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janitor61

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[dead] 2 years ago

Would it be possible for someone to make some "night-time driving glasses" that are shutter LCD-type (3d TV glasses) and which synchronize to the duty cycle of any bright LED lights in the FOV and minimize the brightness to a certain threshold?

Do newer LED headlights even have a duty cycle?

This is tangentially Rivian related, but does anyone else see the inherent danger of stylized tail lights that are just a single red bar across the back of the car? Travelling on the freeway at night I can't really gauge the distance to the car in front of me if it's far ahead and if there's no discernable left and right brake lights. I'd believe Rivians and other cars like that are more at risk of high speed rear-end collisions.

One of the cool things I saw on BBSes back in the day - that I have yet to see replicated - was 'real time chat' in telechat, or being able to see what the other person is typing out as they enter it on their keyboard. It was captivating and made it really feel like an intimate conversation with another person. That could have just been the novelty of it all, as well... ICQ had a similar feature IIRC?.

one variable to take into consideration that I hardly see mentioned, ever - legalization of marijuana in California and other states: there's been a few times on my commute to work where I drive through distinct smell cloud of someone's exhaled pot smoke, and this is in the morning! People might be thinking weed is 'ok' to use while driving and that it's better than alcohol or something...

There's one thing about this I don't see brought up - if someone says "add me, I'm janitor#0832" people usually know they're talking about Discord since that format is ubiquitous, and that's a very valuable thing. They're destroying that and moving for something like "add me, @janitor0832" - which then needs to be qualified (Twitter? Instagram?). Bing tried so hard to become a verb and Discord is discarding something they already have that's similar

This might date me but I'd love to see a resurgence of the Gopher protocol - maybe a touch more modernized, but still just plain text files with hyperlinks. Some sort of public-commons version of the overcommercialized web where advertising is very difficult but information is dense and discoverable.

I'd say they should avoid bloating CSS, keep Sass style and just use type='text/sass' or type='text/css-nested' in the style tag, but it seems that attribute is depreciated... why is that?

Not an expert on this, but I get the feeling they're trying to dissuade people from discovering videos with lower view counts in search results, since these videos are less likely to be cached at the CDN nodes and are more expensive to serve, i.e. budget cuts, like everything else

Newer microwaves don't use bulky HV transformers + voltage doublers for the magnetron anymore and instead use high frequency power supplies + step up transformers, and are noticably lighter

Firefox, like most modern software, is suffering from Winchester house syndrome. Hiring full-time UX designers and making them perpetually justify their salary will eventually turn any software into an unusable, unlearnable amorphous blob that blindly follows trends and alienates even the most determined users, much like hiring dozens of full-time plumbers for your house would transform it into a sci-fi movie set given enough time and money.

The problem I have with touch screens in cars is lining up your finger so that it presses the right area of the screen, which is difficult when driving (and dangerous). Why can't they integrate some sort of capacitive proximity sensor matrix in the LCD that will display a crosshair cursor as your finger gets near the screen? This would help immensely with lining up the press and allow me to use the thing quickly like analog controls.

Humanoid robots won't be feasible while we're still tethered to existing Li-ion battery technology. The two advancements in robotics in recent years, Boston Dynamics' Atlas and Spot, have battery lives of 60 minutes and 90 minutes respectively. With a recharge requiring multiple hours, unless these things are tethered or we invent some kind of electrified floor tech, they are too niche and uneconomical, sadly.

If I were to play devil's advocate: Barring alchemy, I don't believe we've ever had a period of exceptional technological supremacy in the history of mankind that subsequently reverted so completely. In the span of 50 years, we abdicated the position as explorers of space to a civilization trapped within LEO, content with sending probes and taking pictures, and the prevailing explanation for it is "not cost efficient", which in itself is quite depressing.

pragmatically, the mandatory vaccinations seem to be predicated on the following assumptions:

1. Asymptomatic transmission is the primary vector and just as dangerous as being in proximity to a sick individual - has this been confirmed or refuted? Obviously-sick people aren't going to be in restaurants and bars so they can be taken out of the equation entirely. The virus has a normal lifecycle like all others: incubation, infestation and recovery, and during the 2nd phase people should be showing symptoms that our human instincts would urge us to isolate from and ostracize against.

2. The human body cannot become immune to a strain of this virus by recovering from it naturally - most people have had the virus by now, and if the virus is omnipresent, the non-vaccinated should keep becoming re-infected and in a perpetual state of illness - greatly multiplying their chances of death. I don't see the fatality data supporting this hypothesis, so natural recovery immunity is probably serving some protective function.

AFAIK the free speech that the United States enshrines applies to public venues, e.g. the street corner, radio waves, etc. As the current venue has shifted from public streets to private social media, the government should be required to create a counterpart to this emerging venue, otherwise the 1st amendment will be sidestepped based on a technicality (people willingly conglomerating on privately-controlled forums).

The government, if it values free speech, must create a twitter/facebook equivalent, open source it and apply constitutional protections to it as an optional alternative to private venues.

I am OK with specific venues curtailing free speech (FB, Twitter, etc) but I am vehemently against internet infrastructure curtailing free speech (hosting providers, ISPs). Together, the infrastructure providers constitute the internet and censoring free speech at that level makes the internet in violation of the first amendment, and I believe the internet was imagined as a public venue.