monotremata
@monotremata@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Valid point 1 day ago:
And presumably it had never occurred to the kid that one might want to turn off a radio for any reason.
- Comment on The Old Car Summertime Struggle 2 days ago:
My family had two volvos that behaved like this. One was an '81 Volvo 240 DL manual, and the other was a '92 Volvo 740 automatic. Both of them could get up to highway speed noticeably faster if you turned off the A/C. (My dad used to say they’d “do 0 to 60 on a leisurely afternoon.”) There’s some chance that A/C was aftermarket on the '81, so maybe that’s a factor? But the '92 did it too, and that was definitely stock.
- Comment on US Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for wind and solar projects” 1 week ago:
They do very occasionally blunder into something that has merits. Like, they rescheduled marijuana, and they’re fast-tracking research on therapeutic psilocybin and MDMA. Those are positive things, broadly speaking. Removing the tax on tipped workers was also helpful for some working-class people.
I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head, but part of that is probably availability bias: the vaguely positive stuff that they do is a lot less emotionally charged, and therefore less memorable, than the wildly awful stuff they also constantly do.
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
I thought of another one. This is an odd one, because I think the dev is actually quite well known: it’s Yahtzee Croshaw, formerly of Zero Punctuation and now of Fully Ramblomatic. He’s made a number of games over the years, but one that almost nobody ever mentions anymore is Poacher. (Note: link is to Archive.org rather than Steam; I don’t think the game is available on Steam.) I didn’t actually beat this one, as it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as it goes on, but the basic controls and whatnot are very nice, and the humor is great. Here’s Wot Rock, Paper, Shotgun Thought about it, since it’s a bit of a faff to actually install at this point and Archive doesn’t offer reviews and whatnot.
- Comment on Game suggestions: Downvote any game you've heard of before 1 week ago:
I’ve recommended this before, so it’s possible people will have heard of this from me, but Gateways by Smudged Cat Games is pretty great. It’s a puzzle platformer but it gets very, very complicated as you go on, especially once you unlock the ability to use all the different mechanics at once. It’s a pretty smooth learning curve up to that point, though.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
“Do you guys not have phones?”
- Comment on Operation enduring algae 2 weeks ago:
I’m not sure it’s AI. There are people who build screen-accurate prop replicas as a hobby. Here’s a post by a guy who made a version of the beads. www.therpf.com/…/the-rock-vx-gas-build.332887/
- Comment on literally 451° 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, it’s the person I was replying to who was saying that Bradbury made a mistake by saying 451°F, and that it should have been 451°C. I cited the range to demonstrate that Bradbury’s number was roughly correct and 451°C is very much not.
- Comment on literally 451° 2 weeks ago:
This does not appear to be correct. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature gives the point for paper as “218–246 °C (424–475 °F)” which roughly matches the title as published.
- Comment on There's never been an easier time to boycott Microsoft, the most boring video game publisher in the business 4 weeks ago:
I didn’t know that. I guess that gives me a little more confidence in Bethesda, but it still suggests a woeful mismanagement of TES under Microsoft.
- Comment on There's never been an easier time to boycott Microsoft, the most boring video game publisher in the business 4 weeks ago:
I used to be a big fan of the Elder Scrolls games, but they haven’t released anything actually new in 15 years. That’s frankly impressive. Everyone wanted to make a game that could be “the next Skyrim,” except, apparently, Bethesda, who could literally do that.
And it’s only gotten worse since the Microsoft acquisition. I never played Starfield, because it didn’t look like they understand their own gameplay model. I didn’t play the Oblivion remaster, as they seem not to understand their own art direction either.
At this point I kinda doubt they’ll actually release TES 6, but if they do, I’ve not got much hope for it.
- Comment on Can't prove environmental issues if you don't have the data 5 weeks ago:
Yep. They cited it as a source of climate panic. Which, like, yeah, knowing what’s actually happening with the climate right now definitely will freak you out, but…
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
It was definitely the first. I don’t own and have never played the sequel. They called them “digital trips” or something like that. It was supposed to be like an in-universe computer game, I think? There wasn’t a lot to it–you piloted this tank thing and had to clear a level, by jumping around and sometimes killing some enemies until you reached a checkpoint, in a certain brief time limit. But I found it kinda weirdly compelling.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
I didn’t like that game for the most part, but for reasons I find difficult to explain, I really enjoyed that minigame with the robot spider.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 5 weeks ago:
Oh, the brand on mine is “Solar Shield,” fitover is just a category. I’ve also used some of the “Cocoons,” but those are mostly orange sleep hygiene glasses. Solar Shield are cheaper but I don’t think they make orange ones. Clipons do also work for night driving, I have a pair of those too.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 5 weeks ago:
In my experience they help, but they don’t totally fix the problem. I’d still rather have them than not, though. I use fitovers.
- Comment on Valve raises Steam Deck prices by more than $200 1 month ago:
Source?
- Comment on As a small farm owner, no image has ever been more accurate 1 month ago:
I think they care a lot about the lawful axis and not at all about the stupid axis.
- Comment on Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should 1 month ago:
Is this what “I double-dog dare you” refers to?
- Comment on Hands On with the Anbernic RG Rotate: Weird, Unique, and Instantly my Favorite 1 month ago:
Does it support adoptable storage for its SD card?
- Comment on Hands On with the Anbernic RG Rotate: Weird, Unique, and Instantly my Favorite 1 month ago:
Note that it only has 32GB of internal storage, which could be kinda limiting for general Android use.
- Comment on The half-assed implementations of battery charge limits... 1 month ago:
I think they may have fixed the app switcher thing? Or at least one of them.
Here’s the scenario I kept running into on my 6. I’ll give the apps names to simplify the description, but the problem was generic. So let’s say I’m in Firefox, and I want to glance back at something in signal. So I double-tap “recent” to switch to my previous app, but what comes up is instead WeatherBug, because I forgot I glanced at that between Signal and Firefox. So I still want to go to Signal, but when I get there, I want my previous app to be Firefox, not WeatherBug, so I double-tap recent again to get back to Firefox as an interim step. Then I hit recent yet again, and this time the whole screen freezes up and won’t respond to touch. The workaround I found was that if you interacted with the screen on WeatherBug–usually I’d just scroll it down and back up a tiny bit–it wouldn’t lock up. So I got in the habit of doing that.
Recently there’s been a change, though, and it seems to fix that bug. Unfortunately, it also screws up the “switch to last app” functionality sometimes. Now I’ll be in Firefox, open recent apps, scroll past Weatherbug to open Signal, and when I double-tap recent, it’ll switch to WeatherBug.
So it’s still a screwy mess, but at least it’s not locking up as often anymore.
- Comment on Random Choice in Newcomb's Paradox 2 months ago:
Yeah. OP’s alternate scenario, where there’s not supposed to be a way to get the million, is a lot more fragile, since then there’s a huge incentive to get the intelligence to screw up its prediction.
In the original setup, where you can choose either the jackpot box or both the jackpot and $1000 boxes, that incentive basically goes away. Like, maybe you successfully change the odds to 25% $1M, 25% $1.001M, 25% $1000, and 25% $0 (assuming the intelligence’s ability to predict the coin flip is no better than chance). But in the original problem, depending on your analysis, you’ve either got a 99.999% chance of $1M (based on the one-box camp’s analysis of taking one box), or you’ve got a 100% chance of getting $1000 more than you would by taking one box (based on the two-box camp’s analysis of taking two boxes). It doesn’t seem to me that a 25% chance of getting $0 would seem like an improvement to either of those camps.
So yeah. The scenario OP describes would be a lot more broken, because people’s behavior would be much more chaotic.
- Comment on Wrong answers only - what is this? 2 months ago:
The song of my people.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 months ago:
Haha, that’s giving me way too much credit. I was a high school student and was still figuring out what the GUI bits did, like the ArcBall widget, so I practically couldn’t do anything useful on the GUI itself on days when I didn’t have a GUI machine. I could do some of the behind-the-scenes linear algebra stuff, though. Like, there was an array that held a 3d vector at every point in space that represented the flow field, and they wanted to be able to visualize cross-sections, so for that I needed to make a 2d grid of 2d vectors on a single plane. That sort of thing basically had to be done blind anyway.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 months ago:
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn’t run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
- Comment on big facts 4 months ago:
Through the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive diractance… youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag
- Comment on big facts 4 months ago:
I mean, it’s talking about people thinking that “energy, frequency and vibration are just mystical nonsense.” People don’t think that if you talk about an FM station broadcasting on a particular frequency, or about the frequency of light absorbed by particular atomic orbitals. They think that if you’re explaining that you’ve slept much better since you placed jasper and amethyst on the ley lines near your bed to absorb the negative frequencies.
The implication in the meme that anyone who is using these terms cannot be indulging in mystical nonsense, because these terms can also apply to real things. In fact, though, mystic cranks have been coopting scientific terms for ages, and they show no signs of slowing down. It’s a real problem that people confuse crap with science.
- Comment on big facts 4 months ago:
This is what I don’t like about the top meme, though. Like, yes, energy, frequency, and vibration are all things. Obviously. But the top meme is implying that everyone should believe that those things work in the specific ways that the woo practitioners say they do, and that’s a very different demand. More, it’s implying that people who doubt those effects are ignoring obvious evidence, when in fact the people who doubt those effects do so because nobody has been able to demonstrate reliable evidence for them. It has a nasty gaslighting overtone to it.
- Comment on big facts 4 months ago:
I think you’re probably joking, but this actually is a thing. e.g. scitechdaily.com/engineers-harvest-energy-from-wi…