scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 6 hours ago:
A bigger screen is between for text consumption, too. Perhaps especially for that. If you don’t know why, just wait ;D
Seriously as a person getting on in years I always bump up the font size. And if you do. This on a mini phone, you run out of usable space immediately.
I wish there were small phone options, too, but I can see why big is the default.
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 6 hours ago:
I’d like to see more options out there. But there are reasons it could be difficult. I’ve been a software dev for 25 years and we’ve had take our software from local installs to web services, then mobile web services or responsive interfaces for all screen sizes. Then mobile APPs came along… and we do have to decide which devices and screen sizes we’re going to support. It’s hard to justify spending 20% more time so that you can support 2% more people. And for my app anyway that’s how many tablet users we have. 2%. So we’ve never done tablets, period. If we had to support some phones that were 3x the size of others, that would be kinda hard too, and we’ll always choose to spend the bulk of our time where the bulk of our users are.
Just a real answer. Supporting different screen sizes isn’t free.
- Comment on Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices 14 hours ago:
Yep you’re right about all that. It’s a tough situation because it not only requires both employers and employees to behave correctly, it also requires all companies to be doing so at once. If one company makes big investments in skills and gives steady raises annually, but another company offers a little more salary right now, guess where employees are going to go. It may not even be in their long term interests to do so but we sometimes think short term too.
It’s going to be tough for any company to offer all the long term stability things and the short term higher salary. TBH this is what you get at the top tech companies right now and everyone hates them for being exploitative monopolies. But that’s also how they stand head and shoulders above others in order to be able to do this stuff. 🤷♂️
BTW when I say they offer long term stability I guess there are no guarantees with that, but they do offer equity vesting that makes staying with them long term much more rewarding. Right now I’m totally locked into the golden handcuffs and even through my short term prospects at work suck really badly and I hate my day to day, I’d basically be cutting my income by half if I left to get a job on the open market. That ain’t a long term employment contract or pension but it is compelling.
- Comment on Why do i see so many americans obsessed with the concept of "this is a thing that [Ethnicity] does" 3 days ago:
Yeah really… because cultural divides and prejudice are a uniquely American thing! /s
- Comment on Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices 3 days ago:
I read a mini rant from someone here recently about how software shops all fired their elder mentor employees because they didn’t close enough tickets, and spent all their time growing others’ skills. Similar theme.
But there is one problem here. When people possess a rare skill, they often don’t want to pass it on to anyone else. Keeping the skill rare is how you keep it valuable. And young employees who acquire a skill somewhere will immediately put it on the open market to maximize their pay.
So is it the right thing for the world to have apprenticeships? Sure. Is it the right thing for employers to invest in them? Yes, but they don’t because they are short sighted but also because they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty. Is it the right thing for veterans with a certain skill to pass it on? Dubious, unless they have some guarantee that the apprentice will support them somehow in exchange.
Basically everyone acts in their self interest against the interests of the whole. And it’s not just employers doing so. It’s us too.
- Comment on Is 17 and almost 20 wrong? 6 days ago:
If you are over 18 you should be extremely careful about any romantic or especially sexual relationships with those under 18 as they could be construed as statutory rape. I know it makes a lot of natural relationships problematic for a certain spell during your life, but that’s the way it is, and it will pass quickly.
- Comment on Are conservatives mad about trans people or they just mad they get walk around out of the closet while they have to leave the white sheets at home? 6 days ago:
I don’t think they really care THAT much about them, but you have to remember that it’s been turned into yet another conswervative “save the children” bullshit. They think liberals are pushing gender change drugs and surgeries onto children, and they have really shown how they don’t think children’s ideas about who they are matter one bit. Tyrant father is their whole model. Kids don’t decide shit. Kids become who they are told to, not who they think they are. removedy feelings of being a girl are to be beaten out! Remember these are the same people who push “gay conversion therapy.”
- Comment on William Shatner Confirms Talks for Star Trek Return at 93 Years Old 6 days ago:
“It has to mean something” to him, he means
- Comment on William Shatner Confirms Talks for Star Trek Return at 93 Years Old 6 days ago:
I was hoping maybe it was a Shatner return but not a Kirk return. But no. Of course it’s Kirk.
If he could just return as a ferneghi or something that would be amazing and actually take some air out of the big fat overheated James T. Kirk legacy.
- Comment on Sooo, where did the blatant Nazism suddenly come from? 6 days ago:
I think you’re starting with the position that Naziism is a poisonous nonstarter, and wondering why anyone would attach themselves to that.
But that’s not where they are starting from. I earnestly believe that some major revisionism is happening. People are taking another look at the Nazis and finding they like what they see.
Of course, it’s falling into the whole complex of “Nazis aren’t so bad - you were just told that by your woke liberal school propaganda.”
As liberals cry out about the Nazi shit, Trumpers delight in their pain, further adding to the magnetism of Naziism.
And of course there is a slice of the Right that have always been literal Nazis, explicitly. And that slice is larger than ever, with looser boundaries than before.
Basically the divide politics of the US have finally become big enough to be bigger than our feelings about Naziism. That’s really fucking big. But the political civil war we’re in the middle of is all about tearing down everything that came before as tired, corrupt lies. I guess that is includes simple basics like “Nazis are bad.”
If you’re still confused and disgusted and horrified, you are in a lot of very good company.
- Comment on Has America Reached Its Tipping Point with Ignorance? 1 week ago:
One thing that’s absolutely exhausting me is the constant overreactions to every stupid turn of phrase that dribbles out of Trump’s mouth. He says to a television audience “please go vote, just this one time” and the left FREAK OUT because he’s ENDING ELECTIONS. He says the White House interpretation of the law will prevail over that of other federal agencies and the left FREAK OUT because he’s MAKING UP THE LAWS NOW. He uses a trite phrase to aggrandize himself and people FREAK OUT because WE’RE A NAZI MONARCHY NOW.
This shit isn’t helping. Trump’s diarrhea of the mouth needs to be heard for what it is: the babblings of a deranged fantasist.
- Comment on US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan 1 week ago:
Taiwan absolutely found a niche. Its manufacturing capability is what makes it a strategic ally for the US.
Singapore’s niche is more like several niches from financial services to precision manufacturing and medical research. But it all runs on their skilled workforce. Not “politics.”
- Comment on US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan 1 week ago:
Well, Taiwan and Singapore are able to be competitive in the world market, despite being very small and lacking major resource advantages or big militaries. They do this by developing very sophisticated expertise and pressing the few very particular advantages they have.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
I may have to yield this point to you as a demonstrated authority on not understanding plasma.
- Comment on How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*? 1 week ago:
The stock market is a speculative vehicle whereby predominantly rich people get richer. Generally pointing at everything should indicate a lot of rich people getting richer, so what’s the issue? It’s only if you take the valuation of the stock market as some kind of core health measurement of the economy that it stops making sense. Because it’s not that.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.
If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
I’m afraid you do not recall correctly. One of the features of American slavery is that it was population self-sustaining. You can see #4 on this UNESCO page. I like the way they put it: American slavery created a people where there was none before.
- Comment on US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan 1 week ago:
Could you try doing the same with the 90%? if life’s essentials are so easily paid for I am wondering what you think the rest is going to?
- Comment on US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan 1 week ago:
Are you saying that 10% of an economy is vital goods and the other 90% is not? Not that I have any numbers on this but 10% seems low to me.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 1 week ago:
We also did not build turbines then.
Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Yep the South was invested in agriculture, to this day a labor-intensive sector, largely due to advantages in climate and geography which were basically fixed. So how again would slavery have spontaneously ended in the South again? It’s a question - please answer it.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Agriculture still has not eliminated manual labor, son.
- Comment on Microsoft unveils Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits. 1 week ago:
Marijuana 1 is Cortana’s cooler younger sister.
- Comment on Am I a bad friend/rude for not engaging with my friends and giving one-word responses? 1 week ago:
“Good” and “bad” aren’t very useful here.
A friend who does not engage in any way is simply not a friend. They don’t become an enemy or whatever: they just drift away until they are simply a person you know.
To be a friend means to engage. It doesn’t have to be texting, though that is now a dominant communication medium and not some fringe thing anymore that people can just wave away as a modern fad.
You can engage in person. You can engage by talking on the phone. You can engage by playing games together. But to not engage at all… it makes me wonder what you think friendship is.
I am “like 50” and I no longer think of friends as “people who are on my side” or “people who know the real me” because all of that can be true even if you haven’t talked in 5 years. If that’s all you want, for someone on earth to be on your side, theoretically, then you’re good.
But that’s not friendship: you have to engage. If you don’t, you will find that you miss out in growth and change in their lives, and after a very short while, they don’t “know the real you” anymore and you don’t know the real them.
Life is to be lived. It’s a thing you do.
- Comment on US fab construction costs twice as much, takes twice as long as Taiwan 1 week ago:
“Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at so that everything is done as well and as cheaply as possible. However this makes no guarantee about any one country’s ability, at the end of the day, to stand alone without dependencies on others for vital goods. In fact if anything it works against that.
I don’t know why Trump talks about globalism as some Democrat thing. It’s his own party that has been driving for free trade since forever.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 week ago:
Finally we can begin to chip away at BlackBerry’s dominance.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
How exactly would slavery have died out “naturally” in a union made up entirely of slave states who’d just fought and won a war to defend it? I get your point about letting the south stand in its own so it could fall, but you are too casually sweeping aside the issue of slavery. “Yeah yeah - that would pass naturally - now let me tell you my MAIN point….”
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Personally I think this resurgence is a highly specific cultural moment that is coming as religion dies off and the white population of America teeters toward minority status. Since the US birth rate began to decline (natural phenomenon that happens to all developed nations) its string immigration has held it up. But that has had an accumulating demographic effect. White people lost their official hegemony a long time ago but now they are facing the prospect of losing their simple majority and it scares the living shit out of them. It’s not just because privilege sees equality as oppression. It’s also because they know that they have treated others incredibly badly, and deserve to be castigated should they lose power.
That’s why this Trump admin is so ugly. It’s the death spasm of a dying culture. That’s why this Trump admin is hollow at the center: it’s backed by a group that has no future and can only harken back to the past.
This too shall pass, but at great cost. The USA is the greatest political prize there has ever been and it won’t be let go of lightly.
- Comment on Some examples of video games with an UI layout ripped off of another game? 1 week ago:
But that could still be where most games copied it from.
- Comment on I feel my life is empty. Is there any way to stop this? 1 week ago:
is there any way to stop this
There’s pretty much every way. Work, eat, shower, sleep is such a minimal place to start that if emptiness is your issue, I feel like you could go in any direction you want and do better.
Maybe no one ever told you this so I’ll try. There is no objective meaning to life or purpose for it. The meaning is up to you to make. I don’t think any path whatsoever (therapy, volunteering, art, hobbies, dating, travel, whatever) will work unless you take responsibility for the problem. If you are hoping for others to provide the genius answer, or looking for some global perfect answer or “meaning of life” then you aren’t taking on the responsibility yourself.
You have to do that or nothing else can work. This thread might be a start. You did ask. Now you need to put the time into the many fine suggestions here.
Don’t take them in turns and try them “to see if they work.” That’s still the main problem of assuming the answer is outside of you somewhere. Instead, take them in turns and put everything you’ve got into them. If you can do this, any of them will work.