse the same turbine, one could store excess solar/wind energy in the compressed gas form, and then fire up a natural gas or biomass gasification reactor and then feed the heat into the system to produce more electricity on demand.

There are some contradictory claims here.

Boilerplate comes when your language doesn't have affordances, you get around this with /abstraction/ which leads to DSLs (Domain Specific Languages).

Matrix math is generally done on more than raw bits provided by digital circuits. Simple things like numbers require some amount of abstraction and indirection (pointers to memory addresses that begin arrays).

My point is yes, we've gotten ourselves in a complicated tar pit, but it's not because there wasn't a simpler solution lower in the stack.

I haven't tried them, but they only require a zipcode and use ZKP (zero knowledge proofs) for payment authentication.

I agree, but you can mitigate that to some extent by using a phone number that is not linked to your identity.

Phreeli [https://www.phreeli.com/] allows you to get a cell number with just a zip code. They use ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proofs) for payment tracking.

In my country, you cannot legally get a phone number not linked to the identity, and the prices are relatively high on the black market. Also, the phone discloses your location with pretty good precision, especially in US where everyone is living in their own house.

As much as I like e-ink, it has terrible refresh rates. I'd love a larger version of the Sharp Memory display technology that could support at least 80 characters wide, and perhaps 8 bit greyscale. The current ones support 60hz refresh and sip power but are limited to black and white only.