dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

We all knew this day was coming. And, I suspect, knowing this is precisely why most of us are here.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

People talking about topics the marketing-droids feel is likely to result in the sale of a product, i.e., “What is the best X to buy?”

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

• Cats
• Memes about cats
• Cats using Linux
• Owning a car is evil and you should be ashamed
• You should have a cat instead
• We hate Elon Musk
• Knives

(Hey, at least I’m trying.)

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

[Scrolling through my own post history.]

[Side-eye monkey meme.]

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I don’t know if matters have improved any, but back when I created my lemmy.world account specifically it had some kind of bugout about what I’d entered, but it output this to the developer console and not on the page itself. Had I not thought to press F12 I would not have discovered that it had its panties in a twist about whatever it was, I think characters in my email address or something. I forget exactly what its problem was.

So yeah, I can definitely seeing that baffling the average user.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

It’s like every day is Opposite Day! Imagine how much fun that must be for these bozos.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

There’s a reason they are called, internally in business parlance, “Loyalty Programs.”

The point is to get you to come back. Using the Kroger card at Kroger gets you discounts. Or rather, gets you their regular price; their non-card prices are artificially inflated in most cases. So consumers form the idea in their heads that those discounts have value and will return to that store to take advantage of them. This is played up by the retailer in their marketing, who will use terminology to try to make you feel special about the program. (As if it’s not offered to absolutely everyone who will listen, and also everyone who won’t.) Look for words and terms like “exclusive,” “VIP,” or “members only,” or “just for you.”

The buy-stuff-to-get-rewards schemes are the worst, because they prey on the inbuilt sunk cost fallacy neurons in people’s brains. You are statistically likely to buy and spend more if you think you’re going to get something back, or spend a little more than you otherwise would have to meet whatever threshold they set to get the next reward. Even if the reward you get back does not actually match in value to the extra amount(s) you spent. (Hint: It never does. The house always wins.)

Nowadays, of course, they also track and record your purchase history and sell it to whoever will pay. Possibly anonymized in some way, but probably not.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn’t happen.

It’s not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to “revolutionize” the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.

And as usual, this article harps on “range” as if that’s not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack – just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these “could” build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

That’s how battery chemistry works. Even this, if it is real, is a bunch of individual cells in a bank. There is no alternative; you can’t have sufficient reactivity between dissimilar materials to generate the types of voltages required in a single cell. You need multiples of them in series to hit 200 volts, 400, 600, whatever is required by the vehicle’s drive hardware.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Lapped by what? Vaporware? Oh, yeah. If we Americans don’t get all our liars organized we’ll never be as good as the Chinese at playing make-believe.

This article is an ad. This thing being described is not actually a product; it does not meaningfully actually exist. It is installed in zero vehicles, and the manufacturer’s claims are completely unverified and, probably, unverifiable. It’s not real. These kinds of press releases get posted all the time. The company is just simping for investor money, that’s all.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

That’s because Toyota is trying to put all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Toyota is the only brand that really has a functional consumer-available hydrogen fuel cell car and I think they’re stuck in sunk cost fallacy mode with that technology.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

The article also calls this a “leak.” Is it really a leak if it’s in the insider Windows build that Microsoft makes freely available to anyone who wants it?

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

especially when employees do not get guarantees of continued employment in return.

Dingdingdingdingding. Give the man a cigar.

If you want to give me tenure, I’ll think about non-competing. Otherwise, the free market these bastards claim to like so much is a two way street.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

What are you, some kind of rhinophobe?

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Wait. After all this hype Tesla has only managed to move 3878 units of the Cybertruck? That’s hilarious.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

As much as I like to see this sentiment, I think now as ever the people who actually follow through with moving to Linux will be few in number.

Most users who get fed up and decide the hell with it are likely to just buy a Mac instead, as revolting a development as that may be.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

The irritating thing about all this is, at least if Raymond Chen is to be believed, the OS letting you do what you want without getting in your way was actually a/the core design philosophy of Windows up until probably the end of the XP era. It seems with Vista they started losing the plot, and by the time of Windows 8 Microsoft had fully committed to going completely off the rails.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Windows user A will not know what their home directory is and will respond as described. Windows user B will assume that it is their “my documents” folder, which may or may not be the case, because: Windows user C will know that there are effectively three home directories in Windows (/users/username, /users/username/documents, and /users/username/appadata/local) but that won’t help anybody determine which one some program actually put the goddamn file in.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

I think the point the parent poster was making is that the system shouldn’t be designed that way in the first place. And when the vendor fucks it up due to releasing the product in a half-baked state, the hammer needs to be brought down on them in such a way that it will functionally discourage them from doing it again.

If the electronics providing functionality in your vehicle are so complex that the excuse is being made potentially adverse interactions between its various components from various OEM’s can’t be tested and accounted for, what has actually happened is that designed your product wrong. Throw it away, start over, and do it right next time.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

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dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

And at any time.

Cutting someone’s brake lines is all or nothing and can’t be done while the vehicle is already in motion. Anyone who is not an idiot will hopefully notice as soon as they start driving that there’s something wrong with the brakes. But you could brick somebody’s car remotely and without warning while they’re taking a curve on the interstate at 80 MPH, and that’d be a lot more problematic.

In reality, few to no people outside of novels and Hollywood have actually been killed by some malefactor “cutting their brake lines.”

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Yes, actually, it is.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7038fcd3-97b2-4c7a-b208-78c49b71893e.jpeg

Source.

Motor vehicle fatalities had their nadir in 2014, which coincides with the time when we had all major safety innovations sorted out: Advanced air bags, stability and traction control, ABS, RADAR/LIDAR/etc. collision avoidance on fancier models, reverse cameras, mandatory TMPS, etc.

Cars today are basically exactly the same mechanically and insofar as physical safety features existed in 2014. But the line goes back up into the 2020’s as idiots started packing cars with touchscreens, everything-by-wire control systems, hiding critical controls into the infotainment screen, removing physical tactile controls, and loading everything with mountains of electronic distractions. Many of these whizz-bang electronic features nobody actually wants are also released in a sorry state. New cars are objectively worse than cars from 10-15 years ago, with the possible exception of EV range.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

I prefer to just have my phone’s fingerprint reader loaded with a non-fingerprint. You can use any part of your body, really. Use your imagination. It’ll be functionally impossible to unlock your phone even using that same part of your anatomy later, even if anyone could guess what it was.

So then your phone will ask for a fingerprint but none of your fingers will ever in a million years actually unlock it. Jack booted thugs are welcome to try; they will fail. To actually use your phone, just enter your PIN or passcode.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

A believe a trident is the traditionally accepted weapon for this quarry, and possibly slightly more effective.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Note that “optimizing” Amazon package can’t possibly be a very high bar to clear. Just being smart enough to package multiple items coming from the same distribution center on the same delivery route into the same box would do it… Something that other online retailers figured out decades ago but apparently somehow Amazon still hasn’t.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Yes, I did. And what it talks about actually ignores my complaint, which is why I file their claim about “avoid more than 2 millions tons of packaging material worldwide” in the bogus column.

Their system obviously does not take into account multi-item orders at all, and seems to operate purely on a one-product, one-package model. Which is stupid. They’re not trying to avoid landfill waste, they’re trying to minimize returns due to breakages but without putting any human intervention into the process.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Amazon probably does have some programmatic way of determining how much to fit in a truck, but that’s not what this is. Instead, it’s them trying to cheap out on packaging materials in the dumbest way possible, by figuring out what the reasonably acceptable minimum threshold is for packaging durability but not taking into account size or packing multiples of items at all (as far as I can tell).

This is a pure cost cutting measure on their part. Anything else is just a tangential side benefit.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

And, incoming ban on scooters in NYC in 3, 2, 1…

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Or school, for those young enough to still be going to school.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

I write a lot of PHP for part of my job.

The beauty of PHP is that for any given task, there are always multiple ways to do it, all of which are wrong.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

If you’ve got four kids and you’re buying them all laptops, I don’t think buying them all Macs and “saving money” by getting cut-down machines with too little memory (or whatever other hobbling Apple may cook up now or later) is exactly the smart play. You would need to have a very compelling reason to absolutely have to run MacOS to the exclusion of everything else which if we’re honest, most people don’t.

A Lenovo IdeaPad Slim, just to pick an example out of a hat that contains many other options, costs half as much as the low spec 2024 Macbook Air the article is spotlighting while having double the RAM, double the SSD, and, you know, ports. For the cost of a 8GB Macbook Pro you could buy a Legion Slim with an i7 and an RTX4060 in it and have change left over, a machine which would blow that Mac out of the water.

There are a lot of things you can say about Macbooks, but being a good value for the money is consistently never one of them.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

I have never, not once in my life, clicked on an internet or electronic ad. Even for things I’m ostensibly interested in. Jury’s out on just how much manically SEO optimized retail web sites on Google count as “ads,” I guess. But other than that: Zilch.

But someone somewhere must be clicking on them because billions of dollars are spent every year pushing the fucking things.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Of course marketers believe that, because it’s their job to give their clients hype hope.

Middle management usually wants to hear about conversions this quarter and especially ROI, not mindshare.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Correct answer. I just got an electric clipper and I mow the crop myself whenever it gets long enough to bother me. I don’t have to tip anyone, it only takes a few minutes, and I only have a few short years left where there’ll be anything growing up there anyway.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Do you have insurance? My rinky-dink bare minimum ACA insurance turned out to cover it. It cost me $40 in total. You might want to check into that.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

No, I’m doing what I want which is not to have kids. Regardless of what conservative fuckheads want or think.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

It is not six months. I was told by my doctor it was roughly one month, 30 days, and that was the time frame in which I was tested for before and after.

It can, in some situations, take up to three months at the outside. But definitely not six.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

You absolutely do need to follow your doctor’s recommendations and get a sperm count done at the prescribed times. But just blithely saying “it takes six months” to people is going to set them up with the wrong idea.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Which was the secret knowledge for those of us with pen lights or active stylii back in the day that required AAAA cells. And then you’d find a cheap brand of 9v that actually had a stack of nonstandard square cells inside it instead… Bastards.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

steamOS coming out for PC.

This is unfortunately unlikely. Valve controls the hardware of the Steam Deck, which in all of its variants is functionally the same platform with the same hardware in it, versus the near-inifite number of hardware combinations any random user could have in their PC. This means they can tailor it specifically to work perfectly with the platform it runs on. It won’t work that way on J. Random Gamer’s PC. The hardware support would be a nightmare and require a ridiculous amount of manpower to maintain.

Remember that hardware support is already the major weakness of Linux in all of its guises, and this is true even for massive distributions like Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu with tons of people working on them. Drink every time you’re scrolling one of these threads and someone says something to the effect of, “I would use Linux on desktop if my [ wifi / video card / printer / sleep and suspend / Bluetooth / VR headset / etc. ] would actually work right.”

I’d doubt Valve would be willing to kick that beehive just for the karma points, or whatever. That’s not to say that enterprising hackers have not already figured out how to install SteamOS on devices it’s not meant to run on, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work right with all (or most) of them.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

And, “You will never print any part of these instructions.”

Proceeds to print the entire set of instructions. I guess we can’t trust it to follow any of its other directives, either, odious though they may be.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

The one this poster was referring to was everyone suddenly becoming an armchair expert on how bridges should be able to withstand being hit by ships.

In general, you can ask any asshole on the internet (or in real life!) and they’ll be just brimming with ideas on how they can design roads better than the people who actually design roads. Typically those ideas usually just boil down to, “Everyone should get out of my way and I have right of way all the time,” though…

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

And like all of these novelty phones, it has no 5G support and extremely narrow 4G band support, which means this will be nearly worthless for users in North America. And it will quickly become even more worthless as carriers are actively discontinuing their existing 3G and 4G bands.

This’ll work great for most people who don’t want to actually use it as a phone. I.e. it’d make a killer media playback device, remote control, or tiny PDA.

I was interested in their Titan a while ago but it, like all of their phones, has the same problem. There is no sense whatsoever in buying a new phone in 2024 that has such piddling network support.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

You totally can. Mine is a penguin.

Lemmy being what it is, visibility probably depends on a thousand tweaky little factors like which instance you’re on, which instance you’re looking at, and what client you’re using.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

The algorithm makes sense to me, in that on my main PC I pretty much exclusively watch nerd shit on youtube. Tech stuff, 3D printing, machinery, motorcycles, that sort of thing. Youtube therefore probably assumes I am male, so in my Shorts feed seems to be comprised of about 90% boobies, and 10% clips about guns.

But then the algorithm doesn’t make sense to me, because on my living room PC we pretty much exclusively watch cat videos, bird videos, and videos-for-cats (the ones with all birds and squirrels and stuff), How Ridiculous, and Gavin Free. The Shorts feed there is also roughly 90% boobies, but in fairness the remaining 10% appears to be cats.

(Neither instance is logged in to a Google account or anything.)

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Of course we are. We’ve known this all along.

Ever since Windows 10, Microsoft has been treating Windows as an “OS as a service,” and their expected revenue source (at least from home users) is no longer license sales but whatever they can extract from users via subscriptions, ads, and selling their tracking data.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

FWIW and for anyone else reading this, I am running Win10 Pro in the US on my work machine and it let me uninstall Copilot just now when I tried it.

dual_sport_dork , 2 months ago

Let me air out two unrelated but similar things that annoyed the shit out of me back in the day.

Your parents then: “That floor mat thingy (referring to the Power Pad) doesn’t count as exercise because it’s still Nintendo. You need to go outside!!!”

Adults now: Middle school phys-ed classes consisting of playing Dance Dance Revolution apparently somehow now “counts” as real exercise.

And,

Your parents then: “The problem with you kids is you spend all day in front of that tube, watching those stupid movies and playing video games all day instead of reading books. It’s stunting your ability to differentiate fantasy from reality!!!”

Your parents now: Instantly believe every damn fool thing they see on Facebook, even and especially when it is clearly horseshit.

So yeah. I can totally believe that some moron would unironically believe that staring at a screen containing an office application is somehow automatically more “wholesome” than staring at a screen displaying any other content for the same amount of time.