NeoTar

Oh, I completely agree - everything important should be accessible and intuitive - typically that does mean a well-placed physical control.

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.

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.

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.

Allegedly primitive tech is at least partially fake - they use heavy equipment off screen to build their projects.

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.

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.

„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.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Cube_7

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.

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.

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.

Does auto-code generation count as AI?

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!

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

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 !

The average person doesn't pay capital gains tax - at least in the UK; there is a 12 3000 GBP allowance per year of gains which means that you need to have significant assets (think top 10% of the country) before it becomes an issue.

Weirdly Nintendo released an alarm clock this month:

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-sound-cl...

Seems a strange thing to do in 2024.

This is why the law says : “in the opinion of the Secretary of State, consists of or includes computer code.” - I believe a prompt could theoretically be interpreted as code. Some (human) judgement is needed.

Expense tracking software has always been a trash fire in my experience, and I’ve never come across one with an associated credit cards (maybe that’s harder to in Europe? Or just less incentivised since transactions fees are much lower)

I always assumed this was because it fell into the space where the people who choose the software (finance teams) differ from the people who will have to use it (everyone claiming expenses) - so any features offering UX improvements are deprioritised relative to features which help the finance teams.

-ough notoriously has anywhere between four and twelve different pronunciations (if you count strange example with a limited number of words, like hiccough for hiccup).

The point I believe the parent post is making is that you cannot assume that buses would rhyme with fuses, because English orthography is so inconsistent.

Which is partially true - I haven’t seen any research to the effect, but I’d guess you can still predict the pronunciation of an English word with better than a fifty percent chance of success.

2014

It’s not.

The traditional proof that there are an infinite number of primes relies on unique prime factorisation- i.e for any number, n, there is a unique set of primes p1, p2, p3, … etc. where p1 * p2 * p3 * … = n

For instance 88 = 2 * 2 * 2 * 11, 42 = 2 * 3 * 7

It’s worth reading the proof if you haven’t - it’s comprehensible with high school maths.

No such property exists for Mersenne primes, so we can’t trivially extend it. Many proofs of the properties of prime numbers are difficult because they, by definition, actively resist patterns.

SG = Singapore, TDM = Text Data Mining?

Another fun idea which has been proposed is that it’s an ironic nickname - so rather than ‘Baldy’ (which is you see busts of Caesar is certainly plausible) people called him or his ancestors ‘hairy’.

Apparently in the UK, the largest four banks control 75% of all current accounts (en-us: checking account ). Admittedly a smaller market, but even more centralised.

It is said that Julius Caesar borrowed so much money to become elected pontifex maximus that he essentially forced his creditors to support his political ambitions in the hope of seeing some payment on the debts.

So, essentially, ‘twas ever so.

Please don’t impose your solely political definition on others; anarchy meaning disorder (i.e. chaos) is a well attested meaning of the term.

anarchy: absence of order : DISORDER

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy

anarchy: Confusion in general; disorder.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarchy

anarchy: confusion and disorder

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/anarchy

We do for 2D though - Circle and disc. And in 4D plus we have the 3-sphere and 4-ball, etc.

And for 3D shapes have Torus, and, well, ‘solid-torus’.

And, indeed, it’s probably in topology where the distinction between sphere and ball is most important.

Using an apostrophe to mark a plural is often called a grocer’s apostrophe - https://www.grammar-monster.com/punctuation/using_apostrophe...

In English I’m actually ok with it for single letters or abbreviations- “your writing uses a lot of x’s and y’s”, “Can you pack away the CD’s and DVD’s”, but this is a personal quirk and definitely non-standard usage.