Ultraviolet
@Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
- Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet 2 weeks ago:
Yes. We could have had a planet Orcus and we were like “nah, we’ll pass.” That would have been metal as shit.
- Comment on English, old 5 weeks ago:
It’s the unabridged ISO 639 list.
- Comment on ))<>(( 5 weeks ago:
I would never write -n². Either ‐(n²) or (-n)². Order of operations shouldn’t be some sort of gotcha to trick people into misinterpreting you, it’s the intuitive reading of a well constructed mathematical expression.
- Comment on I feel so old. 1 month ago:
Apple, in an attempt to leverage social pressure to drive sales instead of actually providing a quality product, displays texts from Android devices in a deliberately unpleasant to look at shade of green. Teenagers took the bait hook line and sinker.
- Comment on Taylor Swift among 141 new billionaires in ‘amazing year for rich people’ 1 month ago:
It goes even further than that. After vigintillion, you have steps of 10^30 that go trigintillion, quadragintillion, quinquagintillion, sexagintillion, septuagintillion, octogentillion, nonagentillion and centillion, with the 10^3 prefix in the front. If you really need to ramp up further, centillion can be prefixed by any of the other major prefixes, so 10^30 centillion is a decicentillion, and so on.
It’s a whole system that I had a hyperfixation on as a kid so I remember it quite well.
- Comment on Taliban edict to resume stoning women to death met with horror 1 month ago:
“You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles,” he said, adding: “[But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.”
Satan has a far better human rights record, so yeah, I’m with him on this one.
- Comment on Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes 1 month ago:
It’s probably just a ChatGPT wrapper with a preset prompt. That’s all these “AI entrepreneurs” are capable of.
- Comment on Study: Dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old 1 month ago:
How long until the young earth dipshits jump on this as “evidence” to claim that if there’s room to question whether the universe is 13.8 billion or 26.7 billion years old, that means it must actually be 6000?
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
That’s a misconception. The Mayan long count for December 20, 2012 was 12.19.19.17.19. December 21, 2012 was 13.0.0.0.0. Today is 13.0.11.7.4. It continues the same way indefinitely, it’s just the number of days since some arbitrary date in base 20, with the second to last digit in base 18, probably so the third to last can stand in as a rough approximation of years.
- Comment on why don't people say mega meters 2 months ago:
The beauty of the metric system is you don’t lose a sense of scale from using a higher unit because you can intuitively know 1Mm is 1000km.
- Comment on How does delisting a game make/save money? 2 months ago:
That would be an entirely new level of unethicality. Not only does it fly in the face of preservation, it’s a stab in the back to the developers who trusted them to publish their game. Imagine having made a game that you’re proud of and want to share with people, but you’re not allowed to sell it or even give it away because the megacorp that promised to do the business side of things and let you focus on development turned around and decided it will be buried forever.
- Comment on I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace. 2 months ago:
As a side effect of that, learning modular arithmetic later becomes more difficult.
- Comment on I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace. 2 months ago:
I still round, I’ll call 3:11 3:10 when the precision doesn’t matter.
- Comment on OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model 2 months ago:
Because sometimes the generator just replicates bits of its training data wholesale. The “creative spark” isn’t its own, it’s from a human artist left uncredited and uncompensated.
- Comment on AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt 2 months ago:
Better yet, point the crawler to a massive text file of almost but not quite grammatically correct garbage to poison the model.
- Comment on FLOSS communities right now 2 months ago:
Is this an actual thing or is it a misinterpretation of the standard boilerplate “you grant us a non-exclusive non-transferrable license to do the basic things that make a post visible to other people on the internet” message that every platform where you post stuff has?
- Comment on fat time 2 months ago:
Of course they didn’t. Do you think the body metabolizing sugar and storing it as fat is new information that was completely unknown to science in the 1960s?
- Comment on And how's there a car in a mall? Life's important questions 3 months ago:
For one thing, red and blue aren’t primary colors of paint. Mix magenta and yellow paint and you have red, mix magenta and cyan and you have blue.
- Comment on Which option lads? 3 months ago:
You would also have an incentive to walk more so even if you’re normally very sedentary, you wouldn’t be after taking the deal.
- Comment on You may want to wear sunglasses though 3 months ago:
Google’s featured snippet thing is not only a bad feature, it’s actively causing harm. It’s extremely unreliable, but people who aren’t tech literate, which is most people, think “well it’s Google, so it must be right.” Sometimes it’s obviously wrong in a funny way, but more often, it’s doing something like parroting dangerous medical misinformation. To make things worse, it’s very likely to answer a question, which is the search form preferred by the technologically illiterate, with a yes. I would go so far as to say they should be sued for criminal negligence for implementing it.
- Comment on Comcast reluctantly agrees to stop its misleading “10G Network” claims 3 months ago:
4G LTE was the point of no return. It was supposed to mean “it’s not 4G yet but we have an upgrade plan to get there”, but when they finally did, marketing found out that to the average person, going from 4G LTE to 4G sounded like a downgrade, so they rebranded it to 5G.
- Comment on These aren't "feel good" stories, they're "we live in hell" stories. 3 months ago:
That’s why what we really need is for unions themselves to unionize to threaten a general strike. It’s an absolute last resort as it would be a complete economic killswitch, but it’s a threat that can’t be ignored.
- Comment on These aren't "feel good" stories, they're "we live in hell" stories. 4 months ago:
Unions are much stronger in Europe. In the US they’re a lot more limited in what they can do, if a strike would be too disruptive, which is, you know, the whole fucking point of a strike, the government can just forbid it.
- Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis? 4 months ago:
Ok, strictly speaking, the language is called the Egyptian language and hieroglyphs were the writing system used to write it (until Greek influences evolved it into Coptic). But that’s an extremely pedantic distinction to anyone who isn’t a linguist.
- Comment on What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish? 4 months ago:
The Celeste mod Strawberry Jam. It’s a lot of fun, but I’d be more than satisfied with just getting through the expert levels, which are already at the point where simply watching gameplay of them would kill a small Victorian child, but I’m at just the right level of masochism that this is a tough but satisfying grind. But I’ve seen what’s next, I’m fully aware of the horrors of the Grandmaster levels, and I know I’ll hit my upper limit well before 100% completion.
- Comment on Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris 4 months ago:
The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn’t really an advantage because it’s always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.
- Comment on Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris 4 months ago:
The crash was known, it’s been reached by a TAS but no human had gotten far enough to trigger it. He was intentionally trying for the crash to be the first one to do it.
- Comment on Watch a 13-year-old become the first person to ever beat Classic Tetris 4 months ago:
Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.
- Comment on All in the Memery 4 months ago:
Right wingers making memes of characters that they had absolutely no idea were making fun of them is one of my least favorite meme genres.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 4 months ago:
They needed to go scorched earth on SEO years ago. Try anything unethical, your domain is permanently blacklisted from all search results. No appeals, no second chances, your content will never see the light of day again.