A programmer with an interest in transit, making music, and building things of all types.

I have dysgraphia which makes writing difficult for me. I hope you can figure out what I mean despite my issues.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It is really hard to do a good studies on diet. You end up with one of two conclusions: “Despite our best efforts we were unable to get our test subjects to follow the required diet”; or “These results may not generalize to the general population who isn’t confined to [a prison cell/hospital bed]”.

    We can study how one meal effects your body, but that isn’t really helpful - Does it matter if some diet causes cholesterol to go up/down for a bit and then it returns? And cholesterol is one of those markers where we have enough studies to conclude that high is bad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that high for a bit and returning to low is also bad. Some things like smoking are such large effects that we can look at general population and make conclusions, but often the effect isn’t that large and so it is believed that some diet is good/bad, but we cannot prove it from data we can collect.

    The above is about actual science. Most mainstream diet books at best cherry pick some fact and then take it to an extreme to create some eating plan ignoring all evidence of other facts that might limit how far you can take this one. (that is assuming they start with a fact - just making up facts is common as well) The news media doesn’t care to figure out what is real science and what is made up facts.



  • A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I’ve never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.

    These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn’t make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.

    Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.