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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • If you’ve been to Reddit since the API meltdown, it’s pretty clear that large sections of it were fucked by angry moderators, and still remain that way. I don’t think the fediverse was ready to take over, but Reddit very clearly has fewer people working for them for free.

    Specifically, there are several subreddits where they used to be strict about submissions, and now they let anything mildly related in.

    I’m honestly pretty surprised that they still haven’t recovered. At this point, I’m hoping that their mediocrity will continue to push people away until Lemmy can catch up.


  • According to my college physics 101 professor, a curved sail is generally superior in all situations. There are sails made out of rigid materials, and they generally are curved, even though they could be flat. Everybody who sails knows that you can adjust the slack in your sail, and that sometimes a tighter sail is better, for example when tacking. You can tell this just from the feel.

    Now, then, it’s been a LONG time since my physics 101 class, but the explanation was something like this: Although this is an oversimplification, you can imagine that a sail works when air particles bounce off of it. The momentum imparted to the sail depends not only on the direction that the wind is coming from, but also the direction that it ends up going when it bounces off the sail. A curved sail helps redirect the wind away from the sail in exactly the direction that the sail is pointing, which is better at pushing the vehicle in the correct direction.

    Another way to look at this is if it is a pure matter of air pressure. A curved surface will be better at creating air pressure inside the curve. It’s like if you’re driving and you hold something out the window. When you hold a rigid board out of the window, it will be hard to hold in place, but the air pressure won’t build up behind it as much as a sack, for example. If you hold a sack out the window, it will probably just be ripped out of your hands.


  • Everybody else is saying things that some humans are too dumb to grasp. I’ll give you an example that virtually all humans are too dumb to grasp.

    How are our decisions affected by conflicts of interests? The last time I looked into this, the research in this area said that humans virtually always underestimate the effect that a conflict of interests has on them, by a lot. Many people don’t even see the conflict of interests. People who recognize the conflict of interests believe that because they are aware of the conflict of interests, they can mitigate the effects completely. They are wrong.

    Humans get entangled by conflicts of interests just like dogs get entangled by their leashes. Just like dogs, many times, humans don’t realize that they’re caught. Just like dogs, even if you show a human the problem, they cannot understand. But even worse than dogs getting tangled by their leashes, humans believe they can understand what to do when they’re caught up, but it turns out that they’re wrong.



  • What timing! I am so pissed at my smartwatch right now.

    I got a smart watch because I was having some sleep problems, and I found that some Apple watches can monitor your oxygen levels while sleeping. I suspected it was related to other things like stress, but I wanted to be a bit more comfortable and say that it’s probably not sleep apnea.

    So, the point is that I must wear it when I’m sleeping. Also, like any reasonable person, I have my phone set up not to disturb me at night. But at least on Apple watches, this means that my alarm goes off only on my watch. I can’t figure out any way for it to not go off on my watch, and only go off on my phone, unless I simply take off the watch.

    It’s the MOST ANNOYING THING. First, because it means that you can’t have your alarm go off across the room. You can always turn it off on your watch, which means that you can even turn it off without waking up. And then, you have no alarm at all. So, if I absolutely have to wake up for some meeting or airplane or something, I can’t wear my watch to bed.

    Also, maybe this is just me, but I hate when my watch vibrates on my wrist. I hate the feeling. Every time it vibrates, I have the urge to smash the thing. If I had to choose a set up, I’d have my phone always vibrate, and my watch never vibrate. But I can’t figure out how to make that work on Apple.

    This morning was an absolute nightmare, though. Now, I’m used to turning off my alarm on my watch, but when I went to turn it off this morning, the watch was deep in some shitty menu. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. And it was just vibrating on my wrist non-stop. Obviously, this was made much more difficult because I was just waking up.

    I eventually figured it out, but the point is that the UI is obviously less refined than, for example, the phone UI, where this sort of alarm hiding has never happened in all of my years owning a smart phone.

    Anyways, to answer your question, I prefer to wear a smart watch, because a regular watch doesn’t do anything for me. But goddamn do I hate my smart watch right now!


  • I don’t know whether they currently sell phones abroad, but I know in the past they have sold abroad. It’s a big market.

    So it certainly affects them organizationally. Any phone that they want to sell abroad will have completely different software. They’d likely have to use an entirely different team of people.

    any interpreted language is a waste of power

    It’s not a waste of power. There are a lot of tradeoffs like ease of development and fault tolerance. And the cost of the interpreter is greatly mitigated at run time. Please just stop talking about this. It’s not as good of a point as you think it is.