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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.

    There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.

    That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps. Something like a Hisense A9 would fit the bill but the temptation to add more apps than the basics would be too great, plus I still need a way to switch SIMs between the phones.

    I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.


  • What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.

    A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.

    People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.

    The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.






  • With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.

    I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.



  • Who is he going to staff it with? There is zero chance he will cook and clean for himself and he will need a substantial army to protect himself from the collapse of the human race.

    If he goes with people how long before the security guards realise they can dump his scrawny ass off a cliff and have a better quality of life as money becomes irrelevant? If he goes with robots how long before they break beyond what they can self repair? If he goes with robots with human engineers, how long before the engineers realise the same thing as the security guards and program the robots to kill Bezos?


  • People are fed up with being broke and not able to afford the same things that they or their parents could afford even 20 years ago. Populists do not have to offer policies they can or event intend to implement so they can promise any old shit to the gullible who want change. Wrap that in a reassuring racist package: immigration is out of control, send back the small boats, etc. so that it doesn’t smell like communism (not that communism cant be racist) that people confuse even moderate socialist policies for due to decades of western propaganda.

    Couple this with the Overton window being moved ever towards the right due to left and center left parties being captured by neoliberals who seek funding and patronage from the Rich, plus decades of the press putting pressure on any left wing policies by enforcing a double standard of left wing policies required to fully document how they will work and be funded, while right wing fantasy policies are waved through without any scrutiny from the majority of press.

    Then the right deliberately break any essential service, under fund it and spend it elsewhere, making it time consuming and expensive to fix, leading them to point at their opponents being ineffective, and the press refuse to hold the right to account over this.

    This has reduced any coupling between those left of the far right and the general population in terms of policies meeting the requirement. You can start to see why they are gaining ground.



  • I use only 40% and 30% keyboards, thats ones without dedicated number or f key rows, and have done so for about six years now. Majority I use are standard stagger but a few are ortho or splits. Almost all of them that I like using are split space with left half as enter and the right as space.

    I can touch type, although I am not the fastest, only a bit above 80wpm. This is mostly due to me being dyslexic so spelling is challenging for me and I can get bogged down looking up words or retyping it. If I do not give a shit about spelling I can easily get well over 100wpm.

    I think the main show off skill I can do is look at a person I am talking to while typing a different conversation on the computer. Obviously I cannot do either if its complicated conversations but simple stuff is fine.



  • It has always been the main aim of legislation like this to nobble VPNs, they just needed the “child” “violent pornography” etc. excuse to do so. UK government already monitors all of the internet traffic for the UK, except for MPs who are exempt, VPNs are a blocker for this.

    Obviously, not even the UK government would expect a private VPN ban (work VPNs would likely need an Ofcom license) to stop everybody from using a VPN or suitable alternative, its not the aim. The aim is to stop the majority from doing so and criminalize the minority who do still bypass the block as it gives them the power to seize equipment, ask for your logins (its illegal punishable with jail time to not supply this in the UK), request ISP logs etc. to deep dive into your life.



  • Mechanical keyboards are like guitars, you can play the same notes on a cheap one as you can on something custom made for you for thousands. Do they sound very different? Almost always, although the guitar needs someone who can actually play well, unlike the mechanical keyboard.

    However, if you really really care and you really really know what you want out of either you can tweak absolutely everything about both. You want ultra soft silent keyboard? Sure. You want the most clickty keyboard with tons of pressure? Sure. You want something thocky but still has lots of flex? Sure.


  • I have a BEng in software engineering. It wasn’t thst different from a normal BSc in CS. Bits that stood out to me was industrial stuff around building and programming our own circuits, making our own (very simple) compiler, and some assembly modules, I had more maths stuff but that was for 3D graphics. My dissertation was a temperature control system for radiators.

    I don’t really use any of it in my job, although I did do a ton more programming modules than most CS of the time, and those programming modules prove very useful.



  • Yeah that’s not the same thing as a bland food diet, that’s up there with the cabbage diet for how awful it is.

    Mine is: Scrambled eggs made with cottage cheese + porridge for breakfast Chicken, salad (no dressing) and rice for lunch Chicken, vegetables and rice/sweet potatoes/lentils for tea

    No sauces, just dry herbs/spices as a rub.

    Snacks are two protein shakes, naked bar (counts as a one a day of fruit/veg allowance), banana.

    Repeat for past two years. Before that it was lentils, avo, boiled egg, before than goats cheese salad for lunch.

    Its boring as fuck when you do it for months at a time but it works for me. Controlling