adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Is there a way to select specific frequency bands on common Android smartphones (something with custom ROM support) besides giving root access to closed-source app like NSG? 11 hours ago:
Seems to me it’s better to use an external device instead of using the radio in the phone.
Flippers are still a thing.
- Comment on Why do most comedians have different drinks to drink? Most have water, Ricky usually has beer, some have whiskey and such. I get the lights make them thirst. But why not all water or something? 1 day ago:
It’s an old bar trick to serve the performers the drinks the house wants to sell to everyone else — except what they really serve them is water or colored water.
This is also done after the set, where if someone buys them a drink, the house gives them water and charges the person for the drink, and the performer gets a cut of the money.
That way, the performer can accept as many drinks as are offered without being unable to perform their next set.
- Comment on is it spelled "grey" or "gray"? 4 days ago:
What’s wrong with Canada’s weights and measures?
Everything is in SI units.
Unless you’re cooking, where heat is in Fahrenheit, solid measures are in cups teaspoons and tablespoons (but liquids are in litres and weights are in grams).
Or in construction, where you work in feet and yards. Or measuring a person’s height.
But while someone might be 6’ tall, their stride length will be in metres, as will their arm span.
So yeah; simple. It’s not like Canada has tons of people weighing in tonnes.
- Comment on is it spelled "grey" or "gray"? 4 days ago:
. . . Unless you’re in the majority of the English speaking world, which includes India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Of course, grey is the appropriate spelling for all of those but Canada, which uses both.
- Comment on Is natural deep red hair in adults rarer then orange/coppery shades? 5 days ago:
Yeah, it’s red inside too.
- Comment on Is natural deep red hair in adults rarer then orange/coppery shades? 5 days ago:
My sister has the dark red hair I think you’re talking about — at a glance people would call it auburn, but when the light catches it you see it’s really a dark red (not orange). My extended family going back generations has hints of this, but in everyone else it’s mostly been a red tint to another colour. I don’t know anyone else who has actual naturally red hair.
She gets the flush cheeks and freckles of the traditional orange redhead too; that seems to go with the hair, as nobody else in the family has that complexion (and yes, she’s my genetic sister).
Just a single anecdote, but I hope it helps.
- Comment on is our battery/junk drawer dangerous? 5 days ago:
The key is to ensure that you store any “bag” lithium batteries away from everything else, and preferably in an airtight container drained to 20% power.
Dry cell batteries (like the ones in your picture) should be stored in glass or plastic, so if the corrosive electrolytes leak out, they don’t damage anything else; you just have to recycle all the batteries the electrolytes touched.
- Comment on What comes after postmodernism? 5 days ago:
Exactly. It happened already, and we’ve already moved beyond post postmodernism.
I mean, I was studying post postmodernism as a historical moment in the 1990s.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
I wouldn’t call it stupid. It’s a number of negative things, but none of them are stupid.
Inappropriate? Definitely. This isn’t “inappropriate questions.” There are questions that shouldn’t be here despite not being stupid.
- Comment on Why is it cheaper to find and view 2 Girls 1 Cup than it is to read the news on NY Times? 1 week ago:
Let’s rephrase the question: “is it cheaper to find and view that popular video from 20 years ago than a single news article the NY Times released 20 years ago?”
Otherwise, you’re comparing a current events media platform to a once-popular video hosted everywhere.
- Comment on Aside from being an open standard, what other benefits are there to RISC-V over x86/ARM? 1 week ago:
The MC68000, for example, is over 40 years old and out of patent. It’s been repackaged on a smaller process as the 68SEC000, and there are Verilog implementations available too.
And that’s just the example that’s top of mind. There’s a whole line of low frequency Atmel processors too, but those are still very much in patent and so mostly tangential to this conversation.
RISC-V doesn’t really make sense for simpler implementations though; you’d still have to do a bunch of work to simplify it, AND end up with an architecture very few are currently familiar with.
Once Chinese implementations of RISC-V become endemic and there are enough people familiar with the architecture, it might make sense to start creating custom subsets on simplified processes. But we’re still years away from that.
- Comment on Aside from being an open standard, what other benefits are there to RISC-V over x86/ARM? 1 week ago:
While true, RISC-V probably isn’t the architecture for that. Better to use an old architecture whose patents have expired, and implement it on a new, smaller process.
RISC-V is good as an alternative to ARMv8 where the use case doesn’t quite fit what ARM is doing — or to implement in a country where there may be restrictions on how ARM is sold/deployed.
What I’m waiting for is for someone to implement something in RISC-V similar to Apple’s ARM implementation, with all the cores and memory on a single die. No need to do FPGA when you can just fab an unencumbered design in small batches for relatively cheap.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
You can create a new protocol without even touching electronics.
I’ve got a protocol with my neighbor that if their deliveries end up on my doorstep, I take it to them and ring their doorbell. They do the same for me.
- Comment on Why do supposedly dentist have a higher suicide rate than others? Also is it worse in the Pacific North West where depressing weather is always going on even higher there? 1 week ago:
Seasonal Affective Disorder - a mood disorder triggered by serotonin/melatonin regulation issues, normally caused by not enough sunlight exposure.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
That’s why I read on my phone. I can quickly pick up a book where I left off, wherever I happen to be.
- Comment on If internet means wires, then how come my mobile phone gets connected to the internet ? I'm roaming everywhere with it inside my pocket. 1 week ago:
Latency, also known as ping time by gamers, is the amount of time it takes for a signal to get from one computer to the other. Bandwidth is the total number of signals that can be sent over a given amount of time.
Eg: a bus has more bandwidth than a Kawasaki motorcycle, but also more latency (from a people moving perspective).
- Comment on Why do supposedly dentist have a higher suicide rate than others? Also is it worse in the Pacific North West where depressing weather is always going on even higher there? 1 week ago:
In answer to your second question: it depends on what you find depressing.
I love being snuggled in by dense cloud cover, and I love the rain. I’m not susceptible to S.A.D.
I like evergreen trees and mountains and water and moderate temperatures. So the PNW is like a perfect vacation experience for me year-round.
Other people are used to the prairies with wide open clear skies and hot hots and cold colds. Other people prefer equatorial climates with lots of sun, humidity, and storms that rush in and rush out again.
They probably wouldn’t do so well in the PNW.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
The device in your pocket connects to an ISP, who is also your cellular carrier. And it connects constantly, advertising itself to the local transmission towers, even when the phone is “turned off”. Your ISP/cellular provider always knows where your phone is, unless it’s disconnected from power or out of range.
- Comment on If internet means wires, then how come my mobile phone gets connected to the internet ? I'm roaming everywhere with it inside my pocket. 2 weeks ago:
There are “Internet cables” across the ocean; there are also “Internet satellites” orbiting the earth. The cables are good because they provide low latency. But that is not the most desired feature of all Internet packets; sometimes, bandwidth or range are higher priority than latency, and in those cases, a wireless transport layer may be preferred.
- Comment on if all birds sing and if they do why do geese honk, ducks quack, and chickens bawk? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah; crows have mating songs.
But it’s all about two things: attracting a mate and avoiding predators.
Some birds use sound for that. Other birds use visual displays, aerobatics, sheer viciousness, or other physical traits. Some use combinations of the above. Like everything else, what works will survive to be used by the next generation.
- Comment on In Theory if celebs remember all their training for different films. Then would it be to say if you picked a fight with Keanu could he wipe the floor with you since he is both Neo and John Wick? 2 weeks ago:
There’s a difference between remembering your training and being in proper physical condition.
In fact, if your film training involves different martial arts for each film, you probably would suck at actual fighting due to having to think about each thing you plan to do before you do it.
If you know one way to take someone down, if they come at you, you’ll reflexively do it.
If you know 30 ways to take someone down, you’ll either use the one you’ve used the most, the most recent one, or you’ll have to stop and decide which one makes the most sense in the situation—and that hesitation will mean you’ll lose against anyone well trained in a single discipline.
- Comment on How would you feel if someone said you deserve cancer or to die? 2 weeks ago:
We already established that. You have the right to express your opinion. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences to doing so.
- Comment on How would you feel if someone said you deserve cancer or to die? 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and it’s everyone else’s legal right to both tell you what they think of what you said, and refuse to associate with you.
Laws are in place because of precedent. New precedent is set every day.
Society makes laws, but is greater than its laws. Laws don’t define society, they help enforce it.
- Comment on The Dead Economy Theory 3 weeks ago:
Very few people want to be on the receiving end of violence. Quite a few people want it to exist.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 3 weeks ago:
The poll closed 20 April: tc.canada.ca/…/canadian-experience-vehicle-headli…
I seem to recall it opened in February. There were lots of news articles on Lemmy about it at the time.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 3 weeks ago:
In Canada, the federal government just put out a nationwide poll for input on this exact subject, as it’s coming near to the time to review the related legislation. It’s very possible that some of the headlight implementations currently on the road will soon be illegal nationwide.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Personally, I prefer browsers that by default disable most of the stuff on modern websites unless I explicitly enable it.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve visited a public website that ran exactly the way the owner planned on my browser — but that’s a good thing. I browse for the most part without ads or scripts or tracking. It’s fast, reasonably secure, and when a page fails to load what I’m expecting, I have to make the decision on whether it’s worth lowering my privacy, security and resource posture to make it work.
One solution that works pretty well is to use a web gateway that takes any website and makes it mostly functional on any browser back to the original Netscape Communicator and NCSA Mosaic. That way, you can use a very lightweight browser and let a server somewhere do the heavy lifting.
- Comment on What are the memory usage of various types of processes? 3 weeks ago:
Why not do something retro and base it on classic Mac OS apps? Each one has a defined minimum and preferred memory allocation (reserves its memory at launch and has to stay within that allocation).
Otherwise, if you’re using a modern OS, most processes will allocate memory as they need it, depending on use. If there isn’t enough available, background processes will be dumped to virtual memory to make room for the active process. If all memory is used up, the active process will start moving not-recently-used data onto storage as well.
Classic Mac OS lines up much better with your scenario, and is easier to populate as you can just go on infinite mac, boot an OS version, load up some applications and get info on them to see how mich they allocate.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
What does it mean when you don’t?
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The backwards facing Grasshopper, who, As we look up now, Gathering into the LEAP, Is arriving to become, Rearrangingly, Grasshopper.
Of course, you lose most of the meaning writing it like that, which is why he didn’t.