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kinttach

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kinttach OP ,

I thought about that, but they ask for enough info that they’d be able to identify me. And then they’d probably ban me. At least right now I have the option of restoring my account, even though I have no intention of doing so.

kinttach OP ,

That’s usually how I pay if someone requests money. Venmo is owned by PayPal but my account there works just fine.

kinttach OP ,

I haven’t. Maybe someday I’ll be willing to, but not today. It’s a hassle and extremely intrusive to provide my bank statement and photo ID to a company whose security I don’t trust.

kinttach OP ,

Sometimes it’s the only option or the preferred option.

Why are fuel perks at grocery stores so ubiquitous?

This seems insane to me. I live in a city where maybe 50-60% of people have cars, and most don’t drive them that much. Yet every grocery store I’m aware of with the sole exception of the expensive Whole Foods has a fuel rewards points program. Reasons this should be controversial enough to enable a low-cost alternative:...

kinttach ,

You live in a city, but most of the store chain’s customers live in the suburbs where gas is a major expense and fuel perks are a big incentive to shop at a particular store.

The store isn’t trying to promote fossil fuels. They only care about customer loyalty. Besides (they might rationalize), their customers have to buy gas somewhere so why not from us?

kinttach ,

Are you sure about that? Dial tone is a sound you hear before dialing, not the sound you hear when you press a key.

kinttach ,

The Fisker Ocean has solar panels on its roof. It can add 4 or 5 miles a day if fully exposed to the sun.

Not enough to matter. It’s a gimmick.

If you don’t have an EV, you may think that EV owners are worried about range, and they’d welcome any increase. I have not found this to be true.

It’s more like having a car that starts every day with a full tank. You’re never going to burn through that in a single day. Pretty soon you don’t care about range, efficiency, or pay much attention to the battery meter. It only matters if you’re on a road trip, which for me is a couple times a year.

I would not want to give up a nice full-roof sunroof for a few extra miles a day.

kinttach ,

Any USB-C headphones work.

Side of bed debate - Which side is left?

Which side of the bed is the left side? Is the answer based on the perspective of laying in the bed (person’s head at the head end)? Is the answer based on viewing it from the foot of the bed, looking at the head of the bed? Is there an “anatomical position” or special terminology like in boating for this?...

kinttach ,

Imagine the bed is a clock. The 12 o’clock position is at the head — I don’t think anything else makes sense. That makes it unambiguous.

The positions are 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock.

kinttach ,

Did you mean White Castle?

kinttach ,

This report is from 2016. It’s mainly of historical interest.

kinttach ,

Ad-based apps on your phone.

It’s been done already, you say? Not like this: the front-facing camera is used to detect eye gaze. A counter on the screen starts at 30 seconds and only counts down while you are looking at the screen. If you look away, the counter, and the ad, pauses. The app doesn’t continue until you’ve watched the entire ad.

kinttach ,

All Mac laptops do. And my work Windows PC looks like it has one but the company was too cheap to pay for it, so all it has is a spot that looks like a fingerprint sensor.

kinttach ,

It was added in January 2004 and is a reference to the quote in Spider Man.

retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/12522

kinttach ,

Another senior dev here, one of those weirdos who likes light mode. Sometimes. VS Code’s light mode is blinding to me, and I never use it. But Nova’s is beautiful and I prefer it. It depends how well the app renders fonts and colors. The oversaturated colors used in most apps are a big problem.

kinttach ,

It increases the risk of birth defects slightly but not as much as people seem to think.

a single first-cousin marriage entails a similar increased risk of birth defects and mortality as a woman faces when she gives birth at age 41 rather than at 30

independent.co.uk/…/there-s-nothing-wrong-with-co…

kinttach ,

The ?? operator?

kinttach ,

This doesn’t sound like a serious problem for a company like Google. They can afford to solve it by brute force — just put a Wi-Fi hotspot in every single room.

kinttach ,

On Earth it’s just not needed. In nearby space it could make sense — distance to the Moon is 369 Mm. Distance to the Sun 149 Gm. But people aren’t good at visualizing the difference between kilo-, mega-, and giga-. It isn’t obvious from those numbers just how much further away the Sun is.

kinttach ,

Not really, but another massive international project, ITER, is trying to do this. Its timeline is measured in decades if not the better part of a century.

kinttach ,

Nope. For that I use the bang shortcut feature to send it to Google.

One nice thing about that, is that you can use g as a bang, instead of !g. It’s a little thing but easier to type on mobile.

kinttach ,

So this is confusing. I did not know about the maps mode (thanks @randomperson!). If you show the map and then press the “target” symbol to get your location, Kagi will prompt to enable geolocation.

When using a regular search for “chinese food near me” I see results for a city thousands of km away. But if I select Maps first, then it shows my local area and I can search on the map.

kinttach ,

It’s an old federated message board system. Message boards are called “newsgroups “. It predates the web so it’s usually accessed via a special client app. To use it you’d need:

  • A Usenet client app, called a newsreader. See Wikipedia. Many are probably abandoned by now.
  • An account with a Usenet provider. A search engine will point you to several options. There used to be some free ones. If there still are, it would be a good way to try it out. But note that the free ones often don’t carry all of the newsgroups — they omit the binary groups, which are known to carry pirated software and, let’s say, diverse video content.
kinttach ,

Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.

Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”

Apple has an annual legal budget of approximately infinity dollars. I assure you they are aware of this and they believe they are in compliance, even if just barely.

If challenged, they will have no problem fighting it — they have nearly as much cash on hand as the entire EU budget.

I hope the EU challenges this, and I hope the EU wins, but Apple isn’t going to be surprised by whatever happens.

kinttach ,

Unfortunately, Apple has the resources, both legal and financial, to tie that up in the EU courts for decades.

kinttach ,

Strange when the party receiving the “commission” gets to dictate the terms of that commission.

kinttach ,

This does read very much like AI-generated content. For example, here’s what Bard generated as an answer to this question.

It’s the list-based approach, the hyperbole, the too-many adjectives, the writing style that sounds like SEO that makes it sound like AI.

kinttach , (edited )

Although Firefox on iOS doesn’t support extensions, other browsers do.

Orion supports Firefox extensions.

Safari also has tons of extensions available, such as: StopTheMadness (annoyance blocker, highly configurable), AdGuard (ad blocker), Vinegar (blocks YouTube ads on the web), and many others.

kinttach ,

I recommended Brother laser printers to some older relatives and this happened. The printers required a power reset every few days.

YSK that chiropractors are not medical doctors and "Systematic reviews... have found no evidence that chiropractic manipulation is effective" (en.wikipedia.org)

“Systematic reviews of controlled clinical studies of treatments used by chiropractors have found no evidence that chiropractic manipulation is effective, with the possible exception of treatment for back pain.[8] A 2011 critical evaluation of 45 systematic reviews concluded that the data included in the study “fail[ed] to...

kinttach ,

I think you’re exaggerating. Quite a few of them are from the field of functional medicine, which is certainly totally legitimate.

You must pick a point in human history before the 1950s to be spend the rest of your life in. What era and place would you choose?

You would still have the same age, gender, personality, skin color, etc. and you would be able to speak at least one local language and would know basic information of the era and place. Your family, social standing, and such would be randomly picked.

kinttach ,

Come on, obviously they knew what pipes were in the 1940s. They are cylinders made of lead.

kinttach ,

You never ask them if it’s plugged in. You tell them to unplug it for 10 seconds.

kinttach ,

I don’t know. Microsoft across their product lines comes off as desperate for engagement. They probably don’t even care what option you choose as long as you keep their app running a little longer.

kinttach OP ,

From what I’ve heard that’s not true of Tesla though. My car will be able to use their superchargers starting next year. I hope they remain reliable.

kinttach OP ,

The Tesla chargers – do they live up to their reputation for being reliable? Or are they also unreliable, but Tesla puts so many chargers at each location that you can always find a working one?

kinttach OP ,

A literal answer to the title question. I like it. What charger did you have and was it covered under warranty?

kinttach ,

There’s no way Apple lets the automaker access app data from your phone. Apps on the phone can’t even see data from other apps on the phone.

There are two ways I can think of for the infotainment to get the messages. The first is by OCR-ing the CarPlay screen, which is shady as hell. The second is a feature like this one where the car has Bluetooth notification integration.

kinttach ,

I have not. As someone in the Mac community I can tell you that Apple enthusiasts are Apple’s harshest critics. They are the type of people who care a lot about details like this, and have been criticizing Apple for years on the amount of RAM in entry level systems, as well as the absolute rip-off prices they charge for RAM upgrades.

kinttach ,

The legacy Date object has many problems and this is one of them. Another infamous one is that it uses zero-based month numbers: January is the zeroth month and December the 11th month.

This will be fixed Any Day Now™️ when Temporal is released. This is a carefully designed library that supersedes Date and is currently waiting on some standards to be finalized.

kinttach ,

Google Bard can do this. I showed it a picture of my garage and asked for suggestions on how to organize it better.

Note that it will not work with images that contain people.

kinttach ,

A fascinating alternative is “a pressurized ETFE membrane… periodically anchored to the ground by steel cables.”

In plain language: Fiber-reinforced rip-stop ETFE (a thin, strong, light, transparent material used for yacht sails) is used to make a roof and walls with the area under it pressurized and anchored using very tall cables, hundreds of meters high or more, to create a sky. The covered area is huge, the size of a city, compartmentalized for redundancy. People are able to go about their daily lives without use of space suits and it doesn’t feel like you are “inside”.

Domes are over-rated

kinttach ,

Is that basically the premise of NixOS?

kinttach ,

How would this even work? Would the crowd not be booing the ad-song? I can’t imagine a sponsor would want that.

kinttach ,

They’re just repackaging AltaVista results.

kinttach ,

Bots aside this is kind of terrifying.

It’s not like this will keep happening every year. No, it’s much worse. Temperatures will keep getting even hotter for decades until greenhouse gas emissions reach zero. In a few decades we will wish it was only this hot.

kinttach ,

Doesn’t it vary quite a bit by province?

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