ranzispa
@ranzispa@mander.xyz
- Comment on LibreOffice criticizes EU Commission over proprietary XLSX formats 1 day ago:
I didn’t know calc could do that, cool!
- Comment on LibreOffice criticizes EU Commission over proprietary XLSX formats 1 day ago:
Do you know of any software which stores formulas in CSV?
- Comment on LibreOffice criticizes EU Commission over proprietary XLSX formats 1 day ago:
CSV does not allow storing formulas, just results. It is a good format to share data, but it is not a good format to store spreadsheets which very often contain such formulas.
- Comment on Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket 4 days ago:
Self checkout is only a valid option if you are stealing. No, I’m not going to do your job to increase your profits by having less employees. Fuck those things.
- Comment on Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket 4 days ago:
Those are some huge price swings for some chocolate in just a couple months time span. Is it common for products to fluctuate so much in price in your area?
- Comment on Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket 4 days ago:
Don’t you do that already? Do you just go to one store and buy meat, fish vegetables, alcoholics, cleaning supplies and so on in the same place?
- Comment on Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket 4 days ago:
The fact that the other guy who buys the same crackers, but they know they have to give a $0.10 discount so that he’ll buy a beer with it, is also walking down the same aisle. That is likely what would prevent them.
- Comment on Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket 4 days ago:
How would that work? I go to a shop and I know the price of what they are selling. It is not so easy to rapidly change prices without people noticing. There may be variations on vegetables, fish and meat according to availability but everything else has a clear price. Some products do have some seasonality or good and bad years but when I go to the shop I’ll mostly be accounting for those. It would be quite strange to go to the shop one day and buy something for 5€, the following time for 6€ and another time for 4€. You see, if I know this system is in place I will just not buy it whenever it is at an higher price. Moreover, changing prices while shopping is probably illegal. I am not sure about this, but I believe in Europe large shops are obligated to clearly state the price for every product. By changing the price several times per hour I do not think that would comply with such regulations. While personalised pricing itself may be legal, and I’m not sure it is, changing the stated prices while people are shopping probably isn’t. Besides, when I check out how will they charge me? This is 6€, no it was 5€ yesterday, you see the price changed to 6 while you were walking in front of it but it now is at 4€.
- Comment on Just one more square bro 6 days ago:
I’m sure a big square inside the main square would have a higher surface area than this. Calculations over the top of my head tell me this, but then again, I didn’t publish an article on the subject.
- Comment on Name this Paper 1 week ago:
Systematic review of lab equipment and techniques applied after the prohibition of bunsen burners
- Comment on YSK that editing Wikipedia is easier than it looks (and where to start) 1 week ago:
I started editing a page which was a list of scientific software for a specific application. Something really useful if you ask me, as it’s difficult to find a complete list of those, you’d mostly be waiting for someone to publish a review on the topic. After a while someone came around and decided a bunch of items in that list were not relevant, he did in fact delete the most widely used software and left some very old and discontinued ones. I explained that was a mistake and that it would render the page useless, but apparently it is not considered useful to have a list of things if the individual elements of that list are not considered worth having a page, and those were not considered worth having a page because nobody had decided to make one page.
I turned to wikidata and found a very good source of data and a much friendlier community.
- Comment on Burger King will use AI to check if employees say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ 1 week ago:
To be fair, this forced friendlies I have found in many restaurants and bars in the US. A very annoying behaviour. But apparently, people over there will complain if the waiter has not been around annoying them by asking if they need something else all the time. Workers are already being forced to put up such a show because customers like it. I don’t think the problem is using AI to check this, but rather that this behaviour is being forced onto workers in the first place.
- Comment on AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains 2 weeks ago:
Who the fuck wrote such a terrible article? What is described is not a problem with AI per se, but rather automation and poor security. AI may be part of that automation system, but this is a trend which started with the dot com bubble and not something new. Besides, the models they reference to check plant diseases and so on are most definitely not the LLMs which have now become synonyms of AI.
Sure, a cyber attack can lock down your production; but it is mostly not AI who generated this problem. It may intensify the problem, but as of now we don’t have many examples in which that happened.
- Comment on systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success 2 weeks ago:
Red Hay has helped a lot the Linux system, I doubt desktop systems would be a good viable idea by now without their contribution. Does your analogy imply that you think Red Hat made systemd to eventually break it and thus make Linux not viable? I doubt they could do that without losing all their customers.
I mean, systemd can indeed do a lot of things but it mostly is used for startup and service management. And I prefer systems services to a cronjob.
- Comment on If at first you don't connect 3 weeks ago:
Is that a USB to USB adapter?
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 3 weeks ago:
Came from Italy and to be fair I didn’t try too much American food, I guess some corn meal and pancakes, meat was really good; but the real greatest thing I found in the US is the HUGE sandwiches they make in the Publix supermarket. Great stuff, loved it.
- Comment on Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital 3 weeks ago:
I know plenty people who are currently homeless in Europe originally lost their job following the 2008 crash.
- Comment on In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud 3 weeks ago:
Do you often cut and join audio that you did not record yourself?
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 3 weeks ago:
Same, my conclusion is that we have too much faith in medics. Not that Llama are good at being a medic, but apparently in many cases they will outperform a medic, especially if the medic is not specialized in treating that type of patients. And it does often happen around here that medics treat patients with conditions outside of their expertise area.
- Comment on Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet? 3 weeks ago:
I mean, AI is what took the focus away from QC, especially after AlphaFold. Quantum Computing is potentially a society changing technology, now regarding practice we are really far away. The main expectations are in the field of medicine. I work in that field and I reckon that if the expectations placed on quantum computers were to come true, we’d be able to study the human body much quicker than now and to develop drugs much quicker than now. However, I do work nearby a Quantum computing centre and I have met quite a few persons who work in the field, both as researchers and entrepreneurs. Currently no computer can be used to make any real calculations and it is actually unclear if the molecular simulations are actually possible with a quantum computer. As far as I understand it, it may not be possible to encode the whole system in a quantum computer before it loses coherence. This may be an intrinsic limitation as for real problems you’d need to encode tens of thousands of electrons.
- Comment on Claude Opus 4.6: This AI just passed the 'vending machine test' - and we may want to be worried about how it did 3 weeks ago:
Raising price of water or increasing prices when supply is low is not something I’d see working in real world. Pretty sure if it did that I’d just smash the machine and advise the company to replace it with a normal one.
- Comment on “IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial 5 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t use Arab springs as an example of why Facebook is not a good product. Facebook has many problems and misuses, but I would not list allowing people to organise as one of them.
- Comment on Proton's predictions for the internet, 2025 reviewed and 2026 projections 5 weeks ago:
An article about it is very much appreciated. It’s difficult to see things coming when there is no information available.
- Comment on A look at Moltbook, a social network where OpenClaw assistants interact autonomously, as they discuss consciousness and identity, technical tips, and more 5 weeks ago:
So, you have a system with several LLM agents discussing amongst them regarding the best way to reply on a social network to a question posed by a system with several LLM agents who discussed amongst them and decided they should ask someone else for a response.
What is the point of the social network? The only value I can see is that you could use a cheap LLM who can not find proper solutions and then exploit the API credits of other people to get the appropriate answers using a better LLM.
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 5 weeks ago:
I would imagine this would lead to having less users. Or people that use it less. It would also make the experience for users worse. As such it would lead to less subscriptions. It is not clear to me that this would be better. I’m not sure on whether it would be worse, but I doubt it’d be better for everyone.
- Comment on Google will pay $135 million to settle illegal data collection lawsuit 5 weeks ago:
Agreed, LLC should only cover bankruptcy expenses and not penal responsibilities.
- Comment on Google will pay $135 million to settle illegal data collection lawsuit 5 weeks ago:
I have an Android phone, where’s my money?
- Comment on Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App 5 weeks ago:
Is It better for patreon to lose 30% of income from Apple pay, or to have Apple users not being able to pay unless they open the webpage and pay from there? Is it better for them to remove the app altogether and have users on Apple forced to use it through the website?
I’d imagine they’d lose quite a bit of subscriptions if they did that. Is that more or less than 30% is something I don’t know.
- Comment on xkcd #3200: Chemical Formula 5 weeks ago:
Pretty sure that yes, somewhere in the universe there is organic matter.
- Comment on Meta's latest subscription move is an attempt to offset its AI bets 5 weeks ago:
Indeed. It had a very quick spread when it first came out and as such it became the default way to message and call people. Nobody sends SMS. I mostly do calls through WhatsApp: I live in a foreign country and thus calling from my country’s number I would occur in additional costs. I do have a phone number for the country I live in, but I don’t charge it as that would require me to pay 2 phone numbers. However, across Europe internet plans do not charge extra when in another country and thus calling through WhatsApp I do not incur in extra costs.
When WhatsApp first came out that is why it became a big thing: you don’t have to worry about the limit of SMS anymore. You paid 1€/year for the app and got the most basic plan which provided internet and you could send all the messages you wanted to anyone.