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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Point 1 has to be chosen when the cat is young. Forcing an outside cat to suddenly only be inside often doesn’t work.

    I adopted a 7-year-old cat from the shelter, and after a week of having to be inside all the time, he got more and more frustrated. After a week and a half, he escaped during the night. In the morning, while I was panicking, he came strolling in as if nothing was wrong.

    Since he apparently comes back, I allowed him outside from then on. Since that moment, his behaviour inside has improved a lot. No more random play attacks on my ankles and hands, and generally much calmer.

    He has also come back home with mice several times. He always eats them. So I think he is very used to living outside. Maybe been a stray, or a farm cat.

    Forcing him to be inside would feel cruel.






  • What you are mentioning is forcing companies to comply when selling inside the EU or California. The EU does not force companies to comply with their specifications outside of the EU. Companies simply do so because it is convenient.

    The EU cannot decide how cars should be made that are sold in California. If they tried, I bet the US government would have something to say about it.

    What the EU can do, is exert influence to get other governments to adopt the same rules. This already happens with a lot of countries surrounding the EU. But asking another government to adopt rules, is wildly different from forcing companies to adhere to those rules inside the borders of another government.


  • Not entirely. There still exists trade agreements, and diplomatic pushback.

    Forcing companies to make products to a certain specification, would mean the EU is attempting to regulate other markets. Markets it has no direct governance over. While it may come from good intentions, it still invades the authonomy of the governments that should have governance over these markets.

    Much better would be to work together with other countries, and help these countries implement similar rules, and enforce them together. Like, pretty much that the EU is doing for its members in the first place.




  • The problem with C++ is not the lack of safety features. It’s the ever lasting backwards compatibility that is keeping it both alive and down at the same time.

    Having to support 50 year old code, is going to limit any restriction you place. But it is usually the restrictions that make a language good.

    Example: You can write perfectly good modern C++ code without any pointers. But pointers are so ingrained into the language, that it is impossible to remove them.



  • In The Netherlands, the power grid has been turned into a different company than the power supply company. Same for gas and internet. The infrastructure companies are tightly regulated, to the point that they might as well be gpvernment branches. The providers however, are free to offer whatever.

    The result is healthy competition where possible, without any company gaining a monopoly position over the utilities of individuals.

    The drawback is that they figired out that the best way to make money, is of the backs of lazy people. People who don’t want to switch providers, cause that means effort. Hence, not actively looking for a better offer every few years is quite costly.








  • You can look up what the acronym AESA means without unstanding it.

    Take two speakers that are next to each other. If they emit a tone of the same frequency, the sound will “add up” and be louder in some directions, and cancel out to some degree in others.

    A phased array radar uses the same concept, but now on electro magnectic waves, instead of sound waves. And with much more than just 2 emitters. By carefully choosing the phase of the signal in each emitter, itnis possible to both choose a single direction that receives the strongest signal, and to tighten the spread around that direction (creating a pencil beam). This is what the dish is for in standard radars.

    If these phases can be fully controlled electronically, you can steer where you are looking, and swap between wide and narrow search beams in an instant. However, that is not a trivial thing to produce. So cheaper phased array radars use mechanical systems, or partial electronic steering (example: only horizontal steering).