ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on ... 1 week ago:
I’ve got an alarming quantity. The saving grace is I don’t think I’m strong, say any of the weird shit, post the memes or have delusions about my fighting proficiency. And I’m not bald.
I used to be rather fit and I wrestled in high school. I’m fairly confident I could break free of someone roughly less skilled than me and maybe a hair stronger and flee. I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve been punched while boxing but was too disoriented to get a good hit back (first and only time boxing), and I’ve punched a friend in the face as the culmination to a funny conversation about how he’s never been punched in the face.
Flannel is really comfy, and I want to be the sort of person who goes on more hikes than I have time to.
I have no self delusions in the physical realm. - Comment on Anon doesn't fit in 2 weeks ago:
People who play sports games don’t even blink when you tell them you like strategy games in my experience.
Turns out people who enjoy pretending to manage a sports team don’t think it’s odd that someone might enjoy pretending to manage an army or empire. Or that people in general don’t usually think most hobbies are unusual, if you talk about them like a sane person. - Comment on political debate 2 weeks ago:
They’re also just general 4chan Internet weirdo. I take it you’re thinking there’s a particular type of racism libertarians are more prone to? Probably “we don’t need racial discrimination protections, the market will punish it if people care”?
- Comment on political debate 2 weeks ago:
I mean, you’re entirely correct, but there’s also racial politics as in “race relations”. Like “why are we regressing on race based civil liberty protections and seeing an upswing in racial prejudice”.
Racial groups don’t have homogeneous political opinions, but they are often the subject of political opinions.
All that to say: there are many different ways to express a disgustingly inappropriate blend of racial and political opinions in a workplace, and we shouldn’t assume they picked any particular inappropriate way.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.
If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word “inch”.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.
We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.
They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 weeks ago:
Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.
- Comment on He took it literally 5 weeks ago:
And what I was saying was adding to that, and including that without invoking the right to silence simply remaining silent can be used for self incrimination.
If you are not under arrest and not in custody, not answering questions by remaining silent can be used against you. - Comment on He took it literally 5 weeks ago:
It’s actually different. Remaining silent doesn’t invoke the right to not incriminate yourself. Simply remaining silent means they can use your silence to incriminate you.
In the court case where they decided that a man didn’t answer a question about a murder weapon. They used his silence and looking nervous as evidence for his guilt because he didn’t say he intended to remain silent, and he remained silent before he was informed he had a right to do so.
- Comment on He took it literally 5 weeks ago:
There’s also the supreme court ruling a bit ago that weakened the right. Changed it from something you can simply do to something you need to invoke.
Simply remaining silent does not invoke your right to remain silent, you must state that you wish to not speak. This applies before you’re read your rights and arrested. So without ever being told your rights or that you can leave at any time, silently refusing to answer questions can be used as evidence against you. Look nervous when the police ask if shell casings found at a murder scene would match a gun you own? That can be used as evidence of guilt, along with your choice not to answer the question.Coupled with police being able to lie to you more than a lot of people believe, it’s possible to remain silent, say “I should probably have a lawyer for this” (note how that’s not actually a request for legal counsel, just an observation), and for the police to imply that this has stopped the interrogation (“alright, I’ll go do the paperwork. I’ll send someone in to sit with you, can’t leave people unsupervised”).
A lot of people have difficulty not chatting with someone who’s been presented to them as a neutral party, particularly if they think there’s no harm to it. - Comment on Anon discovers hygiene 5 weeks ago:
Hey, if you want to run around with aerosolized poop particles stinking up your underwear like a grotesque feral hog out of a nightmarish Icelandic fairy tale, be my guest.
- Comment on Anon discovers hygiene 1 month ago:
Could be as simple as not having data. It looks like they pulled it from listings for hotels and the source they used simply might not operate their.
- Comment on Anon discovers hygiene 1 month ago:
Oh, such a well thought out response to “you’re taking what someone said deliberately wrong in a very weird way”.
My ass is clean because I take a hot soapy shower evertime I poop and I change my underwear if I fart, unlike you, you degenerate unwashed heathen.
- Comment on Anon discovers hygiene 1 month ago:
You’re responding as though someone said “don’t clean yourself”. What they said was “it’s weird to call not using a bidet disturbing, given how uncommon they are”.
You’re drawing a line for where you think better hygiene is and putting everyone not on your side in the “disturbing” category, even though that’s anywhere from “about half the people” to “almost everyone” depending on region.What I’m saying isn’t controversial at all
That you felt the need to say that is a pretty clear sign that it is.
Bidet’s do provide some hygiene benefits, but they’re not the perfect system you’re making them out to be.
If you got feces on your hands, you wouldn’t clean them by just wiping them with paper. You also wouldn’t just run water on them for a short while and then carry on.
They can irritate the anal opening and let bacteria bother the irritation. They can cause disruption to vaginal flora. The nozzle is a source of fecal contamination between people.Yes, spraying your butt with water is usually cleaner. The actually significant cleansing comes from washing your hands with soap and water, bathing regularly, and not handling shared items with your buttocks.
- Comment on Modern Windows in a nutshell 1 month ago:
Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s odd for a clock to act this way, just not inexplicable. At best it’s an example of UI standards being applied without regard to sense, which is very much in line with Microsoft.
Most other clocks will do something similar, they just do it in the background. Something that’s a lot easier to do if you’re not following a UI framework that says you’re never allowed to change something in a way that might cause the user to see a weird shift. Other things just acknowledge that clock sync should only take a few milliseconds before the clock is even visible, that a timezone DB update will rarely cause a change of more than an hour, and that a user will probably not even notice if there’s a shift.
- Comment on Modern Windows in a nutshell 1 month ago:
It makes sense in a weird way, but it doesn’t feel right for a clock. You need to account for the case where it does take longer than it should to update, because sometimes it will for any number of really weird reasons. So you can’t just design for the best case scenario.
Now that you have a splash screen you need to ask yourself if it’s better to show the splash screen while doing the update, or to just let the app be unresponsive for the common case of a moment and then show the splash if it goes over that.
The answer is to show the splash in the common case too.
Now people are seeing a “weird screen” for a moment before they can process what they’re seeing. So you need to make the screen have a minimum display time to keep people from being confused.It’s weird, but people can sometimes be more confused by thinking something happened too fast.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
“applies” isn’t the word I would use. It’s not like nature has a line that once you pass some threshold of mass, acceleration or distance it needs to flip the relativity switch.
Probably say “becomes noticable”.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
I’d actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we’re attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it’s objectively measurable but it’s still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete. - Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach “borrowing”. 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can’t take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.Definitely more clear, right?
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
I believe that’s what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn’t focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that’s like… Elementary school. - Comment on Incident 1 month ago:
I think the difference might be that you’re thinking of standards that say “if you do A and B and C then you’re a good ___”. Happens with prescriptive education standards that are tied tightly with budget.
I’m thinking of standards like “failure to A or B or C, or doing X or Y or Z makes you an unacceptable ___”. It’s what you see in restaurants and hospital hygiene standards. Any restaurant “cleaning to the test” and only going down the food safety list and correcting any issue is both the type that would just be filthy without those standards, and also would end up serving safe food. Same for doctors and hand washing. We would rather all doctors be deeply committed to hygiene, but we have real world data that mandating hygiene minimums and doing things to enforce them has measurable increases in patient well-being. Same for building safety standards and such.people just go through the motions devoid of thinking and intent :) Now they also can go: I followed the flowchart what more do you want
In a system with the standard, those people are providing better care than they would be without them.
- Comment on Incident 1 month ago:
Yeah, standards for care isn’t “teaching for the test”. You don’t overfocus on “don’t change diapers in the food prep area” or “tell the parents if you use the first aid kit” and somehow end up neglecting care.
I take my kids to a legal daycare. That means I know people who work there and are nearby have been certified in pediatric CPR and first aid within the past year. That they do fire drills. That they have a policy for when sick kids need to go home and when they can come back.It’s not about a law forcing people to care, it’s about establishing a baseline. If a caregiver I haven’t met swaps in for one I know I don’t have to learn their standards on the spot.
It’s odd to be opposed to standards.