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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

    Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

    As far as actual tech competency goes?

    Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.


  • In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20240506163714/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-philosophy-of-simcity-an-interview-with-the-games-lead-designer/275724/

    Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?

    Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

    Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

    Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

    EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.



  • I mean, this story is obviously bullshit and has been debunked over the years.

    Not to mention even on its face, the headline is just wrong.

    Elon states he had an apartment, but also implies he lived in his office, coding 24/7.

    So… he had an apartment and is exaggerating about how often he stayed late.

    How much did that apartment cost?

    ???

    Did he just walk to work?

    Was he working but not earning a wage?

    This is a total bullshit article even by its own text.

    Maybe his food budget was about a dollar a day for a while. Sure, ok, that’s maybe possible.

    This is like those stories that were going around a while ago with various corporations just displaying absolutely absurd budgets for how a person could afford to live on their full time minimum low income job…

    By assuming rent is 40% lower than it is, that they don’t have to pay for car insurance, never have health problems, never need new clothes, barely eat and don’t have a phone or internet plan.


  • As well as apparently multiple hundreds of …negatively…? executed CREATE, ALTER or DROP commands … averaging out to 0 per second.

    … resulting in a spike of negative, I dunno, 30mb/s of reads.

    Mhm yep.

    My initial guess is that failed/malformed attempts to … do something … are being registered as negative instead of being actually displayed as failed.

    But that seems to make too much sense.

    Second guess: Lightning strike.

    Third guess: Arcane, hitherto unseen bug or series of bugs utterly and totally unique to this exact set up which has somehow never occurred or been noticed before.



  • I mean, that’s not that bad, here’s my attempt at contextually inferring the meanings of the seemingly silly bits.

    Delicious Dress vs Cookable / Creamy?

    Creamy almost certainly means ‘Whites’

    Cookable almost certainly means ‘Steamable’, as in, higher temps that won’t cause wet clothes with heavy inks to run.

    Delicious almost certainly means ‘Delicate’.

    The two top quadrants are for different volumes of clothes to be dried, the left for delicates at a lower temp, the right for whites at a higher temp.

    Cabinet Dry vs Wardrobe Dry to me implies drying a cabinet of delicate or white clothes vs just one outfit.

    Outstanding vs Gentle… If I had to guess I’d say theyre the same characters being translated differently due to them having multiple contextual meanings but being absent of immediate context, the translator is confused. All of the other top quadrant settings are mirrored… except this one?

    Probably Gentle is the correct translation for both sides.

    Then you’ve got ‘Dry them just enough to be wet enough to take out and Iron’ for both delicates and whites.

    The bottom left quadrant is two different specifically timed dry cycles, one warm, one cold.

    Its section title is on the bottom.

    The bottom right quadrant probably refers to settings that let the dryer run either longer, set amounts of time, or make use of a humidity detector in some way.

    Its section title is on top: Mangrove Wet, ie, totally soaked like mangroves in a swamp.

    As for smoothing and wool loosening… not sure about ‘smoothing’, but I’d bet its less intense than ‘wool loosening’, if thats referring to taking a heavy, stiff, wool garment and then totally soaking and then drying it to… you know, loosen it up.


  • And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

    … because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

    They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.






  • I… uh…

    …ok.

    So, if you go on Facebook, or Craiglist, and then privately buy or sell a firearm that is:

    Fully Automatic

    Does not meet required barrel length for its caliber

    Is a fucking grenade or other explosive

    Sold to or purchased from a person in a state you do not reside in

    And/or

    You do not also do the required paperwork (and usually a background check on the purchaser) to indicate to the government that you have sold/purchased a firearm, or at least keep a record of this for yourself…

    …in almost every state in the US, you are now likely a felon, should your activities become noticed by law enforcement.

    https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/private-gun-sale-laws-by-state.html

    In fact, the ATF and FBI have quite often done honeypot operations in these kinds of groups.

    Please tell me you can see the difference between exploiting the loopholes in a country with a highly complex array or firearms laws, and an open air bazaar in a foreign country with basically no gun laws.

    Twitter/X, which is, last I checked, a US based and registered company, is now facilitating unregulated firearms sales to a potentially international audience, and again, it is facilitating arms transfers to or from persons and entities the US likely considers to be terrorists.

    I do not have to have any political opinion regarding the Houthis to be able to tell you that this is yet another gigantic legal quagmire for Twitter/X.