Cosmin_C

I work in the medical field and my brain cells have been constantly assassinated for years by bad presentations. Every once in a while I find unicorns - people who tell a story, teach and present using Powerpoint/Keynote slides as support - conveying information that is hard to put into words -> a photograph, an animation, some simple flowcharts to refer back to whilst talking about what is really the subject of the matter.

I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this.

I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.

If there is anything we can take out of the current conflict is that being a NATO member as a country is exceedingly important. I am unsure Russia would have made all the moves it made against Ukraine if the latter were a NATO country.

Also, mr P managed to do what the US hasn't achieved - make Germany put a ridiculous amount of money in the defense budged - exceeding the 2% of the GDP that was asked by the US in the past.

Every way you look at the current situation it is undescribably stupid and dumb, I don't care about "super sekrit intelligence information", the backlash from the US and the EU to the Ukraine invasion is incredible and continues mounting up. All that mr P can hope right now is that he doesn't end up in jail for life at the end of this whole debacle.

The Pi mk4 can do up to 4k (HDR) with the most recent Kodi updates. Really nice. Mine unfortunately requires a smol fan because otherwise it would randomly reboot, luckily Noctua makes 40mm silent fans. Connected on the GPIO pins for 5V, it's more than enough.

I'll try and write some thoughts on this so maybe you can understand where I'm coming from.

I feel that a lot that makes Prometheus a good movie in itself is how it's paced and the graphical effects, albeit it still suffers from bad writing in a lot of places. The story per-se however is a complete dumpster fire because it changes and retcons the Alien universe lore to fit a story that perhaps didn't need to be told. At the same time there were deleted scenes that literally would have added 10-15 minutes to the run time and would have made it at least a 20% better Alien movie.

What makes a good movie and what makes a great sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe are two different sets of things. A good movie can be a good moviein itself but at the same time an absolutely terrible sequel/prequel/movie in an established universe. If you're working on an original idea then all bets are off, but if the work you're doing is in the exact same universe as preceding works then it needs to follow the lore of that universe - or at least NOT contradict previously established things. And you have to ask yourself - is the story that you're telling belonging in this universe? Does it enrich it? Does it bring something new? And by this you answer if the movie is worth actually making from an art point of view.

Would you like to see a modern version of the Mona Lisa painted in 3D on a computer? What if this art would have a blonde woman in it? With curly hair? And skimpy clothing? It can be a great work of art in itself, but has no business piggy backing on the Mona Lisa original.

As another example, there is a school of thought to subvert expectations by writing really dumb stuff, whereas you could subvert expectations in a manner that fits the universe. Star Wars VII, VIII, IX, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and a lot of other works basically step all over established lore to tell submediocre stories, thus harming the universe in the process. I mean with Star Wars there's a whole 'nother can of worms - they literally made a huge part of the universe that exists non-canon. Why would you discard a lot of good stuff just so you can push your sub-mediocre stuff is beyond me, but hey, it's their IP, they do with it what they wish. I just can't be over the moon about it.

I agree, when Ridley Scott does something nowadays all I can think about is how he will ruin it. Villeneuve is an absolutely amazing director, but my personal feelings towards Ridley Scott after Prometheus and Alien Covenant is that he should retire, his job in ruining the Alien universe is done.

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All right, keep your secrets.

This guy is basically Tony Stark with a box of scraps. I'm speechless.

A while ago I caved in and purchased and installed Bitdefender, which I knew was all right.

It wasn't. I didn't renew the license and uninstalled it.

FFWD a couple years and my best friend upgrades his PC. Threadripper Zen 2, 128GB RAM, 2x NVME RAID 0 for the system, another NVME for stuff and HDDs for backups. System was incredibly sluggish and unresponsive and his extra NVME was sometimes dropping from the list of drives shown by explorer. Uninstalled his Bitdefender and all the issues disappeared.

It's just complete robbery at this point. Malwarebytes is a good product for example and Windows Defender is enough. But the best stuff is disabling all of these and just use script blockers and safe browsing practices and you get to keep all the processing power you paid for.

Funnily enough I was reading the other day how some BMWs will come without a touchscreen due to the silicon/chip crisis and I actually thought that was a plus. Seriously, whomever thought it was a good idea to make cars use touch controls and going through 5 menus to turn the heat down should be just shipped to Antarctica to explain their thought process to the penguins.

I'd like to meet some of those people. iOS changed, but not in a way that it hampers usability - and by this I mean basic usability. Texts, calls -> these are the important bits in a phone, not 5000 weather apps that do the same thing and flood you with ads as a bonus.

Android is a bloated mess and this bug should be a giant red flag for both Google and MS to get their shit together. Windows is currently a huge mess as well, bloated beyond repair and with "features" nobody ever asked for, but hey, who doesn't like advertising on their login screen and unrelenting telemetry?

The goal was never to establish a human kind repository of knowledge, but to rule the world. Somebody read Asimov's Foundation series, much better than the current TV show creators anyway :-)

As somebody who has been using Microsoft stuff for years and paid through the nose for it, can you take a guess on why Microsoft is going this shitty path since Windows 8 came out?

I have issues with a LOT of stuff, but ads on the login screen, telemetry that can't be opted out of, privacy invasion, Cortana that is literally malware and the list can go on for days - which people did push for this? The janitors?

Excuse me, but your explanation is just a personal anecdote. Management approved on all this crap and bloatware, you can't realistically cop out that "ohnoes all the PMs at Microsoft I've ever known are more interested in the company's image etc and haven't been actively pushing for this stuff".

I mean, we SEE IT. How tf did all this stuff end up in the OS? Somebody stumbled and landed face first on a keyboard and this crap wrote itself?

Edit: how can upper management ask for this stuff from their underlings if they have no clue about what is happening or what the users want? I also apologise for the harsh tone, but I am so done with Microsoft products I can't help being upset.

Luckily with the advent of Proton and actual anti-cheats being supported by Linux, the last thing keeping me on this utterly disgusting platform will be gone.

I won't miss Windows one second. Now just to find the right distribution environment...

when it comes to security, they trust nobody but themselves, not even the user they sell the device to. It's kind of a strange mindset

It is a strange mindset until you remember that obvious phishing attempts are still crippling organisations and so does ransomware and social engineering.

Relevant: https://youtu.be/kkCwFkOZoOY

It's just another way of saying "kids grow by themselves and school educates them" instead of actually becoming involved with the process and shielding the child from big tech which feels like a rather big threat to underage humans.

I have so many friends who leave their tablet babysit the baby and feeding them so much multimedia content it's making me physically sick. And it's a lot more widespread, kid sees shiny and soundy and quiets down, then won't eat without a tablet shoved to their face.

Yes, I am sure that the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre article [1] is full of misinformation according to China, seeing that they actively pursue people who speak up about it where they have jurisdiction and those people are "disappeared" or worse.

I'm not saying that there is no bias in the wikipedia articles, it's bound to exist seeing it's being written on by humans and bias is inherent to humans. However, the bias on peer-reviewed articles is much diminished compared to a unique party bias regarding issues they want swept under the rug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

This reminded me on how nice Netflix was when it started and how obnoxious it has become. Just like Amazon and Facebook. Small starts, nice things. Then it starts being mildly annoying, then it just intrudes everywhere in your life (like your other browsing tabs and what not).

Netflix was nice because there were no ads. At the same time can I binge on a series without being irked every x minutes if I'm still there or not? Maybe I am, maybe I am not, maybe I am chilling with my SO, it's none of their damn business and at the same time it doesn't do anything helpful except nag you.

Seriously, I would never have expected that somebody would unironically go on and compare VW with Ferrari.

You literally have no idea what Ferarri is and what they do and where they do it and how they hire their employees. Their cars are almost exclusively hand-made and everybody who works at Ferrari is proud to do so, yes, even the dude mowing the grass - this is not cheap to maintain. There are people there whose skills can't be translated to building electric cars - which are really just oversized RC cars. There are people there who are experts in engines - and those will be laid off. In fact, everybody working on engines at Ferrari would be laid off. And those are a lot of people.

The ICE is something that deserves to go on in something special like a Ferrari. This whole electric cars debacle makes me wish the planet would be blown up by aliens sooner before we all roll around in crappy BMW i3 lookalikes because there's nothing else available and there is no choice albeit industry is polluting several degrees of magnitude more than just ICE cars[1]. And certainly so in the case of a small italian sports cars manufacturer that yields true works of art, poetry on wheels.

By comparison, VW is a tech giant who can afford to mass produce their stuff and will not suffer nor will they have to lay off a significant percentage of their staff.

Video reference [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc

It is also completely unreasonable to assume your clients all upgraded to the previous model which still had an USB-C charging brick when all the previous chargers had a USB-A port.

I think what the parent comment meant was that the pollution debt will be automatically paid when civilization collapses and industry basically stops functioning.

A good way of looking at the situation is that the Earth will be fine regardless - it's been through worse (the Premian-Triassic saw extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species), it's humanity that will be in deep, deep trouble in the near future.

I think that's ~xXN0oBMa573r69Xx~ tho.

The fact is that Razer sells a LOT of keyboards and they have been pushing Synapse on the users. I got out of that years ago and I currently run a custom keyboard running QMK.

The users are just fanatically tolerating Synapse 3 and are still giving Razer their money. Until they stop, this kind of stuff will continue to happen.

The biggest red flag at a work place is being welcomed "to the family". The second biggest red flag at a work place is being told at induction that "we work as a team over here".

It's patronizing and implying that you have no idea what you're on about and they're here to set the record straight. And "we're family" and "we work as a team" usually means you're the one upholding all the obligations and responsibilities that come with that whilst having none of the benefits nor any authority.

Even looking within western EU, things could have been done so much better - remember how poorly Italy handled the start of the pandemic? But the true disaster is in Eastern and to a lesser degree central EU, as well as India, Pakistan, etc. Not to mention the trainwreck that was in the USA and to a lesser degree South America.

Try to look outside the box, the world is more than just western EU.

The collective actions of governments did nothing there. What happened is we got exceedingly lucky the research was already there for 30-odd years and interested parties pumped money into it like there was no tomorrow.

Most governments since COVID started faffed about endlessly and took really poor measures all around for what it looked like eternity (with a few notable exceptions). Eventually they got around getting it half-right and here we are, massive death tolls that could have probably been avoided with earlier lockdowns, properly enforced mask wearing and so on.

At the same time a lot of countries where education has been and is poor are full with people who eschieve vaccination for the dumbest reasons possible and see in this manifestations of their freedoms (of spreading further a potentially deadly disease).

This pandemic brought the worst out of people and in a few situations the best.

No, human kind cannot rely on collective actions because human beings are way too selfish to do something for the greater good. And we can see it because we are in this point in time with climate change, the final hour - and still there are a LOT of people denying climate change just as there are people denying COVID is a problem.

Previous 1Password user here. Switched to KeePass, still figuring out the ins and outs, but looks quite nice in the options it provides.

This reminds me of a practice a recruiter used to boast when I applied for a job - throwing half the applications in the shredder without even reading them because they didn’t want to work with “unlucky people”. Albeit I was mildly curious about what mental gymnastics the person did to end up with such a frivolous way of not doing his job, I never left a building quicker ever since.

Well first of all I am not a mathematician, but I enjoyed assimilating the basic principles of math.

Considering the problem as follows: "Bob and Alice have 10 candies in total, and Bob has 2 more candies than Alice. How many candies do Bob and Alice each have?"

My own solution would be to just define the variables as follows: Bob = Alice + 2; Bob + Alice = 10; 2xAlice + 2 = 10; Alice = (has) 4 candies; Bob = (has) 6 candies.

Adjusting the problem with an odd difference instead of an even number we have: "Bob and Alice have 10 candies in total, and Bob has 3 more candies than Alice. How many candies do Bob and Alice each have?" Bob = Alice + 3; 2xAlice + 3 = 10; Alice = (has) 3.5 candies; Bob = (has) 6.5 candies.

I find my solution to be easier to understand and somehow more logical than "let's add/substract this and that and divide by two". Probably my main issue was explaining to a kid how having 3.5 and 6.5 candies works seeing candies I known all my life are basically unbreakable (unless you have a kid's teeths which is known to be able to devour metal).

As an anecdote I recently dated a lady who has a teenage daughter and she showed me the math exams her youngling has been taking. Having never been one to withdraw from a challenge, even mildly implied, I printed the things and started working on them only to be horrified how much I've forgotten in terms of elementary mathematics. I genuinely felt shame even though I scored a decent number (but nothing to write home about).

I feel we're failing our children in how we're pumping them with information but without always teaching them how to learn and that makes me really sad :(

Genuinely curious on what their proposed solution is if they have 10 candies in total and Alice has 3 candies more than Bob.

This feels like such a waste. Yeah, let's destroy electronics (when there is a silicone shortage) and let's destroy clothing (when a large percentage of the people in the world walk around in rags).

Makes me unbearably sad we're such a wasteful species.