I have some professional experience using a visual programming language on the same files with many coworkers. Here are the biggest pain points I experienced:
Diff, merge, search/replace, copying code directly from chat or websites into a REPL or file to try it out.
I have used a handful of other visual languages and when I see a new one I am on the lookout for use cases that involve more than one programmer, sometimes not even knowing each other; features that make it compatible with existing file and line oriented version control systems or provide an alternative(which is a project in itself, hard, and might not be as modular)
Learning about visual programming languages gave me a new appreciation for the simple elegance of text and IMHO the future of them will be those that easily map back and forth between text and graphics so you can have the best of both worlds and continue to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Does anyone konw of languages that translate to/from text well?
Well, if you like the general sound of playing the home row in this layout, then simply remapping this thing for Dvorak might get you somewhat far toward that goal since the home row actually contains the vowels and common consonants.
I don't know what qualifies as "really good examples" but there are lots of random things that use metaprogramming in some capacity and are popular. Lots of IDLs, serialization formats, ORMS etc. I am thinking stuff like Protocol Buffers, Hibernate, Swagger, etc.
Thanks, I also love mason jars. I hate to point it out, but isn't that Cuppow product also made of ambiguously "BPA Free" plastic? Better than an all plastic container anyway.
I advise caution about various percents being thrown around without enough context. I understood the 50% figure above as describing the conversion of heat energy into motion, e.g. inside of a natural gas power plant. The figures you quote are defined as being on the customer side of the energy meter.
Further below that calculation is updated to try and reflect the source fuels using some US EPA numbers: "The (US averaged) inefficiencies recalculated relative to source fuels energies are hence 25% for induction cooking surfaces using grid electricity, 84% for induction cooking surfaces using on-Site Solar, and 38% for gas burners.
The original point (that burning fuel to heat things to spin things to make electricity which is moved to your home to heat a pan is less efficient than moving the fuel to your home and burning it there to heat a pan) is maybe better illustrated by the EPA source-site ratios given to make that adjustment: "3.34 for electricity purchased from the grid, 1.0 for on-site solar, and 1.047 for natural gas. The natural gas figure is slightly greater than 1 and mainly accounts for distribution losses". So if the "electricity purchased from the grid" was generated with natural gas in the first place, you can and see the difference there.
So, methods that don't rely on the convection of air to the pan. I would guess an induction cook top would be a better example than a ceramic element.
At a quick glance, if these efficiency percentages being thrown around are actually comparable(maybe not), than induction still beats fancy convection pots even with heatsink bottoms like these:
http://www.appliancemagazine.com/editorial.php?article=2257&...
> It looks like the inside of the pan has the same fins
I couldn't find out if it does. I found others, like the pots in the link above that have a flat inside.
My guess is that using a pressure cooker with an induction cooktop fed by on-site solar would be the most efficiency possible, but I have not done the math and would love to be corrected.
This comment really resonates with me. It is what I think of when I hear that quote,
"Technology has the shelf life of a banana". It demotivates from starting new side projects when the old ones take such efforts just to set up again. Code can give the impression that it has some timeless value like some truth that has always existed and you have captured, but in reality code cannot "exist"(or fulfill its purpose) in isolation.
>they'd be just as cryptic to me as Mandarin characters
Yes the meaning would be just as cryptic, but the act of typing and probably memorization would be much easier. As an exercise, try downloading an input method for a foreign character set and typing out a string that you see rendered in an image.
>the game no longer trusts the client with coordinates and instead the client sends a list of jumps/flaps made by the player during the attempt. This means the attempts of other players are no longer seen in real time, but rather you see "recordings" instead.
They were never seen in "real time" anyway. Communicating more facts that could have been derived from a smaller set of different facts does not make it any less of a "recording" of facts or more "real time". Fewer facts to communicate may enable lower latency in their delivery, which is a better definition of "real time". Would it be any less of a "recording" to send the rendered pixels of the fish? I would argue the opposite.
Perhaps the point was that much more time was passing before elements of this list in the new format were sent, is that true?
There is a Sega Genesis emulator, blastem, whose premise is that that even when extreme accuracy is the primary goal, it can still be done efficiently.