nymwit
@nymwit@lemm.ee
- Comment on brewing tea with space vacuum? 4 months ago:
“bad leaf! bad!” -scold vs. scald just for fun. good comment!
- Comment on US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week 6 months ago:
Where I was going was: effects can be different even if all choices and results are unethical. If one cares about the possible impacts of ones actions, consideration beyond “well it’s all unethical, so whatever” could be warranted.
- Comment on US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week 6 months ago:
are all unethical choices equal? Surely there are better and worse things?
- Comment on Can I Put it in my Ass? 6 months ago:
hey it says “in” not “up”. Just gotta lay down or maybe go inverted.
- Comment on xkcd #2908: Moon Armor Index 8 months ago:
Not bad, Jupiter. Considering you have 120x the surface area of earth, that’s a lot of moons.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
Come on, the same bread? That’s crazy. How can that work?
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 9 months ago:
For your used things for sure, the seller being reputable and the items being less common works well. Common items (like that knock off Switch dock above) that can be faked are tough because even if you buy product X from seller A, all product Xs can be in the same bin at the warehouse and Amazon just grabs one and ships. if Seller B is pushing a hard-to-distinguish knock off that Amazon believes is product X, then one might end up with that one and think seller A is to blame. That sort of mistake is definitely Amazon’s fault in my view. You can end up with knock off stuff when buying from the official brand’s store on Amazon for crying out loud.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 9 months ago:
So you’re talking about placing app windows everywhere? Then you’re limited to placing apple’s available apps for the device everywhere around you aren’t you? Which doesn’t sound like what you want. I’m taking your 3 monitors comment to mean you’re not running 3 monitors worth of mobile apps (because that would be wild if you were!). The 360 degree desktop setup here is going to be more like 360 degrees of ipad apps seems like. Maybe a windows remote desktop sort of app with multiple instances/windows all around you? Multiple safari instances all connected to some sort of web based remote desktop? I too want “spatial computing” to be more platform agnostic and want to be able to just paste applications or desktops on blank walls or floating in space.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 9 months ago:
The stuff I’ve seen is saying it can only do one extra display from a mac. Is there another way? The high resolution capabilities also suggest one full quality display would max out wireless bandwidth.
- Comment on [deleted] 10 months ago:
Can you run games like this in a virtual machine? Would that eliminate kernel level general invasiveness concerns because it’s a…virtual kernel I guess? Does that virtualization require too much overhead to run demanding games?
- Comment on AI shouldn’t make ‘life-or-death’ decisions, says OpenAI’s Sam Altman 10 months ago:
So just like shitty biased algorithms shouldn’t be making life changing decisions on folks’ employability, loan approvals, which areas get more/tougher policing, etc. I like stating obvious things, too. A robot pulling the trigger isn’t the only “life-or-death” choice that will be (is!) automated.
- Comment on Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage 10 months ago:
Unless they really bury them in other regular features and make them indispensable, I don’t care. I don’t really see myself using the ones they’ve advertised so it won’t bother me to not pay for them and for them not to be active. I get the distaste though, especially among this community with the preferences I’ve seen. That’s perfectly valid. My own choice will be to not pay for any subscription for any AI type services. My Note 20 Ultra has served me well. I may bite on this one (flat screen woohoo!). I’ll miss the SD card though.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro launch pre-view testers complain about weight, comfort, even headaches 10 months ago:
Perhaps, but folks are still wriggling around trying to make it happen. That and this being more an AR/VR hybrid (XR they called it? barf) along with apple’s usual polish (and ardent reality distortion field susceptible consumer base) could make a difference. Maybe. Also, dead can mean different things, no? There is a market for driving wheels and seats and such for racing games but it isn’t widespread like having a playstation is. I wouldn’t say driving peripherals were dead but just niche. That’s probably covered with your “consumer” descriptor of VR vs. what might be called an enthusiast market though. I appreciate the casting of your opinion to posterity.
- Comment on World’s first off-road solar car ‘Stella Terra’ succeeds in cruising from Morocco to the Sahara 11 months ago:
This bit of news made the rounds late October. It’s cool but they go to lengths to, IMO, misrepresent the achievement. It took them 1.5 weeks to do this. It has a great big battery but they give the impression that you can drive more or less continuously from solar alone. No mention in any of the many articles you can read on this (they must all be sourced from the same press release or similar) about charging rates to charge the whole battery. The best you can see is on some of the articles they say cloud cover could impact range by 50km. At what sort of speeds that is based on is up to anyone’s guess.
- Comment on World’s first off-road solar car ‘Stella Terra’ succeeds in cruising from Morocco to the Sahara 11 months ago:
It took a month. The guardian article on this made the rounds a month or two ago. You just can’t get enough via solar to run continuously. It has a big battery for sure. Charging rate is just super low.
- Comment on The state of open source SMS messagers 11 months ago:
Group chats work over SMS. I use cloud links for large files or just SMS/MMS for pictures and you just live with the low quality if texting with an iPhone user.
- Comment on The state of open source SMS messagers 11 months ago:
Samsung messages has Google’s RCS implementation and E2EE, too.
- Comment on Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence 11 months ago:
Negotiation is a thing for sure. It is possible, though I haven’t ever seen it implemented, that digital audio over USB-C or bluetooth can be blocked by DRM. It would seem business suicide to do something like limiting audio output to certain audio products but I wouldn’t put it past any short term minded profit seeking enterprise.
- Comment on Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's 'iMessage to Android' solution 11 months ago:
iMessage is Apple’s proprietary messaging protocol. Apple Messages is the default (and unchangeable) default SMS app on an iPhone. It uses iMessage rather than SMS when chatting with another Apple Messages user. If you use the app to message someone that isn’t using the same app, it falls back to SMS. It’s seamless from the iPhone user’s side except for the bubble color.
Who cares about the bubble color? People who want to send and receive higher quality pictures and video than SMS/MMS allows and can’t or won’t convince iphone users to use something other than their default messaging application. The color signifies the capabilities of the chat. Non SMS based or SMS fallback apps (Whatsapp, signal, etc) aren’t nearly as big in the US as in other countries. The US also has a much higher percentage of iPhone users than other places. Yes, clique-y children care about the color for clique-y reasons but the capabilities the bubble color indicates are the origin of it. “Oh this guy’s on Android, he can only send shitty pictures”, “he’s on Android - don’t put him in the group chat because it breaks it”, implying it’s Android’s fault rather than Apple’s exclusionary setup. Again, because it’s seamless to them, they don’t think they should lift a finger to use anything other than the default messaging app.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
Ugh I can’t believe I’m wading into a “who’s worse” thing on the internet, but here we go! Are the imprisoned Uyghurs all convicted criminals? Not that it makes it ok that the US prisoners are effectively slave labor but they did do something to get there (yeah yeah unfair justice system sure but I want to believe most are there for a legit reason). Maybe the Uyghurs broke the law of “don’t be a Uyghur” and the US prisoners all jaywalked. I don’t know. Even if we can say one is worse, everybody sucks. Why did I say something here? I feel gross now. I have to go take a shower. Look what you’ve made me do! It looks like I’ve defended effective slave labor and somehow endorsed the US’ incarceration system!
- Comment on Thomas 🔭✨ (@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io) 23andMe just sent out an email trying to trick customers into accepting a TOS change that will prevent you from suing them after they literally lost your genome 11 months ago:
Did they lose anyone’s genome? That’s not what’s been reported. They certainly lost customer information and this is definitely a super shitty move to trick you into waiving some rights, but I’ve seen no reporting that says they lost full DNA information.
- Comment on 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users 11 months ago:
The stolen data included the person’s name, birth year, relationship labels, the percentage of DNA shared with relatives, ancestry reports, and self-reported location.
23andMe also confirmed that another group of about 1.4 million people who opted-in to DNA Relatives also “had their Family Tree profile information accessed,” which includes display names, relationship labels, birth year, self-reported location and whether the user decided to share their information, the spokesperson said.
This is of course bad but is everyone thinking that actual DNA information was copied or what? That’s what it seems like from y’all’s comments. I mean that’s a pretty easy leap to make, it’s a DNA testing company after all, but they seem pretty specific on what data got out. I don’t immediately see that this specific information is worse than say what a credit reporting agency has on you.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
probably the real pseudoephedrine containing sudafed and generic versions that are behind the counter and require a swipe of an ID to get from an employee. They don’t want you making the meth by buying a million packs across the city or state, now do they?
- Comment on Spotify re-invented the radio 1 year ago:
Not really the right use I think. It was coined specifically to describe platforms’ lifecycle of changing who they benefit. What’s above is just constant churn in the attempt of infinite growth or just hanging onto market share trying to decide what people want (or tell them what they should want).
A paid subscription service like O365 or spotify isn’t too similar to the advertising “business partners” of a social media platform like tiktok. Of course language is descriptive rather than prescriptive but I feel like overusing this term loses the perceptive observation (and the message Doctorow wants to promote) of how these businesses work. Microsoft adding new features and spotify changing things to either make their app management easier (they claimed that’s why they got rid of android widget for a while) or promote their own stuff doesn’t seem to fit.
- Comment on Spotify re-invented the radio 1 year ago:
Kinda tough on a phone. Screen goes off, music stops. I know there are ways to get around it that yt doesn’t want you to do but that is beside the point of “youtube is free”. Everything is free if you do it that way.
- Comment on ‘World’s first off-road solar SUV’ just drove across Morocco powered only by the sun 1 year ago:
Did you see the pictures? It’s like the size of a sedan. Campervan seems a stretch.
- Comment on ‘World’s first off-road solar SUV’ just drove across Morocco powered only by the sun 1 year ago:
This is a neat project…and terrible reporting.
Did they start out with any charge? How long to charge it fully via solar? How long it took them to do their trip? You could easily read this and think they did it by driving the full range (one of the few stats they give) out every day unless you’re knowledgeable enough to see what they’re not telling you. Is that range at 30mph? People are reading range figures and thinking, “well, gee, the EVs I can buy only do X and this does Y!”, which isn’t comparable at all without how that range is defined. If those figures shouldn’t be compared to regular cars, then say it in the article! This is a 20-30 mile a day charged-by-solar-in-the-desert-near-the-equator vehicle, which isn’t nothing, but not really as presented. Greenwashing (it’s probably not) or whatever this should be called doesn’t help the needed planetary shift away from fossil fuels.
Looking for other reporting (where are other commenters finding the duration of the trip?):
Guardian - no mention of time.
bonus: “We hope this can be an inspiration to car manufacturers such as Land Rover and BMW to make it a more sustainable industry. The car was actually very comfortable in the off-road conditions as it is very light and does not get stuck.”
Remind me how it was so lightweight again? Does it have LR & BMW level noise damping? It surely had AC and all that right? I don’t know because that info wasn’t provided. You don’t need to convince LR and BMW, you need to convince consumers to go without those.
Daily Mail - no mention of time
Designboom - no mention of time
Jalopnik - no mention of time, which is disappointing for a car specific site
This is a cool project and it’s cool university students did it, but why leave out such a misleading pieces of information? It’s bandied about as a “showing people it’s possible” thing as in, “you could have a solar car!”, but leave out all the bits that really make it possible, like forgoing AC or the daily miles driven. That none of the reporting on this has this information either means [puts on tinfoil hat] it’s a vast conspiracy to make green stuff look more palatable [tinfoil off], it’s all confluence of interest in making it look more palatable, or the information just wasn’t given out, or they’re all referencing the same source news-wire style. Frustrating.
Where’s the real information? I feel like we’re in a race against time to move away from fossil fuels so things like this need to not be misleading.
- Comment on Mass protests have failed to bring about social change. It’s time for a new strategy. 1 year ago:
Are they going to stand there with a gun pointed at me making me work? Will they bring you home at the end of the day? Hell, I’m thinking I could cut my commute costs and probably get more done!
- Comment on USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible 1 year ago:
Yeah, Universal Spower Bus. Sounds right. I was reading the “power” part emphasized in the comment you replied to. Prior to mass adoption by phone mfrs, USB wasn’t powering all that much. You’d usually have 5v wall wart and cable ending in a barrel connector. Hate those things.
- Comment on Am I? Who knows 1 year ago:
then we get to really specifically define individual, perspective, and perception (can you perceive while unconscious? I guess?), all sorts of fun knots to tie oneself into. I always thought the difference in sense vs. perception was the thinking about it, but if it’s processed at all by the “unconscious” I guess it’s still perception? I mean, I’m gettting twisted up thinking if my individual consciousness has a perspective from which it perceives the world