Sohcahtoa82

And as much as I love Python, being able to multiple a string by an integer doesn't make sense when adding an integer to a string is a TypeError.

Being able to repeat a string is fine, but it should be a str.repeat() function, not an operator overload like that.

Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.

As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.

School teachers leaving the pointer in the middle of the video.

Hover your hands as you type.

I've been using computer keyboards for 30 years and have never done that.

Still no wrist problems.

I don't typically type on laptop keyboards though, and I use a very firm wrist pad, and sit at a height that makes my wrists nearly perfectly straight.

Motion blur is great when done right, but most games do it wrong, so it gets a bad rap.

The two sins are:

1. Blurring things that shouldn't be blurred.

2. Blurring too much.

Racing games are notoriously guilty of #1. If you're in a third person view, your car should basically never have any motion blur. Likewise, a car driving the same speed as you right next to you shouldn't get blurred. You should only see blur in the road and scenery that is close to you. Instead, the devs will just apply a post-processed radial blur that blurs the entire scene, which just turns the entire screen into a blurry mess.

The width of the blur should at most be the delta between frames, and ideally, just half that, really. But a lot of devs seem to have this idea of "Motion blur is a neat effect! We should emphasize it!" and the blur will cover an area covered by multiple video frames.

A motion blur that is more subtle can actually look amazing. It doesn't look blurry, and instead, just makes animations look more fluid.

Motion blur is why movies can be 24 fps and look fine, but a game at 24 fps typically looks incredibly choppy.

I honestly do not understand why any average person would buy anything else than a macbook today.

Personally, it's because I hate MacOS with a fiery passion. The UX is just awful.

Disappearing scrollbars are a bug, not a feature, on a desktop OS. They make sense on a phone/table where screen real estate is a premium, but on anything 14 inches or more, it's just not necessary.

I hate the dock bar. I don't want multiple windows from a single app coalesced to a single icon. If I have two PyCharm windows open, I should have two entries so I can click between them in a single click.

I hate that I can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I have my scroll speed set to 1 click of the wheel being ~3 lines of text. 4 clicks should always be 12 lines, regardless of it's a quick flick or a casual scroll. MacOS insists on making it so a slow click of the wheel scrolls half a line, but a quick flick of 4 clicks or so goes 3 pages.

It's utterly stupid that Home/End bring my cursor to the begin/end of the current document, rather than the beginning/end of the current line.

I could go on and on about the things I despise about it. But as a general rule, if there's something that Linux and Windows do the same way, but MacOS does it differently, I'll hate it. It feels often like MacOS wants to be different for the sake of being different rather than actually being better.

It'd be a case where the spirit of the law clashes with the letter of the law.

Sony's lawyers would argue about how things are, while your defense has to argue about how things should be.

Which way it goes likely depends on how sympathetic the judge is rather than actual arguments being made.

This is incorrect.

N64 came out in the USA in September 1996.

3dfx Voodoo was released to consumers in October 1996.

GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.

Video cards existed, but 3D accelerators didn't really catch on until the 3dfx Voodoo, which came out about the same time as the N64. Even Quake II which came out a year later still offered software rendering.

Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't.

I'm only a single point of data, but I was a console gamer that transitioned to PC gaming, but that transition happened during the N64/PSX era. It was near the end of the PS2 cycle that I was full PC.

Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows

Because prices are at all-time highs. I have a monster PC that I probably spent around $6,000 building, but with prices skyrocketing, it'd run me $10,000 to build it today. A few months ago, it would have been $11,000.

Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base.

In the AAA world, this is true. So many gamers that only play Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, or a sports game. For CoD and the sports games, they reliably buy the latest release every year despite the lack of anything really being different.

But the Indie world is huge and full of innovation. Balatro, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Cuphead, I could go on.

People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.

I don't think that's true at all. Maybe for high-level play, or if the streamer has highly entertaining commentary, but otherwise definitely not true.

hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off

Isn't it water with some oxygen added?

A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.

And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it.

If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...

but they’re probably double what those same occupations pay in many other (first world) countries with lower healthcare costs

You'll find that salaries across the board are lower in other countries. Software developers in Europe make half of what they do in the USA. In exchange, they get far better benefits.

Also, physician salary only makes up about 8% of total healthcare costs [0]. Cutting salaries in half wouldn't significantly lower our healthcare costs.

[0] https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/physician-pay-makes-up...

I don't own AirPods and never will. I file them under "They sound amazing if you've never listened to headphones that actually sound amazing". The same category as Beats by Dre.

And why would I ever want Spatial Audio? If I'm listening to music, I don't need to sound like it's coming from a specific direction. If I'm watching a video, it's already going to have stereo sound. I don't need it to change based on head movements. If I'm on a Zoom/Teams meeting, I know I can create positional audio, and moving my head to face the voice is just going to be weird.

The scroll wheel works. I don't need to replace it. If I want to free up that hand, I think the better solution is eye tracking from the web cam on top of my screen.

US doctors are overpaid. US nurses are over paid.

Median pay for a Nurse Practitioner is $132K/yr [0]. I think that's reasonable.

Average pay for physicians ranges from $220-450K depending on specialty. [1]

Personally, I think doctors should be paid more than software engineers, so I think those numbers are all reasonable, especially when you consider what it takes just to enter the field. Nurses require a Master's degree. Physicians need a Bachelor's degree PLUS another 4 years of med school AND THEN a residency program that lasts 3-9 years depending on specialty before they finally earn their medical license.

IMO, the idea that nurses and doctors are overpaid is quite simply ludicrous.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/nurse-anesthetists-nurse-...

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/physicians-and-surgeons.h...

So what, this uses the gyroscope in AirPods (Why do headphones need a gyroscrope?) to turn head movements into scrolling?

Sounds like a terrible idea. Like...cool. I decided to move my head around to stretch my neck and now I've lost my position on the document I was reading.

I'll keep my scroll wheel.

It's been over a week. I answered your question and you seem to have ignored it.

If the jet engines are pushing hard enough, then the atmosphere won't be a part of the earth for long.

That makes no god damn sense.

That means that the code to extract exists on the file system, but only Windows Defender uses it.

If you walk down the cold and flu aisle at CVS and start looking closely at labels, you will count about 100 products and around six active ingredients

It's so utterly ridiculous how much space the Cold and Flu section of the medicine aisle takes for no reason at all.

And the whole thing about combining so many medications is just silly, especially the marketing for it. "Why take 3 medications for your cold symptoms when you can take just this one?" then gets countered with "Why take a cold medication that has ingredients for symptoms you don't have?"

IMO, DayQuil should never have existed simply for the reasons the article mentions: It leads to people being unaware of what they're taking. Yeah, the label is right there, but you gotta consider the lowest common denominator when selling things to the general public.

To add to this, despite all efforts to educate people, many STILL don't know that antibiotics don't work against viruses and will want one when dealing with a cold or other viral infection.

If we let antibiotics be over-the-counter, every damn infectious bacteria will be a super-strain in a year.

Dextromethorphan is definitely not a placebo.

It definitely works for me. It'd be wild if for all 44 years of my life, it's only worked because of the placebo effect.

The article mentions phenylephrine, and that shit definitely doesn't work. Not even a placebo.

He has a career that's spanned over 45 years and has managed to avoid controversy.

The man's a saint.

I will never understand some smart appliances.

Like...a smart TV so you don't need a second device to play your streaming services? I kinda understand, though I think it's a silly move. If my Fire TV stick gets deprecated, I can buy a new one for under $50. If my TV itself gets deprecated, I'm spending $1500+ for a new one. But like...the number of people who have their heads in the sand when it comes to pervasive ads being injected by their TV is appalling.

But why does anybody need a smart washer (either clothes or dishes)? I need to be physically there to load it. There's literally nothing to be gained by having an app. Sure, sometimes I want a delayed start for whatever reason, but literally every washer already has that function without an app.

I don't even see the purpose of WiFi-connected light bulbs. The only time I'm turning a light on or off is when I'm entering or leaving the room, in which case I'm passing by the light switch anyways.

I remember playing 44khz 16-bit stereo MP3s encoded at 128 kbit/sec on a 133 Mhz 486.

It gobbled like 90% of the CPU and I had to make sure I gave it a pretty large buffer so it didn't stutter when an app claimed CPU for more than a second, but it worked.

what car company is using forced labor as you are claiming that is pretty serious, almost all except China, are built in countries with strong labor unions.

You're conflating final car assembly with the sourcing of the raw materials.

GM's report [0] says "We have reason to believe that certain of the 3TG in our products may have originated in a Covered Country [1] and may not have all come from recycled or scrap sources."

Honda admits [2] "Among all the smelters and refiners disclosed to us by our suppliers, we determined that some of them processed minerals sourced in the DRC or its adjoining countries."

I read reports from other car manufacturers and they're all full of the same weasel words. Ford says "We do not knowingly procure materials that contribute to child and forced labor, bribery and corruption, conflict, or environmental concerns" [3] while admitting "Through our 2023 data collection and due diligence efforts described below, Ford has reason to believe some 3TG contained in our products may come from Covered Countries."

[0] https://investor.gm.com/static-files/5e0ea429-ded3-40ca-b3a1...

[1] SEC defines "Covered Country" as "the Democratic Republic of the Congo or an adjoining country"

[2] https://global.honda/en/investors/news/news20250522/main/0/l...

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/37996/00000379962400...

Questioning the lithium source is valid, but also a red herring when we're talking about environmental impact.

But yes, battery minerals can involve human rights abuses. But ICE vehicles are also built from steel, aluminum, copper, rubber, electronics, and metals that can involve forced labor, unsafe mining, land displacement, pollution, or exploitative labor. The ethical issue is supply chain due diligence across the whole auto industry, not just lithium.

Funny how some people (Mostly anti-EV folks) only discover supply chain ethics only when the car has a battery.

The carbon footprint of producing an EV is higher than an ICE. Nobody disputes that.

But the lower carbon footprint of operating the an EV makes the EV have a lower footprint over the life of the vehicle. This is true even if your electricity comes purely from coal, as a coal power plant gets an economy of scale that an ICE doesn't achieve. If your power comes from a renewable source, then the trade-off happens even sooner.

IMO, Factorio has the most depth, but DSP is the most fun.

Is it because of no LTS?

Basically, yeah.

A new release every 6 months, and the old release almost immediately stops getting any more updates.

Also, from a vulnerability management perspective, NixOS is terrible. If you have some compliance monkey at your company that demands CVEs get resolved regardless of impact, NixOS is the wrong choice. Yeah, they'll patch CVEs that are truly impacting, but for non-impacting CVEs, they're not nearly as interested at backporting fixes as Debian or Ubuntu. From an actual security standpoint, it's fine, but if compliance requires you to resolve CVEs within a certain period of time, NixOS will fail for you.

The real answer?

In case you want to retrieve your test scores 10 years after you took it. They need some way to uniquely identify you. Sure, they could have given you a specific test taker ID, but what if you lost that? They could have created a way for you to log in with an e-mail address, but what if you changed e-mail addresses?

You might think "Why would I need my test scores from 10+ years ago?", but my wife just started a job and they demanded her college transcripts to prove she went there...over 20 years ago.