masterspace

@masterspace@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I got in a collision with a car from the 70s with a car today, would not the 70s car win out since it would primarily be metal? If so why don't people buy more 70's cars?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s honestly worth keeping the principle behind crumple zones in mind with everything:

  If energy can go somewhere else, then less of it will be transferred to what matters.

  For cars, the energy going into bending and breaking the materials of the crumple zone then doesn’t get transferred to the interior compartment.

  For Xbox controllers, they’re designed so that when they drop, the batteries shoot out and go flying, which means less energy goes into the controller shell and internals.

  And with a lot of laptops these days, you’re seeing the actual toughest, most survivable ones not be built out of heavy rigid metal and glass like Apple does, but out of light flexible aluminum composites. A) they weigh less so there’s less potential energy involved in a fall, and B) some of the energy gets transferred into bending the shell which will then snap back to form.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If someone is involved in illegal stuff... like say you built a drug empire... do they every get like... therapy for all the times they have to murder someone or almost get murdered?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This isn’t an explanation, it’s a thought terminating phrase. Youre just othering people as psychopaths/monsters/inhuman.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some people with college degrees and an education, still act so fucking stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, to be fair, electrical engineering is one of the most notoriously difficult to grasp disciplines.

  People don’t generally have a great intuitive sense for how pulsed electromagnet waves propagate through 3d space and time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some people with college degrees and an education, still act so fucking stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve used the advanced systems analysis math I learned in university as an actual calculation in my job precisely zero times.

  I roughly think about how it applies to situations and how that will effect the various likely outcomes and behaviours etc on a literal daily basis.

  University isnt just about training you to do a job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has society or scientists ever solved definitively the Chicken and the Egg theory? Or is it just like a whose on first thing?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re talking about the chicken and egg problem in the abstract, i.e. how do you determine “what caused what” in a system that feeds back into itself… the answer is that in feedback systems, determining blame or ascribing one or the other as the cause is simply meaningless, and you need to examine how the system behaves as a whole, and how the different parts contribute to the output of the system in various configurations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do all wealthy people in LA drive Supercars?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  LA is also a car culture city. When you’re poor in LA, you drive a shitty car, when you get rich in LA, you drive a fancy car.

  When you’re poor in New York, you get driven around by public transit. When you’re rich in New York, you get driven around by a car service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else feel like websites nowadays feels very broken compared to apps? Like you try to do transactions on the mobile site (eg: ordering food), and payments mysteriously declines...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nope. You can literally just send them the exact fields needed for processing a transaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone break down the real differences between kbin, mbin, Lemmy, and PieFed? I know they're all in the Threadiverse, but I'm not sure what the draw is to use one over another.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The dev of Lemmy is an asshole full stop. He’s also incredibly pro Russian and pro Chinese, but first and foremost, he’s an intolerable asshole.

  You’ll get banned from his Lemmy instance if you dare to suggest that Russia or China issue propaganda.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Then they’re just dumb.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Do I really miss it? It never once came up in any practical situation.

  You would buy a mobo and a CPU and put them together and not think about the specific buses or controllers you have available, unless you had a very specific reason to.

  Unless we’re talking about a mobile power constrained device, I certainly would rather have expandable RAM and graphics cards then everything slammed in a single unchanging chip.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a bad article. It’s just an Apple fanboy watching their company continue its trend of shitting on customers and assuming that everyone inevitably will, apparently never once reflecting on whether their insistence of sticking with Apple is the real problem.

  Their argument boils down to CPUs increasingly integrating basic versions of other components over time meaning that desktops will disappear… Ignoring that the desktop market has stayed surprisingly flat that entire time and has certainly not disappeared.

  If your argument is that integrated CPUs will outclass discrete components connected with high speed buses then you need to make it from an engineering standpoint, not a headline one.

  I also don’t understand his reasoning that because NVidia don’t buy ARM they don’t get to make an integrated CPU… They still do … to this day … Because ARM’s entire business model is based on companies like Nvidia licensing their designs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would you rate your country's constitution?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Their assessment of the charter of rights and freedoms is nonsense.

  We have one of the stronger constitutions in the world, one that actually provides positive rights for it’s citizens, not just negative ones

  I.e. American rights are all framed as the government not doing something to you, Canadian rights also include ones that force the government to do things for you.

  The notwithstanding clause is problematic, but it is not the death knell that post is making it out to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What OSes do Microsoft servers run on?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Microsoft’s been pretty open about using Linux for at least the past decade or so.

  They kept building it into Windows which eventually resulted in WSL, largely because they use Linux servers but Windows workstations.

  It was about 5 years ago that they publicly released Common Base Linux Mariner (now called Azure Linux).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even Silicon Valley Says that AI Is a Bubble⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re talking the US government, then no, they don’t need political capital from the people, they just need capital capital and they can use that to swing elections and bribe politicians.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Under the most ideal circumstances, how 'clean' is drinkable tap water by the time it reaches our taps?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Like, so much insanely cleaner than your food.

  Sewers are the giant pipes with all that air at the top.

  Your water pipes are filled almost the entire time, and the trunks are literally constantly flowing. There’s little to no air for anything to grow with, and at the very beginning there’s almost no bacteria since it’s treated water being pumped in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart Homes Are Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!

  First of all, the author states part of the issue, then bets against it at the end:

  Maybe the technology is still in its primitive stage, some breakthrough will come, and tricked-out houses will soon work seamlessly, removing friction and frustration from everyday tasks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

  The technology is literally in its primitive infancy. Matter is the open smart home standard the first version only just launched a couple years ago, and it didn’t support a huge number of smart home device categories. They’ve been continuously working on it and adding more, but we are literally still in the 1.X era of the first smart home standard of any kind.

  And that’s just the backbone. That’s like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse era, where North America just established that we’re all going to use 120V AC electricity. It took a genuinely long time (decades) for light switches and receptacles to get as good and standardized and seamless as they are now.

  The forces of corporate walled gardens do tend towards a fragmented experience, but interoperable standards have prevailed before, and Home Assistant is the single most actively developed open source project and is a driving force for true consumer focused home automation.

  Secondly, a bunch of the author’s complaints are nonsense / just badly versions of smart home products.

  • Light switches without clear On/Off/Dim/Scene Select labels on the buttons, are again, bad design. It’s perfectly possible to have a smart switch that is very easy to understand.
    • You know what also sucks? Having to tear out drywall and do 120V electrical wiring just because you want your light switch in a different spot, or you want it to control other lights, or you want a three+ way switch.
    • You know what’s nice? Have a complete separation between powering the device and controling the device. It’s nice to be able to turn individual lights on/off/to different colours and brightnesses depending on what you’re using the room for.
  • Turning on the TV and it not turning on the streaming box, means it’s an old tv or someone disabled HDMI CEC. New TVs will synchronize with the streaming box and soundbar / receiver automatically.
    • And I would argue that just having it start playing a random commercial filled channel, is worse for your brain then intentionally picking something to watch, but maybe that’s generational.
  • I don’t know how the author, their mom, or the rental supplied tech guy couldn’t figure out how to look up the instruction manual for the dishwasher, because literally zero models of Miele dishwasher require wifi for setup or use.
  • Black glass oven buttons with opaque symbols have nothing to do with smart appliances, that’s just bad design, and the author chose and bought a badly designed dumb oven, then blamed smart homes for some reason.
  • Programmable thermostats have been badly designed since the 90s, and yet, literally everyone uses them. Why? Because if it’s your home, you look up the instructions, program to a schedule that makes sense, and then you don’t have to go and adjust it multiple times a day. Modern smart Thermostats do the same thing but are usually more intuitive and nicer designed. This is because the author rented and AirBNB (i.e. a home designed for people to live in) rather then a hotel (a home designed for someone to temporarily stay in).
  • The author seems to not like touch screen numpads on their alarm system instead of buttons, because they display the weather while idle. Like ok, again, it’s an AirBNB, not a hotel. The buttons are clear to someone who has literally never used them, but uglier for people who use them every day.
  • And with lag, yes, there is inherently more lag in a digital control device then an analog one but there does not have to be lag to the UI, that’s just bad hardware / software, and as long as they’re wired, the actual control parts of modern control systems have literally imperceptible lag, on the basis of <100ms.

  Honestly, my takeaway from this piece is:

  • Renting an AirBnB means dealing with a home designed for someone else
  • Owning a software company makes you stressed out and rage at every little thing that’s different
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Next generation Xbox may launch in 2027⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, when you could convert Xbox Live Gold credits to Gamepass and get it for like $60 a year, it was genuinely a great deal. And that lasted for like 4+ years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a "buy nothing" community on Lemmy? Or an anti-consumerism comm?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like there’s three types of buy nothing:

  1. buy it for life - people looking to reduce consumerism by purchasing high quality, long lasting items that aren’t engineered to have limited lifespans. See lemmy.world/c/buyitforlife@sh.itjust.works

  2. second hand trading groups - people who want to reduce consumerism by creating vibrant second hand marketplaces and encouraging selling, trading, and donating of old goods. Lemmy is the wrong format for this, these groups tend to exist in geographically focused platforms like Facebook and Kijiji.

  3. true die-hard anti consumerists - want to never buy anything, including any items that are remotely consumable. Hard to find these communities as these people tend to head off grid, and / or self implode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?

  It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do personal knowledge base applications like Obsidian have all these bells and whistles for querying and parsing metadata/frontmatter but nothing similar for the actual content of notes?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because indexing a structured field with limited values is different from indexing a “structured” document with fields that can be anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in Ferrari crash⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Damn, that sucks.

  The studio head of Modern Warfare (all ghillied up), Titanfall / Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends. The guy clearly had an eye for taste / talent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough, I am just being overly angry and hateful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not the same idea, as I didn’t advocated studying them when they were authoritarian shitholes who were actively slaughtering their neighbours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have to, I just have to name one better than Russia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  German culture and heritage was destroyed by the world wars. What remains is not what was there pre-WWII.

  And I’m not cancelling or destroying anything. I’m just prioritizing cultures worth preserving over those that have been poisoned by a century of dictatorship and death.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it a bad idea to learn Russian because of everything?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck Russia. Learn literally any other language. Let them and their brains dead culture rot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ELI5 why I logically understand McDonald's food is low quality and bad for me but I crave it like crack?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because we didn’t evolve to live in lands of abundance. We evolved in scarce conditions and are attuned to that.

  Food that delicious and high calorie would not be constantly available in the wild, so if we ever found anything close, it would be beneficial to eat as much as possible to store up calories and survive during periods of scarcity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seems legit⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can fit text-only wikipedia on a normal Blu Ray as it’s only about 24GB. You can also easily fit Llama 3.1 or any of the other open, offline capable ai models as they’re only about 4GB.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  False equivalency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨spongebob big guy pants okay⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do they regrow their body or a new body made from the same parts?