kbal
@kbal@fedia.io
- Comment on GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement 5 days ago:
I hesitate to attribute it to accidental mismanagement. Surely Microsoft has enough experience by now to be pretty good at acquiring firms they think of as competition only to find some excuse to shut them down.
- Comment on "Yeah, yeah, I totally know what a lion looks like, just give me the brush" 1 week ago:
I like the way he captured my eyes.
- Comment on Checkmate, science 1 week ago:
Less fun at parties guy: While the diagram leaves it somewhat unclear as to what precise effect that mechanism is intended to achieve, clearly it involves electromagnetism and thus any proper explanation must begin with a full description of quantum field theory...
- Comment on The Force should be plural 1 week ago:
What this galaxy's physicists don't yet understand is that if you want to combine all those other forces into one grand unified theory, what you need to do is get in touch with your feelings and become a space wizard.
- Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet 2 weeks ago:
Stay strong. A dwarf planet is a perfectly valid kind of planet, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
- Comment on What would happen if every atom on earth was to simultaneously double in size? 3 weeks ago:
It's difficult to say, because all the atoms suddenly doing that would mean that some basic laws of physics had changed, and since it isn't specified exactly how they've changed to produce this strange result it's hard to predict what might happen next.
But it seems a reasonably safe assumption that there would be a large explosion and then no more Earth.
- Comment on oss-security - backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise 1 month ago:
ah, someone beat me to it and this was already posted on !linux
- Submitted 1 month ago to cybersecurity@infosec.pub | 2 comments
- Comment on Should I *GASP* create a reddit account so I can get support from Tuta(nota)? 1 month ago:
They're active on mastodon. I recommend asking them there.
- Comment on Caption this. 1 month ago:
Teaching the beavers to use a microwave oven had less benefit to the regional ecology than had been hoped for.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Of course it is not that it's somehow a "stand in for he or she" inherently in current usage. It's just that it has recently replaced those other pronouns in places where for some time they had held near-universal prevalence among most users of this language.
Just as some people who've never known the old ways think those people who still aren't accustomed to it are putting on an act when they say it's weird and confusing, I suppose it would be easy for those who've lived through the change to mistakenly assume that young people are being disingenuous when they act as if there's been no change for hundreds of years and there's nothing to remark on here. If you're old enough to have seen it happen, the change in usage seems very obvious. If not, perhaps it isn't.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I don't really have a preference myself, but Richard Stallman's continued insistence that "per" is the right answer is the example that comes to mind.
As he puts it, "most languages have genderless singular third-person pronouns which are distinct from the plural pronouns. English deserves to have them too."
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Obviously it's been used in some grammatical situations as a singular third-person pronoun since forever. It's just as easy to come up with example phrases that would not sound in any way odd to a 20th-century person as it is to come up with examples from the 17th century. But its recent popularity as an all-purpose stand-in for "he" and "she" is indeed unprecedented, and even if it weren't it'd be a notable change.
- Comment on Chart to determine risk of bear attack 1 month ago:
The dangers of the bear zone aren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be. I haven't been attacked by a bear in weeks.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Nah. Maybe twenty years tops. That so many people fell for the fallacious line of argument you're thinking of was part of the difficulty in trying to push for any of the various theoretically "better" choices that are still available should humanity unexpectedly swerve in the direction of caring about such things.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Unfortunately you're at least ten years too late in trying to get people to ask themselves this question
- Comment on Can Reddit—the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine—Survive Its Own IPO? 1 month ago:
Reddit was great in some ways. It's been on the decline for a while and I expect the IPO can only accelerate that. Unless we're all very lucky it's not going to explode in flames and crash into the ditch. It will just shamble on, gradually disillusioning all the people who still cling to it long after it's lost its soul.
- Comment on I hate the term "Boomer Shooter" 1 month ago:
You seem like an intelligent and discerning person, so I'm sure you'll appreciate that the only possible response to this is "ok boomer"
- Comment on Emotion-tracking AI on the job: Workers fear being watched – and misunderstood 2 months ago:
At last, the surveillance cameras will know it when I give them the finger.
- Comment on House likely to pass a bill that could ban TikTok, sending it to the Senate 2 months ago:
That's one way to spread the message to the world that you've given up on freedom and democracy.
- Comment on Shower thought: To a creature from Titan, are we lava monsters? 2 months ago:
I suppose it depends which creature from Titan you ask. Everyone knows that some creatures from Titan are racist, but that doesn't mean it's fair to generalize about all of them like that.
- Submitted 3 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 5 comments
- Comment on Plan Bee 3 months ago:
"Plan Bee" is a personal robotic bee designed to mimic how bees polinate flowers and crops
IMO this one would be a lot better if it just stopped there. That is the interesting part.
- Comment on Twitch lay off 500 people as CEO concedes that staffing strategy has been "optimistic" 4 months ago:
Hmm, did the strategy of constantly making the experience of using Twitch worse for everyone, e.g. by trying to force more and more ads on viewers and streamers alike, somehow not work out the way they thought it should? I'm sure nobody couldn't seen that coming.
- Comment on Stephen Fry wants King's Guard to ditch bear fur 4 months ago:
Come on King Charles, get with it. Bear fur is passé. It took me like 5 seconds of searching the web to find a perfectly suitable replacement: https://www.etsy.com/listing/914324031/mallard-duck-hat
- Comment on This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom 4 months ago:
bans on pay toilets dating back to the 1970s
It's like my grandpa always said, the problem with pay toilets was that without a way for a VC-funded startup to monopolize the market and take a cut of every transaction they just didn't feel sleazy enough.
- Comment on The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance 4 months ago:
Indeed, that we tend to write such scary-looking rants and post them all over the Internet is one reason it was perhaps a bad idea for Mozilla to alienate their most geeky users in so many little ways over the years.
Firefox itself is still the least scary of the available full-featured web browsers, of course.
- Comment on The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance 4 months ago:
I don't think the zdnet article adds much but it does link to https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-continuous-decline/ which gets it about right. If anything has changed since it was written, evidence of it has not yet reached me.
- Comment on Get ready to hear more about "pre-internet" times 4 months ago:
People listened to records, cassette tapes and CDs
Recording formats often get mentioned, but they are not the important music thing of which kids today are often unaware. The important thing is that we used to have record collections (which were mostly composed of CDs by the time I was old enough to have a modest one.)
I now have a more extensive one and enjoy it greatly, only now it's in mp3 form.
- Comment on You probably don't need a VPN 4 months ago:
I'm not quite paranoid enough to believe that all of these anti-VPN articles are propaganda sponsored by people who want to make mass surveillance easier, but when it's from someone whose other recent posts include one titled "Youtube ads aren't actually that bad" and two explaining why Google's Manifest V3 is great, I'm at least going to suspect it as a possibility.