Here begins the year-end link clearance.
- This has always bothered me: Pinocchio is a story by an Italian author set in Italy about a puppet with an Italian name. But the Pinnochio-themed restaurant in Disneyland is named Pinocchio Village Haus and has Bavarian architecture. Why is Pinocchio’s Disney Restaurant German?. Furthermore, why does it serve American food?
- Six days with a big lollipop: I completed America’s most disgusting treat. Fran Hoepfner undertakes an ill-advised journey.
- Bernadette Banner creates historical reconstructions of pre-World War I clothing. As an April Fool’s joke, she created an OnlyFans account for saucy Victorian ankle pics. Leaving aside the saucy content, and the stunning amount of talent required for the entire undertaking, my favorite part was her taking a selfie, dressed in Victorian clothes, with the aid of a drone.
- Do you have what it takes to be a U.S. Open ball person? I had always wondered how you got that job. I had also wondered about how the job is done. I found the answers in Ball Persons: A Training Manual, which outlines where and how to position yourself, how to deliver a ball to a player, and (my favorite) the protocols for moving balls around the court.
- History/fraud/self-aggrandizement corner: The maddening mess of airport codes! (16 minute video for process and history nerds). The man who tried to fake an element (90 minute video for fraud and history nerds), ROBLOX_OOF.mp3: The origin of the Roblox “OOF” sound (120 minute video for self-aggrandizement nerds), How the great online toaster hoax was exposed (2000 words for fraud and prankster nerds).
- I don’t know much about NASCAR or auto racing, but I was tipped off to Ross Chastain intentionally sustaining heavy damage to his car by using a video game move on the final turn to sneak into fourth place and advance to the next round. (One thing I found interesting was the illuminated pit signs at 1:21, which look like augmented reality just floating out there.) From what I can gather, this took advantage of a slow turn before the finish, and it was a very risky and dangerous move. I also found Dale Jr. and Steve Letarte discussing the incident, and I really admire Letarte’s style: Calm and extremely knowledgeable.
- Machine learning models are all the rage. AI Weirdness asks simple questions and gets weird answers. Holiday-themed examples: Valentine’s Cards. Candy heart messages. Hallowe’en candy. Toy fads.
- C++11 introduced uniform initialization, but uniform initialization of vectors is subtle. Uniform initialization isn’t. I have been bitten by the
w2example, and the results were not pretty.
This ends the year-end link clearance.
Yeah, if there was anything in C++ that I was allowed to revert (besides switch fallthrough by default), it would be the non-uniform initialization introduced by C++11. Well, I’d either revert it, or require that any a class’s constructors consist of either:
(a) only an std::initializer_list (and no other constructors, besides copy/move)
(b) accept any constructor, but do not prioritize std::initializer_list. One must explicitly pass the inner braces for the initializer list and the outer braces for the constructor call, with no implicit flattening of the two braces: std::vector v = {{1,2}};.