I challenge you to make an appetizing meal out of the plants (and specific cultivars!) used as animal feed.

You’ll encounter math eventually. It could be as simple as implementing linear interpolation for a custom type, or understanding why a type is not suited for a particular application (e.g. never use floating points to represent money). If you delve into low-level networking, you’ll need a good understanding of binary/decimal/hexadecimal conversions and operations. If you go into game development or graphics, you won’t survive without a deep understanding of vectors, matrices, and quaternions. Any kind of data science is just math translated to a machine-readable language.

In my opinion, knowledge of the basic concepts is more important than being good at actually performing mathematics with pen and paper. For example, if you need to apply a transformation to a vector, nobody expects you to whip up a program that does the thing. Instead, you should immediately know:

• what a transformation is (translation, rotation, scaling, projection, etc),
• that each transformation has a corresponding transformation matrix,
• that you’ll have to deal with inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and
• that you’ll have to combine the transformation matrices and the original vector.

That abstract knowledge will give you a starting point. Then you can look up the particulars – the corresponding transformation matrices, the method to convert between inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and the process of matrix multiplication. I know because I failed calculus.

Elephants. African elephants have large ears to assist in maintaining their body temperature. Asian elephants that migrated farther north (India and S-E-Asia) evolved smaller ears because the evolutionary pressure wasn’t as significant.

For comparison: African, Asian

I’ve never seen that, even in university, and it would be equally as confusing without explanation.

Pascal uses = for comparison (and := for assignment), which confused the fuck out of me when I switched to C.

It’s a convention set by early programming languages.

In most C-like languages, if (a = b)... is also a valid comparison. The = (assignment) operation returns the assigned value as a result, which is then converted to a boolean value by the if expression. Consider this Javascript code:

let a = b = 1

1. It first declares the b variable and assigns it the value of the expression 1, which is one.
2. It returns the result of the expression b = 1, which is the assigned value, which is 1.
3. It declares the a variable and assigns the previously returned value, which is 1.

Another example:

let a = 1
let b = 2
let c = 3
console.log(a == b) // prints "false" because the comparison is false
console.log(a = b) // prints 2 because the expression returns the value of the assignment, which is 'b', which is 2

// Using this in an 'if' statement:
if (b = c) { // the result of the assignment is 3, which is converted to a boolean true
    console.log("what")
}

You can’t do the same in Python (it will fail with a syntax error), but it’s better to adhere to convention because it doesn’t hurt anyone, but going against it might confuse programmers who have greater experience with another language. Like I was when I switched from Pascal (which uses = for comparison and := for assignment) to C.

The 5V applies only to 4-pin type-A and type-B connectors.

USB Power Delivery over a regular USB-C-compliant cable delivers a variable current of up to 3A, using discrete voltages of 5V for up to 15W of power, 9V for up to 27W, 12V for up to 48W, and 20V for up to 60W.

Higher powers require dedicated USB PD-compliant cables that can handle up to 240W at a voltage of 48V.

My uneducated guess is money.

Manufacturers likely have factories (either theirs or a contracted company’s) where they can mass produce the power bricks for a low cost. Upgrading to a USB power supply doesn’t offer significant benefits compared to the power brick of similar wattage, and the up-front cost of setting up a new supplier is financially unjustified. The old technology works just as well, so why change?

High power USB is still a relatively new technology. I’m sure it will proliferate, but the consumer market has a fuckton of inertia.

Not me. Thankfully I live an ocean away from that hellhole.

What a way to put on the appearance of an enlightened neutral observer while completely ignoring the complex socio-political situation by reducing it to a simple, sweeping statement. Couldn’t have done it better if I tried.

I’m going to guess you’ve never lived in a totalitarian state. Travel to China and express your discontent with the ruling party. See what happens.

Never ask:

• A man his salary
• A woman her age
• An audiophile how much they paid for their hoard

On second thought, ask all of those questions.

• Secrecy is how employers get away with wage inequality.
• “I didn’t know she was 17” does not work in a court of law.
• An audiophile will proudly point at their favourite budget headset. I mean, the Samson SR-850 is just insane value for its price. Sure, it’s a symphony of plastics, the design is just a straight rip-off of the AKG K240, and the fixed cable is a bummer, but the frequency response and the soundstage are out of this world. Plus the impedance is only 32 ohms: it easily runs out of a smartphone.

Host a multiplayer game and annoy the shit out of people

Date an audiophile and you’ll never run out of quality cables. If you’re lucky, they might even agree to flog you with the Stax Lambda’s flat ribbon cable.

Exhibit #1 of why every vote counts and every voter is needed.

Adherence to a moral standard is secular, even if the source is a mythological text that is the foundation of a religion.

Keep in mind that the religious figure of Jesus predates Christianity.

In terms of religion, atheist. Adherence to a moral standard is secular and does not require a supreme being.

Yep. It’s called a sounding rocket. Jeff Bezos and his dick-shaped sounding rocket.

If he ever gets two vehicles into orbit and makes them dock together, the mental image might just be enough to kill me.

Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.

Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China’s case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.

That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There’s also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.

I recently had to rescue the SSD of a data science PhD student. While dumping the files, I noticed that he had a dozen copies of identically named large CSV files (I mean 20+ gigabytes each). I compared their checksums - they were copies of the same raw data file, just sitting there in the downloads folder. When I asked, he said he’d made several backups of the project. Including the data.

Unfortunately Windows somehow fucked up the partition table and took the “backups” with it.

The default home page for Microsoft IIS, the web server built into Windows Server (and probably some desktop builds too).