Skip Navigation
Why English language is sometimes "lazy", sometimes not
  • Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there's a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There's contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it's practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don't change over time.

  • I'm still worthy
  • I'm the opposite of this picture. It's like I have to relearn the game each time and fluid play takes a long time to return.

    Funnily enough my muscle memory persists to some degree though. So for instance if a particularly tough enemy is charging me I might push a specific key without actually knowing what it does. Afterwards I have to reason and rediscover what I was trying to accomplish and bind that action to the key I pressed.

  • Just not his thing.
  • You can see that it's symmetrical and that they used 6 diametrical cuts to make 12 pieces. So 2 are missing.

    Not that it matters much, but this little dishonesty just adds to the zaniness of the whole ad.

  • Horoscopes actually tell the personality of someone.
  • In my experience the big problem is not people self ascribing personality types but type casting others. When you expect others to have certain traits you also treat them accordingly.

    I can't believe she has trouble speaking in front of crowds, she's a lion after all.

    Then again horoscopes aren't unified or anything and you can just cherry pick from different sources and cultures to believe anything.

  • New dishwasher video drop
  • After watching the original video I started putting some additional powder at the bottom of the loading tray every wash and it works great. Clean dishes ever since, no pre rinse necessary. Can recommend 👍.

  • Commandline memes
  • git gud

    not a meme per se but I always found the command abcde confusing:

    user1: How to best rip this music album??

    user2: Oh simple: abcde

    user1: 🤔🤔?

    abcde stands for 'a better CD encoder', the more you know

  • Not Total Recall (1990)
  • I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand ...

    In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

  • Presidential party preference post WWII
  • I feel like when comparing over a such a vast time scale party affiliation becomes less useful as a metric.

    Society and mores have changed so much over the last 80+ years that it's better to ask about specific questions or habits like: Do you support a smoking ban in public spaces? or Schools should provide free meals to students: yes/no and see how the answers develop over time.

  • The N64
  • My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

    1. It's stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today's standards.
    2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
    3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don't 'bleed' into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

    The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.

  • The N64
  • Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

    IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn't use up all the data).

    In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn't go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?

  • Life Pro Tip!
  • This is what I used once when my keyboard broke and some keys stopped working. Even ordering the new keyboard was difficult when I couldn't type my delivery address properly.

  • The N64
  • Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.

  • The N64
  • It surely has its technical flaws but that's not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

    Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn't have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

    Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn't so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn't just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.

  • Irreguläre Ausdrucksweisen die an deutschen Sprachschulen weltweit gelehrt werden?

    Ich hatte mal eine Kommilitonin die größtenteils in den Vereinten Arabischen Emiraten aufgewachsen ist. Sie konnte perfekt Deutsch, hat aber manchmal drollige Ausdrücke, falsche Präpositionen, etc verwendet.

    Sie sagte zum Beispiel immer: > den Lichtschalter zu machen

    > der letzte macht das Licht zu

    Kann sein, dass dieses konkrete Beispiel auch irgendwo im DACH Raum als Dialekt existiert, aber sie hatte noch viel mehr solcher Dinger. Das ist leider einzige Beispiel, was mir zurzeit noch einfällt.

    Ich hab mir damals sagen lassen, dass diese kleinen Ungereimtheiten von den Sprachschulen in der Arabischen Welt stammen. Sie werden dort wohl teils einfach so unterrichtet.

    Fallen euch noch mehr solcher Beispiele ein? Kann auch aus anderen Teilen der Welt stammen. Eine Aufstellung dazu wäre mal ganz interessant. Vielleicht kennt auch jemand eine Internetseite dazu?

    9
    TIL in 1995 NASA tested psychoactive compounds on spiders. Each drug affected their web patterns differently.

    Here's a more detailed description for those that like to read up: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-spiders-drugs-experiment/

    Curiously enough when a similar experiment was first performed decades earlier the original intent was to get the spiders to weave their webs during different times of the day, rather than alter the pattern.

    21
    ¿How to quickly select based on incremental color/channel/value threshold?

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13844882

    > I'm often using the Select by Color or Fuzzy Select tool. ¿Is there a quick way to increment the threshold with a keyboard shortcut, the mouse wheel, or similar? > > Take the following example: > > Given the image of the GIMP mascot, I want to select only certain portions, for instance the outer white part. > > To do this I activate the Select by Color or the Fuzzy Select tool. Set the threshold to a starting value (let's say 15), then click on a white part at the edges of the image. But I'm not quite satisfied with the resulting selection: it selects most of the area I want but not enough of the greyish shadow below the chin. So I adjust the threshold to 50 and click again. Still not enough, set to 90 and lick again. A bit too much, set to 80 and click another. Almost there, set to 85 and click. Set to 83 and finally voilá. > > That involved a lot of clicking and typing though. ¿Is there a quicker way to do this? Ideally I would like to see a live update of the selection as I change the threshold, so that I can simply drag the slider or scroll the mouse wheel until it's perfect. > > Maybe I'm simply using the wrong tool and there's are completely different inroads to achieve this. I'd like to know about those as well.

    1
    ¿How to quickly select based on incremental color/channel/value threshold?

    I'm often using the Select by Color or Fuzzy Select tool. ¿Is there a quick way to increment the threshold with a keyboard shortcut, the mouse wheel, or similar?

    Take the following example:

    Given the image of the GIMP mascot, I want to select only certain portions, for instance the outer white part.

    To do this I activate the Select by Color or the Fuzzy Select tool. Set the threshold to a starting value (let's say 15), then click on a white part at the edges of the image. But I'm not quite satisfied with the resulting selection: it selects most of the area I want but not enough of the greyish shadow below the chin. So I adjust the threshold to 50 and click again. Still not enough, set to 90 and lick again. A bit too much, set to 80 and click another. Almost there, set to 85 and click. Set to 83 and finally voilá.

    That involved a lot of clicking and typing though. ¿Is there a quicker way to do this? Ideally I would like to see a live update of the selection as I change the threshold, so that I can simply drag the slider or scroll the mouse wheel until it's perfect.

    Maybe I'm simply using the wrong tool and there's are completely different inroads to achieve this. I'd like to know about those as well.

    1
    looking for a dock that let's me connect my DVI monitor

    I own an older monitor that has only has VGA and DVI port and I want to connect it to my deck for daily use.

    In theory this should be as simple as getting a DVI to HDMI converter cable and then connect to a dock that has a HDMI port, right? Or perhaps a DVI to display port adapter instead? I've read about people having trouble with DVI monitors so I checked multiple dock vendors and their statements boil down to "we don't support it", ie they don't deny or rule out that it works but don't want to give guarantee either.

    Is anyone in a similar situation and can recommend a dock? I want to resolve the monitor situation first and then worry about additional stuff like USB ports, etc.

    My monitor is a Samsung SMT 2333T (https://www.samsung.com/us/business/support/owners/product/2333t-series-2333t/)

    Edit: I got it working and it was quite simple, here's my steps:

    1. I checked the port at the back of my monitor (reference chart) which turned out to be DVI-I dual link.
    2. then I purchased a HDMI <–> DVI adapter cable which supports my monitor’s resolution (1080 p). This costs around 10 €.
    3. connected that cable to the official Steam Deck dock and my monitor and it works without any further setup
    4. while in the Deck’s Desktop mode you can go into the system settings --> display and make your external monitor the primary display. Primary means that your start bar is located there, new apps will launch on this screen by default, etc. In the same settings menu you can also turn off the Decks own display while the external one is connected. I do this because I can’t comfortably look at it anyway while it’s in the dock and also to save energy.
    15
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TA
    takeheart @lemmy.world
    Posts 30
    Comments 122