lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Stupid Sexy Scientists 1 day ago:
A buffet of dildos?
- Comment on Mood 2 days ago:
Ooooh okay, so that’s the point where I stop clenching up and shit my pants instead? Thanks, good to know.
More seriously, thank you for sharing that knowledge. I’ll still be terribly afraid of accidentally inhaling or ingesting them, or having them get in my pants without consent (again), but it should ease my fear of them intentionally attacking me.
- Comment on Mood 2 days ago:
vertically oriented
You mean if it’s flying up and down, rather than left-right as they usually do?
- Comment on Mood 3 days ago:
Wasps are my archetypal frenemy. I hate them, but I love them and what they do, but they can please do it far away from me, but they should also do it in my backyard, but not when I’m there, and I don’t mind sharing food with them, but I can’t stand having them near my food, and I don’t want to hate them but whenever they’re near I seize up and can barely breathe or move.
I don’t like them half as much as they deserve.
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 3 days ago:
Absurdism is your friend. If nothing matters in the long run, if all of existence is absurd, why not enjoy the here and now?
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 3 days ago:
Dave the Barbarian is an American cartoon series produced by Disney that ran for one season between 2004 and 2005. The show is about a cowardly barbarian named Dave who is tasked with protecting the kingdom, as well as the princess, while his parents are away fighting evil.
- Comment on Chirp in Fahrenheit 1 week ago:
Simplified: A black hole is the result of density – how much mass you cram into how little space. If something is heavy enough, even light passing near it gets pulled in and swallowed, so there’s some area where no light escapes: a black hole.
The difficulty is that you need a lot of gravity to bend the course of light. Gravity gets stronger the closer you get to the center, so at a certain distance, it will be strong enough no matter how little mass the object has.
But most objects are simply too large: Light will bounce off without ever getting that close to the center. You’d need to squeeze them together real hard to make them small enough, but there are other forces trying to keep them in shape that will resist you.
What you mean with “a whole lot of stuff” is the way more stable black holes work in space: A bunch of stuff so heavy that its own gravity is stronger than the forces trying to keep shape. If it’s strong enough, it can pull itself together so close that it gets smaller than that distance. Thus, there’s now an area around it where light can be trapped.
If you involve quantum physics, things get fucky, and supposedly there actually is some radiation still escaping, which is what the other post referred to, but I’m out of my depth there. There are also different types of black holes with their own complications, a bunch of details I skipped and a lot more I don’t even know.
Space is awesome and big and full of nothing and tons of tiny, really fascinating bits of not-nothing sprinkled in, and we could spend our entire lives studying it and never know just how much we don’t.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
Some house nearby must have one of those in their garden, because there’s a section of the road where I always catch that odour. Thanks for pointing it out to me, now I’ll look for the tree next time I have to pass through.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
In the United States, a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs.
[…]
PBMs play a role as the middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, and health insurance plan companies.
Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.
They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.
I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?
Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
Bet MMA is making the list too
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
We have one app where client management can’t globally disable update checks or notifications, but also, the updates aren’t critical enough to constantly validate and roll out.
So we get that “update available” badge in the app and can’t do anything about it. Probably not an issue for most people, since they already do updates only when they’re forced to, but annoying to the few who even look at those notifications.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
Entitled customers of any flavour are awful. It’s one thing to know what you want and to decide whether something is worth your money, but it’s another to demand people cater to your specific taste and be a dick about it, as if the devs’ time and effort wasn’t worth anything.
And particularly annoying in my opinion are those who think they know how to fix a given issue, call you an idiot for not “just” doing that and have no idea of the constraints and decisions that might preclude or complicate that “simple fix”.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 2 weeks ago:
I would never be able to explain coherently the difference between UX and UI people.
In theory, UX deals with the psychology behind it: What do people want that our product can provide? Does our product communicate that it can do so? Do people understand how to use the product? Does the product guide them through usage helpfully? Are they satisfied with the result?
Perhaps most nebulously: How do they feel before, while and after using the product, independent of the product itself, and how does that impact their experience? For instance, if you’re buying a train ticket, you might already be stressed and annoyed, so you’ll have less patience.
Source: My wife, who had UX as the focus of her undergrad.
In practice, a lot of people are like you in that they don’t really know or grasp the field, particularly managers who aren’t qualified to make the hiring decisions they do and accordingly there’s always gonna be people capitalising on that ambiguity and grifting their way to a cushy “I’m important and get to have a say, so pay me well” job.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 2 weeks ago:
a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics
A lot of history work is based on statistics and crunching numbers, apparently. For example, ACOUP is currently currently doing a series on the life of pre-modern peasants that involves a lot of calculating and modeling.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 2 weeks ago:
I guess the point is that MBA systematically trains you to be unethical in order to do well
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 2 weeks ago:
I work with one on the daily. I swear, his primary expertise is in buzzwords. Tried to tell me how much better a certain format for documenting requirements is because I can let the people that require something do the documenting for me.
Never mind that this format is neither feasible outside his example case, nor even sufficient for this specific case.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 3 weeks ago:
Finding the silver linings, the rays of light, the diamonds in the mud is a skill to learn, and I think learning it is worthwhile. That doesn’t mean I close my eyes to the bad stuff, but spotting the good stuff definitely makes it all more bearable.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 3 weeks ago:
Gotta love the perennial “our kids are spoiled idiots” bit. That one never gets old. I bet at least one of Aritophanes’ plays will have made fun of the damn kids.
- Comment on makes more sense than this shit 3 weeks ago:
That still doesn’t explain how this timeline would come to exist. Reality as it is is still insane, no matter how we got here.
- Comment on There's no wrong way to stroke it 2 months ago:
Someone else covered it in another reply, but moles have bald areas. Hairy Ball only applies when it’s entirely covered.
- Comment on There's no wrong way to stroke it 2 months ago:
I did not need to know that, but I respect the witty way you communicated it
- Comment on p is for pHunky 2 months ago:
Fair, but also, you could look up XKCD comics by their name or transcript and link to them directly when you come across them.
- Comment on kiwis! 3 months ago:
I think if your organs are all tarred up, you have a problem
- Comment on Baldur's Gayte 3 months ago:
Homotopic: Having the same (homo-) topological properties (-topic)
- Comment on Repent, ye clownish sinner 3 months ago:
I’m in the process of starting a fight with my neighbours. They complained (indirectly) about our garden being unkempt. I asked them for an appointment to talk directly so we can figure out just what the problem is. I’m not doing shit until they can tell me just what part of my little piece of nature is breaking any laws.
- Comment on what is north? 3 months ago:
Tthat’s not south of Antarctica though. It’s below, in terms of the map’s perspective, but “absolute south” is the middle of the picture. Anywhere outside Antarctica is north of Antarctica.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 months ago:
The fact that you launch into some part of your day doesn’t change that it’s gauging your mood on her end.
Maybe not, but the fact that me launching into that is an accepted and expected part of the response does.
If a manager calls me about a project and asks how I am, they don’t want me recounting an earlier frustrating interaction. As you say, they’re trying to gauge my mood, but ultimately my mood or how it came to be are irrelevant because we’re here to talk business. If I omit my headache, they don’t care.
If my GF asks me, she actually wants a response. If I omit my headache and she finds out later, she’ll be upset: “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
That expectation is the difference.
- Comment on Airbuddy 🦛 3 months ago:
Only for bipedals. Quadrupedal animals can well keep a leg on the ground at all times even when moving at speed. To borrow from another comment here: Would you call a stampeding elephant “walking”?
- Comment on Anon gains a superpower 3 months ago:
Sauron still has a physical form during the events of LOTR. Frodo sees him through the tower window when walking towards Mount Doom, and Gollum remarks he was personally tortured by him, and that his hand has 4 fingers.
I tended to interpret that more like “appearing as a spirit”, but you may actually be right. It would explain how he was able to orchestrate and dominate his forces. There is no precedent I’m aware of that any of the Ainur would be able to influence the physical world without a physical presence.
When Isildur slew him, I believe his physical form was destroyed, but as long as a token of his power remained, it makes sense that he would be able to eventually recover enough strength to reincorporate.
Either way, without the Ring, his power was still limited. I’ll update my comment, thanks for pointing that out.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 3 months ago:
If a colleague asks me “Hi, how’re you doing?” it’s small talk and I’ll respond something like “Oh you know, the usual.” If my partner asks me “Hi, how was your day?” it’s a genuine question and I will respond “That fucking dickhead at work that always plays nice and personable came around with another set of “urgent” requests and no fucking clue what he’s actually asking for, whether it’s possible or why I told him last week it isn’t.”
The difference is in how serious I take the question.