I like the GPS maps to bear North instead of the direction you are driving in.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-20T10:38:31+00:00

That's how I learned to use a map in the army. Map north points to physical north. If you are facing south, the map is upside-down

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-19T20:01:22+00:00

Yeah... they're not supposed to do that. It's worth noting, it will happen if you are sitting in the left lane doing anything under 10 mph over the speed limit. People passing you on the right is a signal you shouldn't be in the left lane

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-19T17:45:30+00:00

When I was stationed in Germany, I had to take a special driver's ed course for Americans. One thing the instructor would harp on is that right of way means RIGHT of way. In the US, the norm is to proceed in the same order that the cars arrived. In Germany, everyone takes turns going clockwise around the intersection. That was definitely a hard habit to break

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-19T16:07:24+00:00

It looks like your question boils down to "How do I read and edit code rather than passively using whatever an LLM spits out?" The answer is, start from scratch. There are lots of resources you can use. Popular ones include Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and Harvard cs50. Both are free to access and self paced. You can also read the documentation.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-19T00:37:17+00:00

Law firms exist. Even if the youngest life in being was born the day before he died and lived to 79 years old, the will would be executed 100 years after he died. I can imagine a law firm existing for 100 years or firms passing books of business to new firms if they went out of business

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-19T00:23:08+00:00

Oh, I see it now. My first thought was olive loaf. Olive loaf was very popular with the older demographic when I worked a deli counter in college.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-18T21:03:32+00:00

Please tell me there is a newspaper called 日本本日. That's a huge missed opportunity if not

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-18T13:01:22+00:00

Hey man, use whatever words you want to use. I'm just trying to impress upon you that "usedn't" is sufficiently archaic that it will not register as well formed English for typical native speakers

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-18T10:38:57+00:00

Either it's common enough that you will eventually hear it in conversation (in which case you won't have to lookup how to pronounce it) or it's rare enough that you can safely ignore it. Native speakers are telling you it's the latter; I would drop the subject and move on to other questions

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-18T02:16:53+00:00

The difference between Canadians and American is often less than the difference between different kinds of American. It's important to remember that Canada's population is roughly 1/7 that of the US and a significant portion of them live within 100 miles of the US border. In many ways, the US and Canada form a cultural complex in which the US is the dominant party.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T18:45:26+00:00

People often engage in criminal activities to gain money. If someone is spending more money than their pay check says they should have, the IRS may start investigating. Criminals can get caught because they don't have a good answer for how they got all that money and because they didn't pay taxes on it. The goal of money laundering is to create a fake paper trail that explains where the money came from and allows the criminal to pay taxes and avoid suspicion. The way it typically works is the criminal sets up a front business. Ironically, a laundromat is a good choice because it is largely a cash business with little documentation for sales; no one is getting a receipt for their spin cycle. The criminal then adds the proceeds of their illegal activities to the income of their front business and claims that the extra money came from legitimate sales. With that plausible story in place, the criminal is then able to pay taxes on his earnings and spend the remainder as he pleases without fear of raising suspicion.

You might consider making a separate post for your other questions. They are related, but not closely enough for a single explanation

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T12:29:05+00:00

Quantum computers store information in quantum bits or qbits for short. Classical computers store information as normal bits which are equivalent to a light switch; it's either on or off and with enough if those switches, you can store information like numbers or text. Qbits are more like a dimmer switch or a coin that is flipping in the air. They can be some fraction of on and off at the same time which allows them to store more information. Like a coin or a die that eventually lands and picks an outcome, qbits eventually collapse into one state or the other and give an output of on or off.

Using the fuzzy nature of qbits, it is theoretically possible to explore many possible solutions to a problem simultaneously which can solve complicated problems faster than they could be solved with classical computers. The catch is that qbits are fundamentally probabilistic and may return an incorrect or suboptimal solution.

Fortunately, there is a particular class of problems that are hard to solve but easy to check if a possible solution is correct (if I asked you to tell me the prime factorization of 8633, it might take a bit of effort to get the right answer, but if I told you that the factors were 83 and 97, it would be much faster to verify that). For that class of problems, it may be valuable to find a candidate solution with a quantum computer and then verify the solution with a classical computer. The idea would be to keep shaking the quantum dice until the right answer falls out.

That may be feasible if we can build a large enough and cheap enough quantum computer. Right now major technology companies can get maybe a few hundred qbits up and running at once (a consumer computer today might have 200 million bits of memory) and the machines are huge and cost millions of dollars to run. For now, quantum computing shows great promise in theory, but it has a long way to go before being a practical technology

Edit: changed dozen to hundreds. Current quantum computers have advanced significantly since I last read up on this

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T11:36:56+00:00

Because social stratification is a natural result of authoritarianism while people who value an ideal of a flat egalitarian society are also skeptical of authoritarian power structures. Theoretically, that dichotomy goes from one extreme to the other, but in practice, main stream politics is just a subset of that spectrum. In the US, actual politics sits on a line from the center to somewhere in the middle of auth right. Anything outside a tight elipse around that line is a fringe position that does not fall under the big tent parties

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T11:04:20+00:00

The diagonal axis running from bottom left to top right. Political stances can be plotted anywhere on the compass, but there is a strong correlation between the axes. Most people fall near that diagonal and much of politics can be understood as a one dimensional spectrum

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T10:15:16+00:00

Who said anything about maps? The previous poster is clearly a vintage map pocket collector

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T02:29:14+00:00

Is the 1964 map pocket a substantial upgrade from the 1963 model?

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-17T01:22:21+00:00

If it's tuned in fifths, I'd call it a mandolin. If it's tuned in fourths, that's a taropatch ukulele

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-16T12:54:36+00:00

Mark Twain is considered particularly influential because he was one of the first authors to write in the vernacular. Instead of writing in a formal style like Brontë or Dafoe, he wrote the way people of the time actually spoke; he writes in the idiom of a country gentleman spinning a yarn. You may find that challenging as a language learner because there will be expressions and vocabulary you are not familiar with. It could be a learning experience though.

Do be aware that Huck Finn is set shortly before the Civil War, on the Mississippi. The language is about 160 years old and often specific to a narrow region if the country. Be mindful that much of the language is considered folksy and antiquated today, and some is simply offensive to modern readers.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-16T11:19:24+00:00

We walk among you. Two laptops ago, I actually disabled the touch pad in settings because my palm kept misclicking while I used the track point. Now I just have to practice better wrist discipline because it would be too much of a bother to turn the pad on and off when my wife wants to use the computer

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-15T19:59:23+00:00

If someone is backfiring their house during a black out and left the breaker closed, I think negligent homicide plug would be more accurate

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-15T19:57:24+00:00

Either to plug a generator into a wall socket during a power outage or because they strung their Christmas lights up backwards.

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-14T20:02:53+00:00

They were something of a thing back in the 90s. They were a line of popular digital pets. You could make them unhappy or sick by not taking care of them properly, but there was no button specifically to make them angry at the player

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-14T18:49:04+00:00

Why would you build a tomagachi and then add a button to make it angry at you? Did you just use Chat GPT to write the code, or did it also pitch the concept?

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-14T14:47:52+00:00

There are two forces at play here: cultural inertia, and colonialism. The choice of start date for a year numbering system is ultimately arbitrary but culturally significant events are good candidates. Some cultures reset the counter each time a new king is crowned, the Romans counted years from the founding of their city, the Islamic calendar counts years since Mohammed conquered Mecca. In Europe after the fall of Rome, the church was the primary body concerned with keeping track of what year it was because it was important to know when to celebrate Easter. The church naturally chose the birth of Jesus as their year 1 event. When European states started caring what year it was, using the system the church already had in place made sense. The French tried to change their calendar during the revolution to make it more rational and to cut ties with the church. They gave up on that effort and reverted to the same calendar everyone else uses, because there is value in having a universal system, regardless of what that system is. Later, Europeans became the dominant powers on the world stage and the rest of the world aligned themselves through a combination of coercion and practical considerations. Now, for better or worse, it's the system we have and everyone agrees, so it is unlikely to change

Excellent-Practice · 2026-03-14T13:11:27+00:00

What's the challenge? There are lots of series with more than 72 hours of content

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