NeoTar
Joined 5 years ago
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485
Member since
May 17
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Discoverability is also an issue touch screens can help with - I enjoy that in the settings app on iPhone (I believe android is the same) one can search for a setting, rather than try to guess where a given setting has been placed.
Comment · 2 years ago
At least in the gay community there are still hundreds of DVDs available from physical stores. I did wonder how long that will last though.
Of course the relevant stores will not be very common.
Comment · 2 years ago
Allegedly primitive tech is at least partially fake - they use heavy equipment off screen to build their projects.
Comment · 2 years ago
Excel can be really great — it’s been said that a huge amount of the world‘s programming is actually done in excel (summing a column of numbers is, after all, a very primitive programme).
I wish there were better tools to help excel users migrate to more formal coding. Something that allows the immediate visibility and accessibility of Excel code, but avoids some of the problems of updating a formula in one place, but missing another, allowing better testing, and type safety for data.
Comment · 2 years ago
An advertising supported YouTube creator would be delighted!
No, literally a lot of creators target this market now — for instance by making a mega mix of their existing content which runs for two to three hours. Or releasing a video „xxx hours of yyy to fall asleep to“
It’s the new ‚meta’, apparently a big part of the YouTube algorithm is watch time, and it doesn’t know if the viewers are awake or not. Even if those viewers aren’t being shown adverts, it means your other videos may get additional promotion. Plus if your viewers have YouTube premium I believe watch—time literally translates directly to payment rates.
Comment · 2 years ago
> „reserve the bedroom for sleep“
That’s unfortunately a luxury many people can’t afford.
I’m literally sitting in my in—laws apartment in Poland right now. About 40sqm total, and for forty years they’ve slept on a fold—out—sofa bed.
Comment · 2 years ago
You are correct, the 7 x 7 x 7 is the minimum where a perfect cube of cubes is impossible. The Wikipedia article shows the issue with the corner cubes.
Apparently the 7-cube bulges slightly which helps to hide that the larger sized edges / corners
Comment · 2 years ago
Each corner piece needs to make contact with the core.
Consider when the top layer is rotated 45 degrees relative to the layer below. The corner is now about 0.707 units from the centre of the face, but the layer below only extends 0.5 units out from the centre.
If the corner pieces were smaller than about 0,207 units it would become disconnected from the cube as a whole.
So, any cube larger than (I believe) the 5 by 5 either needs to have bulging faces, or have the edge/corner pieces larger than the others.
Comment · 2 years ago
> I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.
And you are not alone - apparently 53% of gamers (total) prefer single-player games, [although this falls to only 30% in the 16-19 years age-group]. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single...
I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.
Comment · 2 years ago
I have spent most of my life in the UK, which has no national ID card and does not typically require one to prove/verify identify on a regular basis. Prior to the introduction of voter ID laws in 2023, typically one would simply need to give their name/address at the polling station, who would have a list of eligible voters for that specific region (in the UK one has an assigned polling station, of which there are around 30.000 total for a population of 70.000.000)
If you require voter ID in such a state (and I believe the US is comparable), you run the risk of systematically disenfranchising groups of people - generally the most poor who are less likely to drive, take vacations requiring a passport, etc.
And, as I mentioned, in the UK at least vote fraud is not, and has never been a problem. You can see the recorded instances of electoral fraud in the UK here: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/research-reports-and-... - e.g. in 2022 (before vote ID) there were 13 alleged cases and 1 conviction.
Comment · 2 years ago
Does auto-code generation count as AI?
Comment · 2 years ago
I generally go to low cost events (<20 USD) and sometimes buy tickets speculatively (eg at a date/time when I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it).
It’s surprisingly hard to let many venues know you won’t attend and the tickets can be reallocated, even if you don’t expect / want and refund!
Comment · 2 years ago
Voter ID should only be introduced where you have a cheap (ideally free), universal way of proving ID, and multiple ways of establishing identity (what if I’ve just been mugged on the way to the polling station?)
It’s also solving a problem which probably doesn’t exist. The number of arrests / convictions for voter impersonation are next none.
It was introduced recently in the UK, and in the next election, the prime minister at the time the legislation was introduced managed to get caught without ID when trying to vote: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68947834
Comment · 2 years ago
Possibly joking about the .iso file-type for optical disc images?
Or maybe that 'most' ISO standards that are encountered by engineers are defining file-types.
I'm also a big fan of ISO-3166 though !
But there are so many settings on a contemporary car that it would be impractical to have a switch for all of them, and even if they were, if it's something you'd like to change once in a blue-moon being able to search for that setting is really useful.
I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.