TranquilTurbulence
@TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Do most people still use computers, or do people only use a smartphone as their main/only device? 1 day ago:
I can. Also, the headache is 100% real.
A mobile phone is for emergency calculations only. If your life, job or honor depends on it, you can make it work, but it’s going to suck sooo hard.
A tablet can do much more as long as you have a keyboard. Also, Apple Numbers and Google Sheets are just barely acceptable for light calculations, nothing more.
When you start doing anything even a little bit more demeaning, you really need to use a laptop. Even the browser version of Excel isn’t good enough. You really need to run the actual application.
- Comment on Do most people still use computers, or do people only use a smartphone as their main/only device? 1 day ago:
My thoughts exactly. The number of Linux users and programmers here may distort the picture OP gets from these comments.
- Comment on Do most people still use computers, or do people only use a smartphone as their main/only device? 1 day ago:
I know someone who just started studying game development. No prior programming experience required. I guess that’s not a problem as long as you do your homework properly.
- Comment on Do most people still use computers, or do people only use a smartphone as their main/only device? 1 day ago:
Phones are great when mobility is a high priority. Tablet are great for on the go entertainment. Laptops and desktops are great for everything else.
For example, searching information online is so much nicer if you can ctrl click and you have 15 tabs open in no time. Then you can jump between the tabs quickly to compare sources efficiently.
- Comment on Do most people still use computers, or do people only use a smartphone as their main/only device? 1 day ago:
That’s the first explanation I was able to find, and I still don’t know what everyone here is talking about. Why do Americans love to use so many acronyms for anything and everything?
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
All these years, preppers may have been right. Having a well supplied fortress of your own can turn out to be very handy.
- Comment on Why doesn't phones numbers have a "DNS" servet so we can just type in words like we do with the internet? 4 days ago:
What did I just watch? Like… educational content, explained by… 🤷 not at all who you would have expected. What a unique mix.
- Submitted 4 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 2 comments
- Comment on Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says 6 days ago:
Absolutely! You just gotta involve blockchain, AI and cloud computing. Otherwise, the investors won’t know how hot Reddit is. Slap on some quantum computing, and you’re all set.
- Comment on Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says 6 days ago:
We’re just getting warmed up here! There’s so much to do.
How about we introduce several tiers of premium currency, like copper, silver, gold, platinum rubies and diamonds, each with their unique exchange rates.
You could have limited-time awards purchased with one of the premium currencies. Also, add time-gated features, like temporary access to meme subreddits, or comment and post visibility boosts.
Pay-to-win mechanics should be included too. How about time-limited karma boosters?
Oh, and loot boxes! We’ve got to have those too. You could buy basic loot boxes with copper coins, and in those you could find a few silver coins randomly. With the silver coins, you can buy silver boxes, some of which may contain gold coins, and so on all the way to diamond tier. Now that you have a convoluted assortment of different currencies, you can use them to boost your account, posts and comments in different ways. Oh, and Season passes too, can’t forget those!
Ads. So much ads! Of course, you can get rid of some of them, depending on how much you pay and which currency you use. These are all time-limited features, so you better keep those coins and gems flowing every day.
And subscriptions too! Once you subscribe to something like 1231 copper coins a day, you can’t cancel without climbing the mount Kilimanjaro. The only cancel button is physically located on a computer somewhere up there.
And there’s so much more to come.
- Comment on What happened to Pez? 1 week ago:
Congrats! I didn’t even think that this message could get more NSFW.
- Comment on What happened to Pez? 1 week ago:
Are you supposed to stick this gun in your mouth and pull the trigger?
Sending some pretty interesting messages to kids…
- Comment on Who here does NOT have intrusive thoughts? 1 week ago:
How do you define intrusive in this case?
If your subconscious mind suddenly reminds of that one time you said something stupid and embarrassing… Yeah, that happens to pretty much everyone. Just tell that thought that nobody remembers that day or cares about what anyone said, so carry on as usual. That’s just the human mind doing its thing, making sure we pay attention to social interactions. Humans are social animals after all.
If troublesome thoughts bombard your mind all the time and you’re having trouble living your normal life, consider talking to a mental health professional.
- Comment on Speaking honestly, what has to happen for you personally to take to the street in protest of the current administration. 1 week ago:
Many years ago, I formed the opinion that protests rarely accomplish anything useful. If the government has decided to pass a particular bill, build a dam, cut costs or whatever, people often respond by protesting. Usually, the bill is passed, the dam is built and costs are cut regardless. The way I see it, protesting gives people a chance to feel like they’ve done their part, while the government does what they wants anyway. From the perspective of the government, it’s useful to allow people to have a channel where they can safely vent their anger. If you make protests illegal, people will form a resistance and start a guerrilla war, and that never ends well.
There are notable exceptions too, so not all protests end up being useless. It’s just that the probabilities aren’t in our favor. You proposed other forms of political activism, and I totally agree.
To me, all of this is rather theoretical, because I’ve never actually participated in any of this. Instead, I’ve just observed these events from the outside, while you’ve seen it from the inside. I’m really curious to know if agree or disagree with these thoughts.
- Comment on Can you eat soap for acid reflux? 1 week ago:
That seems to be a common theme in medicine. You have a super common symptom that is usually caused by something completely harmless, but there’s also a non-zero chance that you’re absolutely screwed.
- Comment on Can you eat soap for acid reflux? 1 week ago:
Wow. That’s amazing. And terrifying. I hope you’re doing better now.
- Comment on Can you eat soap for acid reflux? 1 week ago:
Wait, it’s possible to have a heart attack for 5 days? I thought a heart attack means your heart stops and you pass out?
Reading these comments is exposing how little I really know how cardiology. This is what it feels like to be on the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve.
- Comment on Can you eat soap for acid reflux? 1 week ago:
But isn’t heartburn all about stomach acids? How is that related to the heart? After all, these are two completely separate organs.
- Comment on If scientists could make you immortal but could only do it by transferring your consciousness into a single video game for ever, which game would you choose? 1 week ago:
Meaning that you would be technically one of the NPCs.
- Comment on When will we have auto turrets mounted on plane engines to stop birdstrikes? 1 week ago:
Now that you put it that way, it’s mildly terrifying.
- Comment on When will we have auto turrets mounted on plane engines to stop birdstrikes? 1 week ago:
That would be cool. Boringly though, there are safer ways as well. Birds tend to be scared of loud bangs, so you could scare them away with just sounds.
- Comment on Is there any way I can realistically send a message to Donald Trump and have him read it? 1 week ago:
As aiming accuracy goes down, damage radius needs to go up accordingly. History is full of examples of what happens when these variables are separated.
- Comment on what is the actual name of this type of „logic”? 2 weeks ago:
Even within a single language, you can have several different options like these
“curly double quotes” look like 66 and 99, so they are asymmetric.
“vertical double quotes” are identical.
‘curly single quotes’ are asymmetric.
‘vertical single quotes’ are identical.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
You know what’s infuriating about multiple choice tests? When you know enough to notice a mistake. You can tell the teacher screwed up, and now you know none of the answers are correct or more than one is. Next, you’ll just have to telepathically figure out what the teacher was thinking of when designing the exam, and pick the answer that was originally supposed to be the right one.
If you’ve mastered the art of exam telepathy, you also unlock the ability to pass any multiple choice exam.
- Comment on Anyone ever look at pictures of themselves as a child and feel no connection to them? 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and that’s why I don’t like looking at old pictures of me. I feel like old me isn’t the same thing as current me. It also sparks lots of Ship of Theseus type thoughts.
The atoms and cells the old me was built out of are mostly gone now. The emergent properties of that collection of brain cells is also different. Thoughts, beliefs, emotions, habits and attitudes have changed. The old me and new me are different parts of the same continuum. If we lived in the same time, everyone would consider us two different people.
- Comment on When a country is ruled by a dictator, does it matter which party he belongs to? 3 weeks ago:
Just take a look at the countries that have the word “democratic” in their name. Seems like that’s the unofficial way to let everyone know exactly how authoritarian the country actually is.
- Comment on How are you actually doing today? 3 weeks ago:
I feel fine. Sure, there’s lots of stuff to do, but it’s ok. Just one thing at a time…
- Comment on How to Be Bad at YouTube 3 weeks ago:
Browse the site as usual, but never watch any videos. Instead, download them at maximum resolution. You’ll skip all the adds, and require the maxim amount of bandwidth.
The business stays profitable as long as people watch ads and don’t use bandwidth anywhere near as much as you could.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know exactly how bad would it be, but my guess is that it would have a significant impact on the prices consumer pay for everything. In the past few hundred years, we’ve taken all sorts of nasty shortcuts that have allowed us to produce things at very low prices. If you want to do things the right way, it’s going to cost much more.
Burning fossil fuels is just one of those unwise shortcuts that need to be reversed completely. In the long run, we’re going to have to bury all the carbon we’ve dug up, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive too.
Fortunately though, the downsides of intermittent energy production can still be mitigated with various grid energy storage technologies. The way I see it, investing into them is crucial.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 3 weeks ago:
That would be possible, but seasonal production has some serious downsides.
Let’s say you have a steel mill with several solar powered arc furnaces and enough batteries to keep production running through the night. During the summer you can continue production 24/7, but in the winter you’ll have to shut down completely, because there’s not enough energy to keep even a single production line running. This means that there will be wild fluctuations in a variety of things:
- number of employees on site
- rate of steel produced
- demand for storage space for raw materials and steel products
- demand for logistics
- demand for maintenance This means, that in order to deal with the fluctuations, you would need to have lots of spare capacity in pretty much everything: More machines, more people, more money. If you could keep the production steady throughout the year, you could do so with less.
In the winter you’ll have plenty of time to fix anything that’s broken, but if there’s an unscheduled shutdown during the summer, you’re suddenly going to need lots of maintenance personnel and materials. Incidentally, those will be in short supply in the summer, because all the other factories would have the same problem. You would need to have lots of spare capacity in maintenance as well.
The AI industry should be fine, since you could train models when energy is cheap. Oh, but what if the summer isn’t long enough for you to update all your models? Simply just buy more computers so you have more spare capa… Oh, it’s the steel mill problem all over again. Oh, but what about the people who use the models during the winter? Maybe you could charge your customers double the price during the winter so that the traffic would be reduced to a reasonable level.