Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
I'm not sure how I feel about "Entangled Life" on the first page of books in "science". Isn't that slop? I mean, it's pop-science bullshit, and it's based on feelgood extrapolation from a thin evidence base. Maybe that doesn't quite fit the definition of slop, but it's not a signal of quality for the rest of the list.
Comment · 4 years ago
I was asking myself: Why? Isn't this in bad taste? Isn't this continuing a meme long after it has turned from funny to sad?

I am sure the answer is just because we can, just for fun, to make it more accessible. But I kind of wish there was an answer to that question in the README or on the site.

Comment · 4 years ago
hand-held laser speed measuring
Comment · 4 years ago
Wayland will stop sucking when distros and Wayland developers stop dismissing these concerns by comparing them to people who didn't want to adopt systemd.

The worst part of this mindset is pointing to Xwayland. In my experience, Xwayland is more of a fig leaf than a real solution. Applications that need wayland-specific code and can't just use a newer version of GTK or SDL are usually apps that don't work with Xwayland anyway.

The second worst is pointing to Wayland-only apps as a replacement, when the previous apps were cross-platform, and not just X11 cross-platform, but Windows/Mac+Quartz/Linux+X11 cross-platform.

Wayland will stop sucking for people like you when distros and Wayland developers acknowledge that people like you have a point and real concerns, and that you are driven by something else than nostalgia and inertia. Until then, this discussion will always end with "you don't understand that Wayland is a much cleaner design than X11" and nothing will fundamentally change.

Comment · 4 years ago
It's really hard to figure out how the system differs from PeopleMover. Is this new tech, or just a new vendor for basically the same design they have at Disney? Wait, is this a MagLev peoplemover?
Comment · 4 years ago
Gnome is the worst of the wayland compositors in terms of spec compliance. KDE and sway are much better in this regard. What good is having protocol specifications when the reference implementation does not implement it, and Gnome, the biggest Wayland desktop, does its own thing anyway?

I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations and for proper drag and drop between windows.

Comment · 4 years ago
Open source is the "development model", free software is the license. I thought this was common knowledge.
Comment · 4 years ago
There is a difference between free software and open source, and this may be the former, but is not the latter
Comment · 4 years ago
This might be controversial, but I honestly think it's important to recognise and counteract his in content moderation. When people deliberately give bad info they should be banned, and posters in good standing who exercise insufficient caution and feed the trolls must be reprimanded.

If you allow people to troll a help forum or bug tracker with low-grade content, you will soon be overrun with low-quality information, and that will make the search function in your forum useless, leading to a cascade of more low-quality questions.

I know reprimanding people for answering badly phrased questions or clear trolling is not something many people want to do because they want to be beginner friendly, but harsh penalties for deliberate disinformation should be the norm. Punishing people for falling for this would at least starve the trolls of oxygen.

Comment · 4 years ago
But if you want to move the heat away from a CPU, wouldn't you want to pump more electricity into the Peliter element to move heat away faster?
Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah, this is the version that is not true
Comment · 4 years ago
I have tried to find the roots of this "pizza effect" myth, but all I could find is somebody making a point about mindfulness meditation and yoga, and I am not even sure how it holds up WRT yoga, because Indian yogis who do not-Western yoga are still a thing.

WRT pizza, it's clearly false. Pizza was a thing in Italy before World War II and it spread through Europe from Italy, not from the USA. You can trace the history of many pizzerias in Italy back far further than the "pizza effect" would have you believe, so you can easily de-bunk it by going to the web site of a pizza place in Napoli.

Comment · 4 years ago
No, it's not about the "optimal way", it's about the oft-cited the factoid "90% of people are haptic learners, 30% are visual learners, 15% are auditory learners, 25% are text-based learners". Somebody did an experiment and found out 90% of subjects remembered something later when they had to learn to do it, but only 25% remembered when they had to read it. (All numbers made up, does not matter in the context of this comment)

Of course, this completely misrepresents the experiment! After learning to do something, you are 90% likely to retain it for a certain duration, after you read about it, you are only 25% likely to retain it, so in aggregate you only retain 25% of what you read.

The idea was never to find people who are "visual learning type" or the "non-learning-by-doing type".

That's what became of this idea in education through the game of telephone that mangles experimental results on their way from developmental psychology and cognitive science into education departments, and then into future high school teachers during undergrad lectures. Even my own high school teachers in Germany talked about learning types as if there was such a thing.

Comment · 4 years ago
I want this guy to duke it out with the developers of chicken scheme
Comment · 4 years ago
People who say "electric cars are good enough now, the median distance driven is just 20km anyway" act as if that's a good thing.

If you use an electric car only for a commute, why not commute by bicycle or by bus? Why buy an electric car at all if you only ever drive short distances? Why not take the train if you are going long distance only four times a year?

Why even buy a new car then?

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