leisesprecher

@leisesprecher@feddit.org

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Explains Why 256GB Storage Is Better⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
I wouldn’t call it perfectly fine. It’s a bad decision made for the wrong reasons, but it’s also not a disaster.

It’s like coke in a mug. Weird, not ideal, but serviceable.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Explains Why 256GB Storage Is Better⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Most people don’t shut down their Macs that often, the fingerprint sensor on the keyboard acts as a power button 99% of the time.

Stupid decision, but almost inconsequential in real life.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guerrilla Women⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
No, but it causes alpha particles to be emitted.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oopsies⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Germany is currently considering a third way: they ask you.

Everyone in Germany has health insurance, so the idea is that the health insurance simply asks you directly to decide. Most people are in favor of organ donation, but never actually get an organ donor card or talk to their relatives. Asking them to decide won’t get anywhere near the donor rates of an opt-out scheme, but it could drastically increase them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Star Wars’: Simon Kinberg to Write, Produce New Trilogy for Lucasfilm⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
No, it’s a desert planet that’s legally distinct from tatooine, but still very obviously inspired by it.

Just like starkiller base was definitely not a death star and this weird mining site in 8 was definitely not inspired by hoth, it’s salt and not snow afterall!!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It’s interesting in the sense that something went catastrophically wrong here.

This isn’t just a small indie dev wasting a bit of money, it’s hundreds of millions set on fire by an established company in this industry.

The fact that “no one heard of it” is exactly the point. What went wrong here?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨5 days with new phone number - 84 spam calls⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
It only started this year for me (had this number for 15 years or so), and it’s mostly numbers from the UK and India for some reason (I’m in Germany).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Absolute Units⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Why is that guy so annoyed, though?

A person being passionate about something is a good thing!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Joy & Curiosity⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Even ascribing consciousness into others or ourselves is actually pretty stupid if you think about it.

Stemming from religion there’s this idea that human “souls” are somehow special and exist on a plane outside reality. But that’s not the case.

We are just semi-rigid blobs of mostly water that grew into weird shapes.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Economists be like⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
As an academic discussion, sure.

But why exactly are these guys in charge of almost everything to some degree? Economics is essentially string theory for people who are not smart enough for physics - theoretically maybe sound, but utterly useless for reality.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goos-Hänchen effect⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Hähnchen means little rooster, btw.

So this is an article about Hähnchen energy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie movies are having a surprising comeback in a bleak time for Hollywood⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
And don’t forget that they’re not even good. Like, the CGI looks bad, the writing is bad even for action movies, the acting is weird.

It’s a simulacrum of entertainment. Why would I pay 20€ for that?

And on that note, why 20€ for a movie that shows very clearly that hardly any money went into actually making a good movie?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Wouldn’t that break the necks of everyone over 50?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c o e x i s t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
And let’s be honest: the Mongolians were probably not worse than any other invader. War, destruction, looting and raping is kind of par for the course for most civilizations in history.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Transformers One’: Sleeper Box Office Hit in the Making or Franchise in Decline? | Analysis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
I think the implication is that a movie without large marketing budget or much attention of media became “silently” successful.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Covert Racism in AI: How Language Models Are Reinforcing Outdated Stereotypes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
The real problem are implicit biases. Like the kind of discrimination that a reasonable user of a system can’t even see. How are you supposed to know, that applicants from “bad” neighborhoods are rejected at a higher rate, if the system is presented to you as objective? And since AI models don’t really explain how they got to a solution, you can’t even audit them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2real5me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
So you feel like you’re an imposter syndrome imposter?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The struggle⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
You’d have to overhaul the funding system drastically.

Measuring scientific output by publications and citations is useless at best, but it’s easy so that’s how you’re measured.

Writing grant proposals is 95% useless bullshit, there’s no useful content in the proposals, but it gives a false sense of objectivity and competitiveness, so that’s how you’re funded.

Thing is, most of the world operates like that. Corporations measure useless KPIs and demand empty reports. There’s an entire caste of administrators whose entire existence is founded on this overhead to exist. I don’t see a way to change that without a very very serious disruption (that is, a major war, not a startup).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Academic writing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.

I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It’s often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn’t get to the point. (I’ll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)

I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.

As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delectable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Germany has Spaghetti ice cream, but that’s at least real ice cream just made to look like spaghetti.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨elucidating 🤌🏼⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Well, actually you’re kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.

So I’m not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) “we will deploy that in our k8s cluster” but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that’s incredibly stupid.

Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.

I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨elucidating 🤌🏼⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Most “professional” writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.

I’m involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it’s 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨biodegradable⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
And reusable!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nature is blunt.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I’m still not sure, what exactly the journals are actually doing.

Like, in all seriousness, what service do they provide? Just hosting the platform for anonymized reviews and basically a blog for the actual articles? That should cost maybe a few millions each year, yet this sector makes billions in revenue.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whoever wrote this headline has never encountered a passenger train before in their lives⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Train nerds are a weird bunch.

Please never change.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tensors⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It’s all just pointers with semantics attached.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coming up with new names is hard⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Most names are essentially just landmarks of some sort.

Hamburg is derived from Hammer Burg, simply meaning hammer castle.

Part of Hamburg is Altona, which is lower German for all too near, because it’s really close to Hamburg.

East of Hamburg is Lübeck, which is means “settlement of the lub”, whoever the lub were.

Even farther east is Warnemünde, which is located at the mouth (Mund) of the river Warnow.

Said river is getting pretty wide a bit upstream, which gave the city of Rostock its name (“where the river gets wider”).

East of that: Stralsund. It’s the sound (the water kind) of Strela.

And so on and so on.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coming up with new names is hard⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Germany has Katzenhirn - cat brain.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director says "almost all games should cost more at a base level" because they cost so much to make⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
That’s one of the reasons I lost almost all interest in games.

It already costs an arm and a leg to stay somewhat on top of the hardware requirements, I can’t justify to myself also investing hundreds of hours into essentially busy work.

I don’t enjoy fetching Fred’s uncle’s magic shovel of doom from a stupid generic dungeon 4h away.

Maybe I’m weird, but I use games more like interactive movies. I want a story, not some artificial and ultimately pointless “challenge”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Proving them wrong": After raising minimum wage, California has more fast-food jobs than ever⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
What really baffles me here is that in essence, what happened is exactly what free market economics would have predicted. If you can’t find people for low paying jobs, you increase wages and will get more workers. That’s literally economics 101, like, the first or second page in an economics book.