AnyOldName3
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 5 days ago:
Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.
- Comment on Would you do Onlyfans if needed the money? 1 week ago:
Many of the inactive accounts will be people who signed up and started, but made no or too little money, so abandoned the idea. They’re still worth counting when working out how likely a new person will be to make money. Other inactive accounts will be bots or catfish where there was never any intention to make money the way people expect the site to be used, so you can still discount a lot of them, but it’s not all of them.
- Comment on Anon's strict mom 2 weeks ago:
What better time for prank signs than right after a real flood?
- Comment on Anon's strict mom 2 weeks ago:
Printing off those signs and sticking them in the showers is a common student prank, so I wouldn’t assume they were real.
- Comment on Is it normal that I get wet water all over myself when taking a shower? 3 weeks ago:
Wet water is the water with added wetting agent used for firefighting. That stuff shouldn’t be coming out of your household plumbing.
- Comment on Anon hates Apple 3 weeks ago:
There was a scandal years ago because the moisture indicators were found to be wildly over-sensitive, and changing colour in inappropriate situations, e.g. it being a bit humid because it was raining, being in someone’s pocket when their clothes were a little too warm so they sweated, or having been brought into a bathroom within a couple of hours of someone showing. Some were already showing water damage immediately after leaving the Apple Store when journalists investigated.
If the Genius Bar staff are told the water damage indicators indicate water damage, then they don’t have to lie to say they can’t repair a phone. If some percentage of phones have indicators that simply don’t work correctly, then people will have repairs rejected when they know their phone’s never been near water, so it’ll look like the staff are lying.
The situation must have improved because this was headline news years ago and I’ve not seen it mentioned since, but even if it’s a fixed problem, it still gave Apple a reputation for refusing to do repairs for nonsensical reasons.
- Comment on GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam” 3 weeks ago:
It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.
- Comment on GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam” 3 weeks ago:
Selling old games and new games isn’t mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It’s not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.
- Comment on If investing in the S&P 500 is such a surefire way to make money, then why isn't everyone doing it? 4 weeks ago:
Something I’ve not seen mentioned here yet is that one of the reasons it’s such an effective way to make money is specifically because loads of people are buying into it. When you buy a stock (or a derivative like an S&P 500 index tracking fund), it increases its price. If you’re just one person with a normal-person amount of money, it won’t be enough to register, but if you’re part of a group of millions of people, or an investor with billions at your disposal, it’ll make a visible difference, and if people see that happening consistently, they’ll want to join in and there’ll be a positive feedback loop. It only stops when there’s a big enough panic that lots of investors can no longer afford to maintain their investment and have to sell at the same time, and then you can even get a positive feedback loop in the other direction when people see the price plummeting and decide they need to sell before it plummets any further.
Stocks are supposed to represent the value of a company’s current assets and expected future profits, but this kind of feedback loop muddies the water. With something like Bitcoin, which intentionally has no inherent value, because enough people have agreed to pretend otherwise, it’s gained effective value, and can be exchanged for money, or in some cases, goods and services. That’ll remain the case until everyone agrees that they don’t want Bitcoin, so could go on forever.
- Comment on Evil 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, looks like I’d remembered it backwards. It’s still an easily solvable problem by not using a load everything as whatever type you feel like function.
- Comment on Evil 4 weeks ago:
You’re allowed to charge before you give access to the software, but then can’t restrict the people you give it to giving it to more people. The beer licence sounds like those people would be on the hook for beer, too.
- Comment on Evil 4 weeks ago:
no
doesn’t becomefalse
, it becomesNorway
, and when converted to a boolean, Norway is true. The reason’s because one on YAML’s native types is an ISO country code enum, and if you tell a compliant YAML implementation to load a file without giving it a schema, that type has higher priority than string. If you then call a function that converts from native type to string, it expands the country code to the country name, and a function that coerces to boolean makes country codes true.The problem’s easy to avoid, though. You can just specify a schema, or use a function that grabs a string/bool directly instead of going via the assumed type first.
The real problem with YAML is how many implementations are a long way from being conformant, and load things differently to each other, but that situation’s been improving.
- Comment on Evil 4 weeks ago:
It’s generally accepted that file formats aren’t protected IP, so you can write a compatible reader or writer and be in the clear as long as you reused no code from the original reader/writer. The specification may have licence terms that restrict who you can share the spec with, but you don’t necessarily need the official spec to come up with a compatible implementation. Plenty of file formats have been reverse engineered over the years even when the original didn’t have a written spec.
- Comment on Ewww 5 weeks ago:
I don’t think bacterial excretions count as farts, so it’s probably more like 800 million years worth of farts as that’s when animals started existing.
- Comment on The torque better not be too strong with this one 5 weeks ago:
I think it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen loads and never known they were different. The difference is small enough that you wouldn’t realise it was significant until you were told:
- Comment on The torque better not be too strong with this one 5 weeks ago:
Pozidriv is intentionally not backwards compatible, and one of the biggest problems it has is looking enough like Phillips that people assume it must be compatible, use a mismatched screw and driver, and strip a head.
- Comment on Binary search 1 month ago:
If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.
- Comment on flouride 1 month ago:
Real men make chlorine pentafluoride anyway. We have no use for pathetic hypergolic oxidisers with only three fluorine atoms.
- Comment on Did something about mass produced ice cream change like 10 years ago? 2 months ago:
As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.
Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.
Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.
Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.
Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.
Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.
- Comment on Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’ 2 months ago:
A plumber or a sparky doesn’t just maintain one house, and if they’re just doing maintenance, probably work on hundreds of houses a year. Maintaining your own house takes a fraction of the time and effort of working a housing-related trade full time.
- Comment on Honey 2 months ago:
I’m referring to arguments I’ve had in person against native English speakers. If they were online arguments, the ability to use mobile data to show someone a citation wouldn’t be a new development.
- Comment on House Centipedes 2 months ago:
I have seen one of these in my life. I found it in my hair. I’m glad if already seen pictures of them on the Internet as the experience was already unpleasant enough when I could recognise what if found and knew it was harmless.
- Comment on Honey 2 months ago:
I’ve had an unreasonable number of arguments against people who seemed to think animal was a synonym for mammal. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where you can look it up and show them now mobile data is cheap, so it’s become a winnable argument.
- Comment on Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee 4 months ago:
It also doesn’t help that once you’ve paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn’t actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn’t help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn’t fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer’s looked at it).
Anyway, I’m glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.
- Comment on Tesco loses UK legal battle over plans to ‘fire and rehire’ staff on lower pay 4 months ago:
Either:
- They’re in denial that this happens (arguably, it didn’t happen, as eventually Tesco lost, and they wouldn’t know about it in the three years Tesco was winning because The Telegraph/Mail etc. wouldn’t report on that).
- They think worse things would always happen under other systems (e.g. everyone would be a slave of the state and go to gulag if they complained about anything).
- They don’t see it as an inherent problem with capitalism (e.g. simply make doing this illegal, and refuse to let business lobby to reverse the decision, and everything’s fine).
- They think this is a good thing (e.g. the fired workers will be incentivised to work harder, then earn a payrise, and use the extra 10p an hour to start a competing multibillion pound supermarket chain).
- Comment on Blood Meal 4 months ago:
A rusty crowbar is also red because of the iron atoms that compose it, but it’s not mansplaining to take issue with someone telling people they’re eating crowbars.
- Comment on What the hell even is Diet Coke? 4 months ago:
Personally, I can ignore the effects of artificial sweeteners on insulin levels as they, like everything else, have no effect, and my insulin levels are only affected by when I inject it. I’m type 1 diabetic. When people make incorrect claims based on effects that aren’t reproducible or weren’t statistically significant in the first place about the safety of sweeteners, it causes direct problems for me. I’ve had bartenders mess up my blood sugar levels by lying about serving diet drinks because they think they’re dangerous. Plus, if the people who push for artificial sweeteners to be banned had their way, there are plenty of things I couldn’t ever eat or drink again.
- Comment on What the hell even is Diet Coke? 4 months ago:
Aspartame is very mildly carcinogenic. An equivalent amount of sugar is much more carcinogenic, and is harmful in other ways, too. If you have to have a can of cola, diet is the healthier choice.
- Comment on Do any "thickening" products actually work to prevent hair loss/thinning? 5 months ago:
Minoxidil is produced in 5% concentration creams and foams, and that study is comparing rosemary oil to a 2% preparation. It’s impressive that rosemary oil is comparable at all, but obviously if you’re not taking a therapeutic dose of Monoxidil, it’s not going to work properly.
- Comment on Do any "thickening" products actually work to prevent hair loss/thinning? 5 months ago:
I use topical Minoxidil. It’s clearly made some difference, replacing a bald patch with a thin patch, and making my scalp noticeably warmer to the touch due to the extra bloodflow. It wasn’t the brilliant instantaneous wonderdrug some people told me it would be, nor totally ineffectual like others said, so I guess it’s something whose efficacy varies from person to person.