Actually:

2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +

10 keystrokes

I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.

On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:

2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =

9 keystrokes

I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!

If you can eat well for $1 then it is definitely a poor country relative to the US. Differences in purchasing power are a direct result of differences in wealth.

You can’t though. People have the right to refuse to sell. See the whole saga with trying to get Mr Acker (played by Barry Corbin) to sell his house in Better Call Saul. If you don’t have the legal power to force someone to sell then they can hold out as long as they want.

There’s also the issue of supply and demand. If you’ve got a ton of money and you’re willing to spend above market prices for many different properties you need to buy along a route then the market price will skyrocket as people learn and start to hold out for more and more money. The usual way developers get around this is to quietly acquire the land at market prices without drawing attention to it but that can take years and years because most properties are not up for sale at a given time. Try to make an offer to someone who isn’t actively selling and you risk them going public and exposing your whole scheme.

I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we can’t do that because of property rights etc.

Aladdin was my favourite Disney film as a kid. None of the characters are white Europeans! The villain is a real villain: someone who is evil that the heroes must defeat.

We left the leafy jungle and built a concrete one. We moved the competition indoors.

I see this a lot and GM definitely deserves a large share of the blame but we also need to look at ourselves, our culture, and the way we decided to evolve our cities.

Redlining, white flight, car-centric suburbs, HOAs, wide streets, 2-car garages, Hollywood movies like Rebel Without a Cause. The list of factors goes on and on and on.

A lot of people like to blame boomers for all our ills but I think the trend started earlier with people who were teenagers at the end of WW2. They were too young to fight in the war but they were old enough to get sucked into this brand new marketing and cultural phenomenon known as the teenager.

Prior to WW2, marketers targeted only older adults and their messaging was very practical and family-oriented. After WW2 there began a movement towards teenage independence, rebellion, and rock & roll. The centre of all this independence was the car!

Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.

They’d have to tear down all the tall trees in the neighbourhood to make room for the power poles. There’s no way in hell the car-centric folks who live here would approve of that!

When you walk down the sidewalk around my street you walk in the shade of these trees most of the time. Replacing those trees with ugly power poles and overhead wires would ruin the character of the neighbourhood.

They’re not just random examples for some people though. For some indigenous peoples these items are a foundational part of their cultural practices.

No, there’s a lot bigger difference than that. I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump. Unlike an air conditioner, it’s designed to operate continuously with a variable speed compressor and cooling fan. It’s easily capable of running for days on end during the coldest times of the year (well below freezing). It’s also capable of defrosting itself which is critical for winter operation because it’s literally cooling the air around itself way below freezing.

My previous air conditioner could not run for long cycles like that without the compressor shutting down as a protective measure. It had no ability to defrost itself and its vertical fan orientation allowed it to fill up with snow and ice during the winter, clearly making it totally inoperable until spring when the weather was warm enough to defrost it and dry it out.

I’ll take the GEP Gun!

They’re actually not hard to replace at all. Just look up “shower cartridge replacement” on YouTube.

How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?

You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.

The commands aren’t very complicated. You’re mostly looking at stuff, taking stuff, or using items on stuff. It’s usually just [verb] [noun] type simple 2 word sentences.

The hard part of Zork is figuring out where to go and what to use where. Navigation in the game is usually by compass directions but the map is not a plain grid, so you can go north and then go west and end up right back ever you started for odd reasons. You’re highly encouraged to make your own map on paper, in addition to lots of notes about things you saw in each area.

The game even includes a maze, a reference to the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure’s “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Navigating it is a real challenge!

Learn how to stir fry. It’s the ultimate vibe cooking technique. You can stir fry pretty much any protein, veggie, or carb (or any combo) and create awesome meals easily and cheaply!

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

― Jean-Luc Picard

Sometimes we get stuck in local extrema. The biggest challenge facing the human race is not climate change, it’s collective action. Simply put, we’re unable to cooperate effectively enough on a large scale to be able to deal with these sorts of problems.

My city could invest billions of dollars in building a fully electric streetcar transit network and climate change could still proceed largely unabated due to the actions of other people in other areas. In that scenario, my city ends up losing because climate change happened and we wasted all that money on a system that didn’t stop climate change. This is the worse possible outcome so the rational thing (on an individual level, see game theory) to do is avoid it by doing nothing.

There are lots of people who use public transit in my city, they just don’t live in the suburbs.