Unfortunately I got it at a thrift shop and there are no stickers. Googling for “pulley lamp” shows me one that looks very similar: “Carbon Loft Tirith Industrial Farmhouse Table Lamp with Pulley System”
Ummmm… how about 2 vertical monitors above each other?
That’s how I got this long ass screenshot, for example: https://i.imgur.com/2AOYktQ.png
I don’t know how else to do that, so I fixed it with hardware ʘ‿ʘ
You can tell xrandr anything, it doesn’t have to be physically connected. So you could get 3960x1080 virtual screen space for a single vertical HD screen. If you move your mouse to the edge of the screen it will scroll what is visible. I discovered it in my triple monitor setup. I turn off screens I don’t need (they waste like 30W!), but the script I wrote to notify X11 of these changes doesn’t work as reliably as I would like, lol. Also duplicate polybar sometimes, haha.
Not sure how useful this is, because while the application thinks it has all this screen space available you can’t actually see all of it at once.
I’m not using it as much as I should be, but it is genuinely a pleasant improvement over sitting all day long. A really expensive chair can do you a lot of good, but nothing beats the mobility of standing. When I read something or watch something I can do some light exercise for my legs, squatting a tiny bit and moving my upper body left and right for example. For a lot of people it can be a good start to moving their body a bit more.
If you go running every other day you don’t need it, I’ll give you that.
The number of people who simply don’t know how to effectively use a web search is absurd. If you can sit down to a search engine and find what you’re looking for within 5 minutes or less, you’re probably the go-to troubleshooting person for your family. The general population is almost dangerously tech-illiterate.
I don’t know what pissed me off more, watching my mom write a book into the google search bar because she refuses to just use the key words or the fact that it gave her the exact info she wanted immediately despite being somewhat niche.
AFAIK the two are identical, and words such as “how”, “do” and “what” are mostly ignored by the engine. The only content words in both are “apple” “pie” and “recipe”/“cook”.
Most of genz get it pretty intuitively because they grow up with Google searching. I didn’t realise until recently how much more important it is you understand the answers than find them especially if you’re getting a niche error.
Yep people who try to copy paste code without understanding it are not programmers.
Even though, I admit I do that myself with new languages. I tried to build a Rust async application and it worked but didn’t properly work… I just put code in there and got something running.
But now I went back and read the docs and realized I’m doing things wrongly.
Shameless plug for Kagi. It’s a subscription search service but you get unlimited searches for $10/month (and a few hundred I think for $5), and it’s generally much better than Google – especially since you can customize which sites are shown higher in the results and which ones are shown lower or blocked entirely.
The reason why it’s a subscription service is that they don’t have to rely on ad revenue, meaning they don’t track or profile you at all (so no search history either, although I think they’re working on an optional history feature)
Socrates said books were dumbing down humanity because, since people could just look things up in books they wouldn’t have to memorise information anymore, and that made their brains soft.
Ever since society began, some people have been convinced the next generation’s technology was going to be society’s downfall, whether it was Socrates’ books, the telegraph in the 1800s, radio, the (land line) telephone, dishwashers (women will become lazy and unsuitable wives and mothers), screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes), comic books would rot the brains of the youth, then music, then video games… it goes on and on.
So far, those predictions have never been true. Every older generation freaks out when the ones after come of age. It’s like societal growing pains.
I think this is one step further, that technology has become so abstract and complex that people who focus on different crafts and careers are using magical black boxes. It blows my mind how my neighbour goes through life without any concept of what a phone app is. He just uses functionality and memorized the associated logo. I’m an engineering wizard to him.
Isn’t that true of pretty much everu technology, though? I remember in the late 70s there’d occasionally be a loud pop and a puff of smoke from the television, and I’d tag along with my dad to the tv shop to buy new vacuum tubes, then we’d remove the back of the television and do minor repairs. Everyone knew how to do that.
Exactly, my television is an ips lcd with an arm based programmable microcomputer with software that translates input signals for the display, LED backlighting and an internal power supply. Although, I wouldn’t be able to repair it, there are no spare parts.
Every washing machine has an embedded system that controls the washing cycle and needed programming for that. That’s not common knowledge and they rather put functionality in their marketing than function.
We need a right to repair and common instructions how to fix things, maybe that helps dissolving the magic.
Some technologies actually have had unintended side effects, but not always the ones we saw coming. Artificial lights are killing all the insects which nobody really worried about and cars do kill tons of people, which we worried about in the 1920s. I don’t know what the deal was with leaded gasoline, that one was just bizarre.
All in all, it’s just really hard to anticipate how society and technology will interact. We think about the environment now but I don’t know if any systematic progress has been made on predicting the human factor.
screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes)
This one has actually come true to a certain measurable degree (see Bowling Alone, written at what is now the midpoint of the trend), but I don’t think it’s down to window screens.
Leaded gasoline has a really crazy story. People have known that lead is highly toxic since the mid 1800s, and when tetraethyl lead was invented by Thomas midgley Jr in the 1910s, pretty much everybody at GM knew how toxic it was. Dozens of workers died from exposure, and Thomas himself was sick with lead poisoning when it was unveiled to the public. GM even went as far as naming it “ethyl” to avoid public backlash.
The reason it wasn’t banned until the 90s was because health officials in the 20s thought that exposure to drivers was so low that it wouldn’t reach toxic levels until decades down the line. Like, the 1970s. This wasn’t reviewed until the mid 70s and by that point the consequences were disastrous.There were some studies between the 20s and 70s, but most didn’t gain much traction. Many adults and children had increased levels of lead in their blood and lead has contaminated the groundwater and polluted the air. For instance, there is NO safe level of lead in blood, and Herbert needleman in the early 70s found some American schoolchildren had as much as 14 micrograms per deciliter This is the reason it wasn’t banned until the 90s in most countries. One could say we’re still recovering from that in some ways.
And the worst part? They could have used ethanol, an organic substance that’s a major additive in alcoholic beverages. It also prevents engine knocking and is highly flammable, but otherwise not even close to as toxic as TEL was. You still woudlnt want to breathe it in, but it probably wouldn’t have polluted our air and ground so much. GM refused to use ethanol though because it couldn’t be patented (being naturally produced?) and it wouldn’t be very profitable to use it to prevent knocking. TEL was far more profitable.
Right? The general public could be told that it was a tiny amount that was harmless, but any doctor could have done the napkin math, so how did it gain traction in the first place? GM pulled off quite something there. I’ve seen a pretty convincing argument that the lead poisoning was responsible for the high 1970s crime rate.
They could have used ethanol, an organic substance that’s a major additive in alcoholic beverages.
That literally is the alcohol, actually. It’s not quite as good though, which is why small planes still use leaded.
Mandatory mention that Thomas Midgley Jr. also invented the CFCs that fucked the ozone layer, and was eventually strangled by his own mobility pulley system invention. Truly a legend of cursedness.
I know this is just a meme but school is an excellent way to have a foundational understanding of how things work, and learning to problem solve including googling.
Yeah! Kids these days are learning (in school) all about containers, service discovery, AWS, production deployment strategies, password vaulting solutions, cryptographic key/password management, and most importantly: politically defensive email practices.
Oh wait: No they aren’t, LOL.
I just interviewed dozens of fresh (CS) college grads a few months ago and only one of them even knew what SSH was let alone anything remotely resembling basic command line stuff, Linux skills, or any of the above mentioned things.
They sure could write a mean linked list though! 😁
I’m usually one to think folks exaggerate the dangerousness of strange staircases in posts like these, but yeah these are definitely gonna cause a few accidents.
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