dual_sport_dork

@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best way to turn off people and get lower tips⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, yes. I made a slight edit; we’re largely making the same point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best way to turn off people and get lower tips⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  However in reality, the number of restaraunts which track tips and actually make up the $7.25 difference is functionally zero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best way to turn off people and get lower tips⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s because the UK has stronger wage protections than the US. Here the Federal minimum wage for “tipped positions,” which are their own special category, is only $2.13 per hour. The management literally expects you, the customer, to make up for their payroll shortfall.

  Related fun fact: The reason the US has such a tipping culture at all is, as usual, the result of post-slavery racism when business owners flat out refused to actually pay any of their newly freed black employees, and instead demanded their customers to do it for them. For those positions, tips were the only way those people got paid.

  So yes, US business owners would absolutely force their employees to work for no pay if they could get away with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  20 is a funny way to spell 40.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I don't need no app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And it wants permissions to:

  • Camera
  • Microphone
  • Location
  • Media
  • Contacts
  • Call History
  • Read SMS Messages
  • Make and Receive Calls

  …And will throw an absolute hissy fit and refuse to load without explanation if you deny any of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are dwarf planets not considered planets but dwarf stars are considered stars?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For instance, just wait until you get a load of what astronomers consider to be metals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any better mechanical keyboards that don't break the bank?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would not buy a Razer if they paid me $120. Do yourself a favor and don’t. I’ve owned a fair few Razer products in my life and they’ve all been overpriced flimsy pieces of shit, and when they break Razer will do anything and everything to weasel out of doing anything about it. As a matter of fact, the last Razer product I had break on me was a Blackwidow Chroma, and not coincidentally it was the last Razer product I will ever buy. I think it made it a whole nine months.

  Anyway, I was in this very boat not too long ago and settled on the Glorious GMMK 3 100% for my wife, which is indeed available in white. It’s $140 USD list price, so I don’t know how that fits your budget. She got some nice cat themed keycaps for it and she’s having a ball. You can get it with various keyswitch options prepopulated, or even swap the switches around as you see fit. She got the “Fox” linear keyswitches which are not short throw but are definitely quiet.

  I use a Logitech G512 Carbon at the moment, myself. It’s not white but it has otherwise been bomber for over a year.

  This is a sterling endorsement for me. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but I type a lot. Not just bickering in the comments, but for work as well. I am not rough on keyboards and mine never moves from this spot, but I will tickle the keyswitches on any 'board a couple of million times in short order and I probably find the service limit on all the keys that are not W, A, S, or D more quickly than the average penguin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Romance scammers are now in the fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you do it the former way, you’re supposed to use a zero as well: “Pr0n.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What part of what I wrote expressed that I agreed with it?

  I’m just telling you how people behave. I don’t have any control over anybody but myself. For what it’s worth, I’m probably one of the six people in this damn country who doesn’t drive like a nut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For what it’s worth, the I-95 corridor from about Richmond to Boston, particularly the DC-Balitmore-Philly-NYC part, is probably one of the worst stretches of highway in the country for generalized insanity and phenomenally poor driving skills on display from everyone involved. It is easily my most hated patch of asphalt in the universe.

  A small but measurable improvement would be made to the world instantly if every person in DC and Baltimore had their licenses revoked. Although if experience is any judge, that still wouldn’t prevent any of them from still all being on 95, three inches from the car in front and raging over “only” being able to do 80 in a 55.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Practically no one actually drives at or below the speed limit in the US, especially on freeways. Whether or not you personally like this doesn’t matter – it’s just how it is.

  You’re welcome to try it, but speeding is so pervasive in our culture that this will single you out and Ruggedly Individualistic Americans will get frothingly butthurt at you over it. Prepare to get tailgated, cut off, bullied out of your lane, stuff thrown at your car, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because it can be enforced selectively, and if everyone is guilty of something, anyone in particular can be harassed under the cover of a legal justification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOOM: The Dark Ages | Gameplay Sizzle | Coming May 15, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

  If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

  The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

  Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

  I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOOM: The Dark Ages | Gameplay Sizzle | Coming May 15, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know that this has been revealed yet, but it is likely that it runs in id Tech 7, which is the same as Doom Eternal (and not Doom 2016).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOOM: The Dark Ages | Gameplay Sizzle | Coming May 15, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can beat the Marauders no problem, and I can even cheese them with the shotgun trick. That doesn’t magically make them good game design.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOOM: The Dark Ages | Gameplay Sizzle | Coming May 15, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though…

  It doesn’t look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I’m going to give this one a miss. All I’m seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that’s just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, “The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he’s functionally invulnerable.” Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn’t grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

  I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don’t like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn’t Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guess I'll starve⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, a series of JPEGS. Which are displayed in a little Javascript carousel, which automatically flips the pages every 7 seconds without any user input and can’t be stopped from doing so.

  You laugh. There’s actually a restaurant around here whose website works that way. You have to kill the script from console if you don’t want to drive yourself insane.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guess I'll starve⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  somebody’s totally misplaced idea that any Tech is cool just for being Tech

  Nah, it’s worse than that. It’s somebody’s totally awful idea that they can meddle with their menu prices in real-time and do “surge pricing” and other schemes to rip you off. If they committed to a paper menu they would have to honor that printed price in most jurisdictions, which would preclude them from such shenanigans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guess I'll starve⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but in this context guess what happens if you don’t hold and you just tap it.

  …

  The same thing, but with fewer steps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guess I'll starve⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun with QR codes! Two things are on the top of my mind today.

  My boss loves QR codes. He wants to put a QR code on every single publication we print, for any reason, or often for no reason. To this day, he does not understand that QR codes are not magic, and all they contain is a link. I can’t make the QR code “do” this, that, and the third thing he wants; I have to program our web site to do whatever it is. When he is explaining what he wants, he is inevitably tracing his fingers around in the air making a box shape, as if this means anything.

  His latest brainwave was trying to make me put QR codes on internet banner ads. Which are displayed on the viewer’s screen. ~90% of which are viewing on their mobile device to begin with. I had to explain to him using small easily understandable words that you cannot make a phone take a picture of itself. (Yes, I left the topic of screenshots out of it.) The fact that the banner ad is not only inherently clickable but being clickable is really rather the entire point, and this click directs the user to anywhere we want – say, the same place as his mythical QR code – did not sink in for him.

  He also doesn’t get that merely generating the pixels of the QR code does not automatically create the landing page and all of its content. He also doesn’t grok that, to the nearest decimal place, nobody scans the fucking things on our literature anyway. Like I don’t track that kind of thing.

  But I have a theory as to why, now. Thing the second is that just today I had a customer tell me, “I won’t scan them QR code things because I saw on the news they’re all controlled by the Chinese government.” (Our quotes have a QR code at the top you can use to view the products therein on our web site without having to type anything. It’s practically the only genuinely useful thing we do with them.) I had to demonstrate to him right there and then that the QR code is literally just a block of text, and you can see every single damn fool character in it before you visit whatever link it is if you feel like it and/or don’t trust it. Our QR codes clearly just go to our web site, with a ?products=[list] tacked on to the end of the URL.

  I am positive he didn’t get it.

  I’m positive my boss still doesn’t get it, either.

  Whatever, it all pays the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why can't there be a soda dispenser for energy drinks?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  God people are stupid

  And, we have a winner!

  Words to live by: Don’t step in the marketing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why can't there be a soda dispenser for energy drinks?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The inevitable howling from Karens when their children get ahold of a 64 ounce Big Gulp of the stuff notwithstanding, the main issue is that fountain availability would pull back the curtain on the supposed value of energy drinks. These are no more expensive than Coke or Pepsi or Sprite for their bottlers to produce, but they’ve successfully bamboozled the public into believing that a Monster or a Red Bull or whatever is “worth” 4-6x more per ounce than a normal soda. This is obviously bullshit, but if you were able to dispense it at the same rate and the same price as normal soda the jig would be up and the energy store brands would have an absolute cow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where a soldier gets shot in the helmet and it bounces off. Now a days soldiers seem to get shot in the helmet and it goes right thru. How come and why?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  TL;DR: Because Saving Private Ryan is a movie, and meanwhile reality is reality.

   

  Whether or not a helmet can stop a bullet (and manage protect its wearer in the process) depends an awful lot on how much energy it has to dissipate, i.e. how fast the bullet was traveling and how much it weighs.

  Rifle bullets travel very fast. This has not changed appreciably between WWII and today, although contrary to expectation it was more common to have front line soldiers issued with full power battle rifles back in WWII which were actually more powerful than the intermediate cartridge rifles most often issued to them today. Military rifles nowadays actually commonly fire a much lighter bullet than in the past. (Yes, there are exceptions. That’s not really the point.)

  There is no such thing as any kind of metal helmet that can protect the wearer against a rifle bullet that is a square hit and within the rifle’s optimally effective range. You can play with ceramics like are used in plate carriers that protect the torso, or weird high tech aramid fibers, etc. but the long and short of it is that such a thing would be too bulky and heavy to feasibly wear on your head. A bog standard 7.62x39 round, i.e. that fired from an AK pattern rifle commonly found all over the world, delivers around 1000 ft-lb of energy at impact within 100 yards. Even if you could magically stop it somehow it would ring your bell like you wouldn’t believe. We’re talking unconsciousness, fractured skull, brain damage.

  And to put it into perspective, the 7.92x57 round fired by the types of rifles likely to be issued to the Germans during WWII was even more powerful than this, developing around 2,900 ft-lb at the muzzle (I can’t find a figure for at 100 yards offhand, but just subtract a couple of percent). Yes, that’s around three times more powerful. You are therefore much less likely in reality to be happy about being shot in the dome with a WWII battle rifle with a primitive WWII helmet versus a modern helmet and a modern intermediate power cartridge.

  A steel helmet stands a greater chance of deflecting a pistol round which is slower and carries considerably less energy. 9x19 round at 100 yards is packing more like 250 ft-lb of energy, a quarter as much as the 7.62, and is also shaped with a much wider cross section and a less pointy nose so it’s less likely to penetrate hard objects.

  Any garden variety lid would be much more useful at deflecting a shot that was a glancing blow, or that was fired from a very long way away, and/or has ricocheted off of something and thus lost much of its energy. Not to mention fragments of whatever it hit – bits of brick or doorframe or glass or whatever it was the enemy’s bullet hit near you that was not you. And shrapnel, and gumpf raining down on your head from nearby explosions, etc. Helmets are designed to maximize their effectiveness based on what we understand and can build (and, yes, what the lowest bidder can manufacture) but are not and never have been expected to shrug off a straight-on headshot from an enemy’s rifle because this is a fool’s errand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Boomers with their loud Samsung phone sounds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had the Samsung notification whistle down pat back in the S3/S4/S5 era. Everyone had that as their default and it was so easy to fuck with people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A God of War live service game? Who the fuck signed off on that? I’m glad the article was able to zero in on the blistering stupidity of such a thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Genshin Impact Game Developer Will be Banned from Selling Lootboxes to Teens Under 16 without Parental Consent, Pay a $20 Million Fine to Settle FTC Charges.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  'Member when Kyle’s Mom freaked the fuck out and tried to ban Pokémon Red and Blue because they “depicted gambling” in the game corner, which had no links to the outside world and could not be fed with real money in any capacity, was completely contained within the monochrome screen on your Gameboy, and could be save scummed anyway? Pepperidge Farm 'members.

  My, how far the bullshit has come.

  Anyway, 16 is sure a funny way to spell 18. Why the hell is the age requirement 16 when you can’t buy a lottery ticket until you’re 18 and in most places you can’t enter a casino until you’re 21? It’s the same thing.

  Lootboxes is gambling. So are gacha pulls, and doubly so for both of the above when they can be fueled with real world money. People who are not adults should not be enabled to gamble.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google is now forcing gemini in their gmail app⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It gets worse. If you have “smart features and personalization” turned off for your Gmail account, which I do, you can’t even ask Gemini anything. Not even to get the inevitably wrong answer.

  But this still doesn’t remove the damn button for it from the corner of your screen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google is now forcing gemini in their gmail app⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey Google.

  I still can’t create folders in the Android Gmail app. But somehow you had time for this?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Potash is forever⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I KNO~3~, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any Roguelike/Roguelite suggestions?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dead Cells?

  Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.

  It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?

  There is indeed a Switch version.