jqubed
@jqubed@lemmy.world
- Comment on Rate my routine 13 hours ago:
Wouldn’t breaking something make the exercise more difficult?
- Submitted 1 day ago to internetisawesome@sh.itjust.works | 0 comments
- Comment on Trending Communities for Tuesday 10th June 2025 4 days ago:
That would seem a little odd given the person behind it has listed their account as being on a PieFed instance.
@andrew_s@piefed.social do you know if your bot is/should be tracking PieFed communities?
- Comment on Hello, non-Americans, do you have any Chinese language classes in your education system? 4 days ago:
My school offered (from most popular to least popular):
- Spanish
- French
- Chinese (I think Mandarin)
- German
I think my child’s high school offers the same, although I don’t know the relative popularities. I’m confident Spanish is still most popular, and judging by the number of posters around the school from German classes trying to convince kids to take German, I’m thinking German is still not very popular.
- Comment on Zynga shuts down Torchlight 3 developer four years after its acquisition 1 week ago:
TIL Zynga still exists
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 1 week ago:
If it was pre-compiled that could also cause issues not just across operating systems but also the architectures, right? Like x86 on desktop versus the ARM architecture most mobile devices use?
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 1 week ago:
I always have a case. Basically every phone I’ve tried has felt too slippery without one to me, so I get one that’s a little more grippy
- Comment on No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera 2 weeks ago:
As it got dark they began the arduous procedure of aiming the laser and something very quickly dawned on everyone: While considerable attention had been made in the design and alignment of the laser’s optics and in achieving good sensitivity of the optical receiver, no-one had really thought too seriously about the practical difficulties of aiming a very narrow beam over a distance of 118+ miles! Using a number of improvised techniques, the laser crew managed to get the beam “close”, setting the elevation with various shims and other pieces onhand, but getting both azimuth (horizontal) and elevation (vertical) dialed in proved to be a hair-pulling task.
After a bit of fussing, the receive site crew was tantalized by the occasional brief, bright flash from the distant laser but it seemed as though the transmit site crew could never repeat the maneuver - plus the necessary corrections - to get the laser back and on-point! When the receive site crew queried the Grassy Hollow folks about this on the radio it turned out that they were using two primitive tools to adjust the aiming of the laser: A large rock tapped at the end of the metal channel in which the laser was mounted for coarse adjustments and a much smaller rock for fine-tuning!
- Comment on No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t finished but this is a very interesting read
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 2 weeks ago:
The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.
My understanding is that in Virginia the city/town that serves as the county seat is explicitly not a part of the county it’s located in!
- Comment on Why are American animations more expensive than Asian animations? 3 weeks ago:
It’s why a lot of American cartoons like The Simpsons or Futurama are animated in Asia, usually Japan or Korea. They might have American animators do the key frames and then pay Asian animators to do the tedious in-between frames, or just send it all to Asia.
This also puts a downward pressure on American wages, with the threat effectively being, “take a pay cut or lose the work entirely.” Seems to be what Hollywood is hoping to do with “AI” also.
- Comment on Shats 3 weeks ago:
!nominativedeterminism@feddit.uk
- Comment on Shats 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on It's just for testing, promise 🤞 3 weeks ago:
“Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.”
- Comment on It's just for testing, promise 🤞 3 weeks ago:
So you just had that laying around, or you bought it for that purpose?
- Comment on I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option? 4 weeks ago:
Sorry for the slow reply; just remembered to ask her. For bookkeeping you don’t need anything. It could be valuable to get a certification in QuickBooks, but not required. It just seems to be the most common software.
- Comment on I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option? 4 weeks ago:
Have you considered accounting/bookkeeping? My wife has done it before and it’s not necessarily the most exciting work but typically pays pretty decent. She says it can be interesting trying to track down what is preventing the books from balancing.
- Comment on What are some examples of some of the most well-known and watched TV series at the time that been forgotten culturally? 5 weeks ago:
Lost would be similar to that. It was huge when it was on, then it ended badly and everyone ignores it now, except for talking about how badly it ended
- Comment on Will all these multiplayer games being released without support for LAN or hosting our own servers will no longer be playable with others when the company shuts down the servers? 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 5 weeks ago:
I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.
- Comment on Consumers make their voices heard as Microsoft's huge venture flatlines in popularity 1 month ago:
Copilot is Microsoft’s name for their AI service, like Google’s Gemini or Chat GPT. Recall is their service that will screenshot everything you do for
trainingimproving the results. - Comment on What do office workers actually do? 1 month ago:
Office work is largely paperwork, even if very little is on actual paper nowadays. Much of the work involves creating records or communicating with others to get things done. A salesperson will try to find clients for the product or service. They’ll typically create a record of customers or prospects with their contact information and notes about the negotiation. They’ll create a formal quotation or estimate for the customer and if the customer wants to move forward they’ll create an order confirmation. That document will trigger some other department to fulfill the order, either by providing a service or product to the customer. A work order might be provided to a service technician specifying what work is to be done and where. If a product needs to be delivered a picking slip might be created to tell someone in a warehouse where to get the product and how many to get. Once it’s been picked the product will go to the shipping department to be packed and shipped. An item fulfillment will be created saying what items were packed, how many, and what the tracking number is. Once the order is fulfilled an invoice will be created. If the customer paid in advance the payment will get applied to the invoice automatically or by someone in the accounting department. If the customer is on credit terms they’ll be sent the invoice with instructions on how to pay and when payment is due.
There are so many steps like this. The records help the business plan. They know how many parts and supplies to order. They can track if they’re selling more or less than forecast, if they need to place a rush order for more parts, ask people to work overtime or hire more employees. If something starts costing more they can look to see if they need to raise prices or redesign the product to use a different component, or find an alternate source. At the end of the day, it all comes down to accounting, making sure the company is generating enough income to pay the bills, suppliers, and employees, and hopefully make a profit.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
And getting a completely new phone and number while you’re at it
- Comment on Cinema has a physical media problem and it just keeps getting worse 1 month ago:
That second-to-last sentence is great!
- Comment on Pens in Space 1 month ago:
I don’t know if anyone still makes the pencils. IIRC they used a special formulation for the graphite that reduced the dust and risk of breakage, but I don’t think there’s much market for that outside the space program since that’s about the only place the dust would float and be hazardous. The pens were in development even before the space program because there’s a market for pens that can write in unusual orientations. I’m sure the marketing of it being a pen used in space helps expands that market some, but the market would exist regardless. It’s supposed to be a nice pen to write with also, although I don’t know how much of that is kind of a placebo to justify spending $10-20+ on a pen. I’m sure it’s nicer than a 50¢ pen, though.
Felt pens can be prone to leakage, especially in lower atmospheric pressure. This can be a problem even in airliners, and definitely not what you want in space. There’s nothing in the pen mechanism to seal the ink in when not in use. A properly made ballpoint pen actually seals the ink in when not in use. That was Bíró’s big selling point over earlier technologies like fountain pens; the pen still writes even if you leave it uncapped and the ink doesn’t dry out. The Bic pen was revolutionary for creating a manufacturing process that could produce them cheaply.
- Comment on Pens in Space 1 month ago:
Fisher’s claim to fame before inventing the Space Pen was inventing a universal replacement ink cartridge. You can even put the space pen cartridge in pens from other manufacturers.
- Comment on Pens in Space 1 month ago:
The Soviets were using grease pencils IIRC before also switching to the Fisher Space Pen around 1969. The grease pencil eliminated the risk of graphite floating around but the writing quality isn’t great.
- Comment on Pens in Space 1 month ago:
Your points about a cost-plus contract have merit but aren’t applicable here because the pens weren’t developed under a contract at all. Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company had started developing a pressurized pen before the space program even began (to develop a pen that could write in other orientations than on a desk), although learning of the concerns from the program gave him renewed impetus to solve the design. Fisher patented the design in 1966 after ten years of development and about $1 million in cost. Prior to the pens NASA had been purchasing special pencils at $128.89/each. The original purchase order for the pens bought 400 at $2.95/each.
Original Space Pen Purchase Order from NASA
The Soviet space program bought the pens in 1969, and besides the Americans they’re still used today by the Russian and Chinese space programs. You can buy one yourself for as little as $7 if you don’t care about it being refillable. On the one hand that’s a lot for a disposable pen, on the other hand that’s not terribly expensive for a pen that writes upside-down if you need that, and might not feel too bad if you’re prone to losing pens.
- Comment on What are the odds of a person getting poisoned by food delivery driver? How would the odds change if the person is a public figure (such as Twitch Streamers)? 1 month ago:
Yeah, it would be easier to just fake being a delivery driver and drop off tainted food and act like somebody else ordered it. The odds of a driver being able to target someone specific with a legit order are very low.
That said, don’t eat random food you didn’t order!
- Comment on Anon works at a warehouse 1 month ago:
I had a sales guy once ask me what tablet he should purchase for watching porn. He was later fired for buying groceries with his P-card.
