Wolf314159 @ Wolf314159 @startrek.website

Posts

0

Comments

534

Joined

1 yr. ago

I guess they couldn't get it suspended long enough to get a measurement from the crane itself?

My smartphone isn't a phone with "extra" features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don't want to carry an extra "dumb" phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver's license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the "year of the Linux desktop". But a kid can dream.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called "Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection." I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it's mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I'm not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don't think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I'm familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician's or band's stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I'll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don't have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It's never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

They missed the other big one:

If you think you're hungry, drink a glass of water first. You're probably just thirsty.

To a gator you are only easy food, troublesome food, or not food. (Momma gators may make the additional distinction between "threat to my brood" and "not a threat to my brood".) They are opportunistic feeders, so them seem chill. They are NOT chilling, they are patiently waiting, conserving energy, for an opportunity for troublesome food to make itself easy food. A relatively fast moving and agile human feeding a gator is troublesome food dispensing easy food. Either way, to a gator fed by people, you (and by association any other humans) are just food that hasn't become easy food, yet. They aren't chilling, they are waiting for an opportunity.

It seems likely that this guy is keeping this gator in a climate a little cooler than what the gator is used to. Cold gators don't just slow their movement. Their entire metabolism slows down. Cool enough (and I'm talking mild Florida winter cool here) and the gator may stop eating for a few weeks or even months. It may not even bother going after easy food if it's cool enough because it's body may not be able to digest it even if it did. That's probably when photos like this would be taken. A zonked out cold gator with a belly full of rotten meat that it can't digest until the temperature rises.

The whole scene here looks like that girl from the walking dead with zombie pet. It's all going to end very badly one day.

Those people aren't the lowest except in pay. Those people are the engineers, the teachers, and the administrators. They execute actual functions that directly benefit society. These are the people that prevent crime through their support of the community. It's like calling the foundation of a building the lowest function of a building. That may be true on the surface, but the metaphor quickly breaks down.

There is another lowest of the low in government that does little in the way of support, unless you're one of the elite. The lowest rung of the government ladder are the people whose job it is to punitively punish people for breaking the laws. They do not prevent any crimes, and the courts have ruled that they are shielded from any responsibility in that regard. They protect inequity between the rich and the poor. They are trained to discriminate and profile. Their very fraternity is rooted in tribal exclusion, us vs. them. They even desecrate the national flag as a symbol of that fraternity. Sometimes that insult even gets worn as part of their official uniform. They restrict and opress rights granted by the law at the whim of politics and oligarchs. They are licensed to murder, with immunity from responsibility. They are encouraged to remain ignorant of the laws that they are tasked with enforcing and they wear that ignorance as a legal shield against consequence and accountability. And yet these gangs of murderous thugs are routinely paid better than any of the others. They are called heroes when they do the bare minimum. They are applauded for showing the bare minimum of humanity.

If this government were a family with the state and federal administration as the parents, then the teachers/engineers/administrators would be the older siblings, aunts, and uncles. The police would rule that house through fear like a toddler on a sugar high with a gun. Occasionally that toddler may shit itself, steal from the cookie jar, or murder a loved one. But all is quickly forgiven because after all they are a only toddler.

A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just "power strips" that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they'll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don't last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.

Let's play Peaches on some peaches.

The nostalgia is the point. Nobody stores crackers in barrels anymore, but everybody did then because it was the best option at the time. Same reason the save icon is a floppy disk.

I'd ask a couple thousand people to guess in private. So the most popular answer would probably be either surprisingly close to correct or Cuppy McHazelnutface.

To be fair, nothing on the face of this box indicates any relation to chocolate anyway, except the company brand by implication. My only other clue as an outsider was that the wording "Dairy Milk" was just a little too weird to be taken at face value.

The point is that those are 2 separate and distinct units. I'm not saying it's not a valid representation of time. I'm say the units in this case are actually hours and minutes, not only hours. It is compounded by the fact that the title is talking about time in a way that is ultimately also a ratio (something a colon is also used to represent), the ratio of hours on the device to the hours in a day. There were many other ways to represent this data that would have been less ambiguous, more clearly showing real differences at a glance, and paying attention to using more appropriate significant digits.

This place should be called mapshitposting for how often actual map enthusiasts get voted down for pointing out amateur mapping and statistical blunders here.

Wait till they hear about the people farming, harvesting, and shipping the vegetables.

Are these ratios of hours online in a day (3:11 implies 3 out of 11 hours) online per day? That seems unlikely given how difficult comparisons like that would be to make.

That leaves the other option that these "hours" are actually hours and minutes (hours:minutes). But, that option is almost as bad simply because then the map subtitle has lied to us through omission in not mentioning minutes.

This map should have either just shown the number of total minutes or shown the hours in decimal rounded to a sane number of significant digits. Making a distinction of a minute or three amongst such broadly general averages of almost certainly guesstimated numbers self reported in a survey seems a poor choice.

Primates make tools to help eating ants, among other things. It's a bit of an unusual snack, but people eat ants too. We are anteaters? How much of your diet needs to be ants before you're considered an anteater?

Not to be confused with disco snails.

I always keep a few episodes of the various Pod Castle, Escape Pod, etc. short fiction podcasts loaded up for those times I'm stuck on a trip and between books.

Have you never actually seen a crosswalk before? Because I'm having trouble figuring out which part of these rainbow flag colored crosswalks makes them look any less like a crosswalk or makes them less visible or recognizable in any way. Literally the only other pavement marking that comes anywhere near looking like or being placed in the same way on a road is a stop bar. And guess what, car drivers routinely mistake the plain crosswalks for stop bars, thereby blocking the crosswalk. Making the claim that painting a pedestrian crosswalk in bright colors somehow makes them less visible or recognizable has got to be the dumbest argument I've heard this week.

Somebodies lying (or at least being deceptive). I checked the link. There's no mention of 20 countries anywhere. Nobody said 20 countries here either. Setting that pedantry aside. In fact, even if it were used by significantly fewer than twenty countries, the ones that without a doubt do use them are spread around the globe. Thus, they are used globally.