blindsight
@blindsight@beehaw.org
- Comment on Australia should pass bill to ban non-prescription vapes, Senate committee finds 3 hours ago:
I assume as a smoking cessation tool? idk, just speculating.
- Comment on Academic Rizzlers 6 days ago:
Based.
- Comment on ONS staff refuse to work two days a week in office 1 week ago:
Team building is very important.
That’s why my employer strongly requests us to meet in person 2 times/year.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 3 weeks ago:
I might have changed that setting. I don’t like Google Assistant on my phone since it interferes with my Google Home devices.
- Comment on Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules 3 weeks ago:
On my Sony phone, holding power with the screen on brings up the power menu, which includes Lockdown mode.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 3 weeks ago:
Universal holidays between the years was good enough for the Mayans and it’s good enough for me!
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 3 weeks ago:
So what I’m getting from this is that we need to pull the Moon a bit closer to the Earth, and the Earth a bit closer to the Sun.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 3 weeks ago:
What the flying fuck. I literally did that exact thing in university to manage my at-the-time undiagnosed sleep disorder.
I slept through like 30% of my classes, but it was the most rested I’d ever been in my life.
- Comment on Or we could do metric time 3 weeks ago:
You can thank Julius Augustus for that. He wanted the best months named after himself. Egomaniac.
- Comment on Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus 3 weeks ago:
This is fascinating to watch happening. As numbers-must-go-up businesses chase profits in a world where subscribership has peaked, they cannibalize their own value proposition to increase profits. This encourages more users to shift to piracy, accelerating profit losses.
Will we ever reach an equilibrium? My understanding is that total entertainment spending doesn’t decline or grow much, so it’s all just trying to compete with rivals for a bigger slice of the pie. I wonder if the major TV and film producers are just going to have less total money heading their way, and we’ll have less high-budget content created.
I don’t really care either way; lots of lower-budget content is amaze balls. I barely ever play AAA games or watch blockbuster movies, and I think it might be better for everyone to get more diversity in content creators (that lower budgets will likely enable.)
It will be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over the next few decades.
Now excuse my while I go pirate low-budget UK panel shows (that are region-locked internationally) while playing Final Fantasy 5 on an emulator modded with several fan-made romhacks.
- Comment on Meta's 'consent or pay' tactic must not prevail over privacy, EU rights groups warn 3 weeks ago:
I really hope they make the right decision!
- Comment on Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites 3 weeks ago:
This article goes against what I’ve noticed in schools, as a teacher.
In schools I’ve worked in that block sites students want to reach (games or video streaming, almost exclusively), one kid in the school figures out how to sign up for a free VPN, and it spreads quickly until everyone in the school is using a crappy (likely unsafe) VPN. They don’t have the knowledge to seek out a reputable VPN; they just get whatever spyware they find first that works.
There’s no point filtering school Internet, except for known porn sites. Block PornHub, obviously, but as soon as you block YouTube or Cool Math Games, then every student in the school will be using a shitty VPN by the end of the month.
That said, students aren’t going to put the effort in to get around blocks for schoolwork. Obviously. They aren’t going to open the VPN for that!
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Clickbait answer: It’s property taxes. Not hidden at all.
- Comment on Everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 2531 unless marriage law changed, says professor 5 weeks ago:
I posted this in another thread on this article:
The math is wrong.
You can’t apply exponential growth to the proportion of a total.
Growing from 1% to 2% (a 100% gain) is equally a reduction from 99% to 98%, a 1.01% drop.
Going from 99% to 100% (a 1.01% gain) is equally a reduction from 1% to 0%, an infinite drop.Simple exponential modeling is the wrong tool.
- Comment on degree in bamf 1 month ago:
Did you drop a /s? This is a funny meme, so I’m assuming I just missed a joke.
Right?
(Speaking as a white male, white male entitlement, and privilege for that matter, are incredibly relevant to white men being sexist/racist.)
(You can trust me on this because I’m a white male. Also, I’m used to my opinion being listened to, so I expect you to as well. Just FYI.)
- Comment on positivity 1 month ago:
√(x²)
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
That stood out to me, too. It also completely ignores the t-shirt of compound interest on amortization schedules. If you can pay 10% of your minimum wage job to student loans (lol, good luck), quick napkin math shows that millennials will literally never pay off their loans, I think?
I don’t have time to run the math properly right now, but I’m really tempted to skip out on working to run the numbers, lol!
- Comment on Can someone explain why authors do this? 2 months ago:
Alt text:
Changing the names would be easier, but if you’re not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.
XKCD isn’t complete without the alt text.
- Comment on France halts €100-a-month electric car leasing scheme after huge demand 2 months ago:
Brilliant. A model that should be adopted in developed nations all over the world.
I wouldn’t qualify (I live too close to work) but it’s reasonable that they put driving requirements on the plan. Not much point subsidizing drivers who drive under 5K km/yr.
- Comment on Can a new shot prevent a hangover? I put it to the test 2 months ago:
200 mg of caffeine in a product that’s marketed to take after a night of drinking before going to sleep? Or is this meant to be taken in the morning, after a night of drinking? (But by then wouldn’t the hangover be started already, making this a remedy, not prevention?)
I find this product confusing.
- Comment on Why do programmers need private offices with doors? (Do Not Disturb) 4 months ago:
What a great article. Practical and poetic.
It would have been nice to have a connection made to Flow, since that’s what was being alluded to throughout, but maybe excluding Flow was deliberate in some way I’m missing?
- Comment on Software Engineer vs Software Developer 5 months ago:
I fixed my comment above. Thanks for the correction.
- Comment on Software Engineer vs Software Developer 5 months ago:
This whole thread was weird to read as a Canadian:
In Canada the title “engineer” is a legally protected term. You can’t legally call yourself a software engineer without going through the Engineers Canada accreditation.
You are a software engineer if you are an engineer in good standing. Calling yourself a software engineer without accreditation is fraud.
- Comment on linguistics 5 months ago:
Obligatory alt text:
“Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you’re currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.”
XKCD should always include the alt text, imho. It’s often the better punchline (as in this case, imho.)
- Comment on Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption? 6 months ago:
I’d love to read more about that! Normally, I’d just do my own searching, but since you have actual expertise in the area, is there someone in particular I should search for who explains this?
I also want to clarify that I’m not skeptical; on the contrary, I can think of three reasons off the top of my head, as a layman who knows virtually nothing about Esperanto, just based on you identifying colonialism as an issue, but I was hoping to get an educated take on it.
- Comment on Unity U-turns on controversial runtime fee and begs forgiveness 7 months ago:
A lot of those employees must be client-facing/sales/ads, I would think? I don’t think game engines generally have large teams, but maybe I’m wrong.
- Comment on Amazon To Start Running Ads In Prime Video Series & Movies, Will Launch Ad-Free Tier For Extra Fee 7 months ago:
The unlimited full resolution photo storage is what keeps me subscribed. Everything else is just extra.
The Prime shipping I don’t really care about; it’s easy enough to just wait until the cart hits the free shipping spend. Prime streaming was fine, previously. We like a few of their shows, but it’s just as convenient to pirate then now that they’re adding ads.
Is there a better option for cheap off-site unlimited photo storage?
- Comment on Amazon To Start Running Ads In Prime Video Series & Movies, Will Launch Ad-Free Tier For Extra Fee 7 months ago:
It’s even easier than that, now. For like $20/6 months, you can get a debrid service account that will host everything (that’s not obscure) for you. Hook it up to an app like Stremio and you basically have Netflix for all media. It even has panels for show/film discovery, sorted by genre categories.
The only big difference is that you select the quality of stream you want each time you start playing something.
I was going to set up my own system, but a debrid service is cheaper than buying the hard drives and a lot easier to set up.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Yeah, but that was after he was already doing some pretty Forcy things. Leia only used the Force very weakly for empathic connection.
- Comment on Striking actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI 7 months ago:
And re: remixing:
How long until enough people put recordings of their voices out with a CC0 license that you can legally digitally remix any voice you want?