Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The amount of people your age is only going down with time.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People born after 2000 have never seen the cosmic microwave background on their TV set.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the problem is because CRT displays didn’t have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had “dots” of all sizes.

  Also another possible thing that’s off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People born after 2000 have never seen the cosmic microwave background on their TV set.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  By the way, the picture illustrating the post isn’t actually displaying the real thing - the noise in it is too squarish and has no grey tones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People born after 2000 have never seen the cosmic microwave background on their TV set.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s definitelly an analog over the air TV thing.

  The way digital works you would either get a “No signal” indicator (because the circuitry detects the signal to noise ratio is too low) or squarish artifacts (because of the way the compression algorithms for digital video are designed).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Recently I’ve been playing Airline Tycoon Deluxe, Sims 3, Battle Brothers, Kerbal Space Program and Prey.

  I think the newest is Prey, from 2018.

  Airline Tycoon Deluxe is from 1998 and still fun (at the beginning, eventually you just make tons of money, use it to do more of the same to make even more money and it stops being fun).

  By the way, they all run on Linux, though I had to literally pirate the Sims 3 to get it to work even though I own the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Monster⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and that being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

  Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Little kid: “Why is there a bright ball of light in the sky?” Me (thinking): “Oh, shit…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can't figure out if this is a baby, or a cat⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In all fairness, he never had any in choice in your relationship.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be happy if you woke up today and your throat didn’t hurt.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve lived in a couple of cities in Europe and I can tell you my nose was runny far more often in a poluted place like London (UK) than it is in the small city I live in now in Portugal or the places I lived in when in The Netherlands.

  I suspect that the tendency to catch colds and suffer from alergies is often coupled with all the Sulfur Oxide gases around in cities with lots of car polution which turn into various sulfur oxiacids when those gases mix with water in the nose and airways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cognitive Biases⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a good point.

  Ever since I’ve became more aware of those I’ve found myself doing similar kind of “disarming” of such falacies when I notice I’m using them.

  My point it’s that it generally feels like swimming against the current.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cognitive Biases⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.

  It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy).

  Personally I try to “balance” this by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investin days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cognitive Biases⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s interesting is how, even when knowing these biases, one has a tendency to often have and display at least some of them.

  (At least, that’s the case for me)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Any process unless specifically adjusted to compensate for it (and the adjustment itself is a distortion of it and has secondary effects) will be affected by the environment it is working in.

  So specifically for Capitalism and the practice of Science under it, funding and the societal pressure on everybody including scientists to have more money - as wealth is a status symbol in that environment - are he main pathways via which Capitalism influences the practice of Science.

  It’s incredibly Reductionist and even anti-Scientific to start from the axiom that environment does not at all influence the way Science is practiced (hence Capitalism is unrelated to Science) and then just make an entire argument on top of such a deeply flawed assumption

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get good.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You had a cardboard box?!

  Luxury!

  When I was young …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get good.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re supposed to use baby talk with them from about 15 years old and until they’re 18, to really piss them off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sympathy for their PTSD⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Something about he at the end of the day going home to his young wife and 5 month old baby with a sad face.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sympathy for their PTSD⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “We didn’t hear the whole story during the Holocaust.” (emphasis mine).

  It seem mean in the sense of back then people weren’t hearing about what was going on in near real time, and only afterwards was the full dimensions of the horror discovered.

  Mind, you don’t think we are hearing the whole story of this Holocaust in near real time either: it’s not for nothing that Israel has blown up the Hospitals (were the dead were counted), has murdered over 1000 journalists and is blocking aid organisations from entering Gaza - all of which to block people outside from knowing the full scope of what the Israeli are doing in Gaza.

  We are hearing enough to know its a Genocide, but the full dimension of the thing (possibly with it, in scope and in methods use, already being or well on its way to be a new Holocaust) will only be discovered later if at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone give me an overview on the Jill Stein situation?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.

  (I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)

  This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.

  Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Birmingham Travel Guide⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  White vans, no less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨T-Mobile, AT&T oppose unlocking rule, claim locked phones are good for users⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Birmingham Travel Guide⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The style of architecture (notice the roof shingles, chimney shape, the dark red brick low wall between the street and the pump court and the iron fence in the middle of the road that goes by the pump - the photo was taken from the other side of the road), the kind of cars there, the weather and even the guy working with a reflective vest (all the way to the right of the picture) all suggest UK.

  In fact even without the title the whole thing looks very UK (as opposed to other places in Europe, though I wouldn’t be as sure).

  I lived in Britain and this picture immediatelly said “familiar” and “UK” as soon as I saw it. What’s funny is that to write this post I had to try and understand what elements made it so familiar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opened an old scientific instrument to see if it works...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Curiously, it’s one of those words that for me feels enjoyable to use yet I seldom have a chance to do so :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opened an old scientific instrument to see if it works...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s quite shrewd way of going about it.

  Since it’s not emitting anything the power it needs will be way less that something emitting its own signal and then checking for bounces which is how I naveivelly expected it would work.

  Cheers for the detailed explanation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Opened an old scientific instrument to see if it works...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I remember it correctly, it’s not just the overall capacity but also the how much the voltage drops as the current being drawn goes up (i.e. their internal resistance).

  You can pull several Amps out of an AA without its voltage dropping significativelly though it does accelerate depletion quite a lot if you do it in a sustained way (the volage curve of alkaline batteries actually depends on how much current you draw so if you just draw at say 100mA the “knee” in the curve were the voltage drops down from around 1.5V to a value too low to be useful is a lot sharper whilst if you draw 1A it’s a lot softer with the voltage starting to sinking much sooner for the same fraction of total charge drawn).

  Or in other words, the 9V battery might no be able supply enough peak current whilst still remaining close enough to 9V.

  (It was actually quite a commonly reported problem in Arduino forums that people used 9V batteries for things like motors and then had weird power drops or the motors didn’t actually work as expected even though theoretically everything seems to be in spec for them)

  You should probably test the device under “in use” conditions with a 9V battery rather than just in standby before you replace the current setup with a single 9V battery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon will “ramp up” Prime Video ads in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In this day and age, accepting cash payments is the least shady and most customer friendly thing of all.

  It’s the ones who want to know ALL about you and partner with payment processors who want to know ALL about you that are shady.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft retires WordPad after 28 years — app no longer available as of Windows 11 24H2⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Pfew … I move to Linux just in time!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US couple blocked from suing Uber after crash say daughter agreed to Uber Eats terms⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s the Left Butt Cheek Party and the Right Butt Check Party, both from the same ass hence why you get the same shit from both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Tom Warren] The PS5 Pro still hasn’t sold out in the US or UK. Looks like the $700 price point will mean this console will be readily available this holiday⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah.

  I have so far avoided that specific pit, but that’s because for maybe decades now and still whilst using Windows as my main I’ve avoid proprietary solutions (except for games) and went for Open Source ones instead, which has yielded the benefit that since I moved over to Linux for good a few months ago, I have yet to be faced with needing something I used to use in Windows and not finding a Linux native version.

  I’m sure I’ll end up in the same kind of situation you describe.

  By the way, have you tried “Bottles”? From what I’ve heard (but did not test myself yet) it might help there and it’s not specifically for games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Tom Warren] The PS5 Pro still hasn’t sold out in the US or UK. Looks like the $700 price point will mean this console will be readily available this holiday⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I just use Lutris, which generally does most of that work for me.