dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 day ago:
More or less, yes. That’s also why it appears more red/orange as it gets closer to the horizon from your perspective, since at that oblique angle the light has to pass through more of the atmosphere to get to you and more of it gets scattered or absorbed by particulates in the air.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 day ago:
The question is how gradually. Over the span of 10,000 years, probably not. Over the span of a month, absolutely. Remember that the hue of sunlight already changes significantly throughout the day based mostly on the sun’s proximity to the horizon (and thus how much thickness of crap in the atmosphere it has to plow through to get to your location) and we can definitely detect that easily.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 day ago:
We perceive the sun as white. That’s a fairly important distinction.
The reason we perceive the sun as white is surely because the sun has output basically the same spectrum as long as humanity (and a great deal of humanity’s precursors) has existed. We evolved with our eyes considering the spectrum the sun kicks out as fully white light, comprised of the sum total of electromagnetic frequencies we’re able to receive with our eyeballs.
There is no such thing as objective color of any light. Our understanding of color is completely based on our perception of it. If the sun’s peak output were in the 590–625nm range (what we currently perceive as orange) for all that time rather than in the green part of the spectrum it is in reality (500–565nm), we undoubtedly would have evolved to see that particular spectrum combination as white light instead.
All of the above notwithstanding, if the spectrum output of the sun changed overnight like OP’s idiot friend is suggesting, it would be immediately apparent to everyone who isn’t literally blind.
- Comment on Invest now before it's too late! 1 day ago:
Jest, perhaps. But you can already buy copper bullion for “investment” purposes the same as you can do with gold and silver:
www.jmbullion.com/copper/copper-bars/
This is, of course, for the express purposes of parting fools who listen to too much AM talk radio from their money. Copper is worth, what, a little under $6 a pound right now? So these one ounce ingots in reality contain about 37 cents worth of metal.
Copper is self-evidently not an investment or speculation vehicle, unless you are able to front the money to deal with it in quantities measured in tons.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 2 days ago:
If you have to do it legitimately for corporate liability purposes then yes, actually buying licenses will not be cost effective. But activating the LTSC versions is otherwise trivially easy.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 2 days ago:
I am explicitly using LTSC.
You don’t need a license if you know about massgrave.dev. I’m only using this because our warehouse software requires Windows and the latter is already bought and paid for. Otherwise, Microsoft can bite me.
- Comment on Retail stores still selling the same overpriced junk since at least 2019 and even pretending it's on sale 3 days ago:
Ooh, a Celeron N4000. I will see you, and raise you this piece of shit we have at work:
My boss bought this as one of those Black Friday “deals” for about $99 USD. The sticker on the bottom doesn’t seem to reveal its manufacturing date but I believe this model was released in 2018. Really, it’s just a netbook in all but name.
We use this specifically to drive a walk-around barcode scanner in our warehouse and the software we have to use on it is Windows only. It’s tiny and still somehow gets stellar battery life, and it’s deliberately so cheap as to be disposable so when the day inevitably comes that it gets smashed, no one will care.
With Win10 IoT on it the thing actually runs tolerably for our intended use case, which is the aforementioned barcode bleeping and nothing else. And at least yours there has a 1080p display; this one is only 1366 x 768 so doing practically anything else on it is excruciating anyway. What amuses me the most about it is that with only 39 gigs of usable storage there literally isn’t enough left over to run Windows updates. I have this thing as ruthlessly pared down as I can get without creating a custom Windows installation or something and it only has 770 megabytes free on it at the moment. If you want to let it update for whatever reason, you have to attach an external USB drive to it.
I can’t fathom trying to run Windows 11 on it. Fuck all that noise.
- Comment on How can we convince Trump voters to NOT vote for Trump (or Vance) in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 election? 3 days ago:
People do understand what the midterms are, right?
…Right?
Neither Trump nor Vance are up for election in 2026. But quite a few of their GOP cronies are, in the house and senate. All of the house is up for election and roughly one third of the senate. This will most likely be our last chance to oust at least some of Trump’s enablers in congress.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 sales stumble over Christmas 1 week ago:
And even in the cases when you think it might have games, it turns out they’re not on the cartridge.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Your example sounds like Ikaruga if it were deliberately designed to be annoying.
…We probably shouldn’t give any mobile game developers any ideas.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Especially the gold chests that give you a fiver. However, my gripe is with the 3-4 second delay after it goes “bling” but before it presents you the button that allows you to dismiss the popup.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 2 weeks ago:
Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters “talking” at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting you input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I’ve read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.
I’m adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn’t even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 2 weeks ago:
I’m always verbose. If you see that penguin knife over a post you ought to know what you’re signing up for.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 2 weeks ago:
Meta.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 2 weeks ago:
They’re almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.
Console players are usually out of luck.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 2 weeks ago:
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player’s time, intelligence, or most often both. I’m looking very hard in Nintendo’s direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they’re offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they’re not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for you game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So also cutscenes you can’t skip even after you’ve already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can’t skip after you’ve seen them the first time as well and, definitely if you can’t press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. This goes double if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you don’t even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I’m a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. You don’t need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. Or even moreso if the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I’m also including stuff like, “You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it’s a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type.”
No Man’s Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I’m glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can’t be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
Also,
Don’t even come at me with, “But realism! Everyone needs to sleep!” First of all, the other denizens of your boat don’t sleep because they are all dead souls. And second of all, the game can’t even hold it in until the actual ending before revealing that so are you, so it turns out Stella doesn’t even need to sleep either.
The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it’s not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can’t figure out a way to teach your game’s most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn’t for you.
- Comment on I miss him and his crazy family 2 weeks ago:
- What was covered up with the smudge, and
- y u no do better job?
- Comment on My kitten loves his hammock in the bathroom window, but my neighbor's trash pile ruins pictures 3 weeks ago:
We already have local governments, too. What a reductive take.
- Comment on My kitten loves his hammock in the bathroom window, but my neighbor's trash pile ruins pictures 3 weeks ago:
More like the HOAs want to act like a government. But we already have governments. We don’t need two of them.
- Comment on We're just friends! 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on We're just friends! 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on actual version! 4 weeks ago:
I suspect that’s because that is your cluster size, so the smallest “size on disk” value this file could be is 4kB.
In reality in the .png format it got served up to me in, it’s 3.45 kB.
Converting it to a four color paletted .gif (!) I managed to squeeze it down to 2,461 bytes, though.
- Comment on Whats the best use for 75 dollars? 4 weeks ago:
!pocketknife@lemmy.world
- Comment on Whats the best use for 75 dollars? 4 weeks ago:
Cripes, this argument again. Give it a rest already, people.
I don’t know about you but I’ve never used mine for combat and I’m unlikely to be in a position to try. Despite the inherent ridiculousness I do occasionally EDC mine, but mostly I use it as a folding camp knife.
There are oodles of other perfectly cromulent knives to recommend, of course (just ask me how I know!) but I zeroed in on this one for the sheer perversity of its selling price being near enough to precisely OP’s available figure.
If you’re going to be that way about it, might I recommend a Leatherman Skeletool which is also currently about $75.
- Comment on Whats the best use for 75 dollars? 4 weeks ago:
An HOKC Finka-C is almost exactly $75 on Amazon right now.
Apropos of nothing, really.
- Comment on The Internet is for.. 4 weeks ago:
The interstate is for corn
The interstate is for corn
Sick of looking at, honking my horn at
Corn, corn, corn
- Comment on the 'wow you're really annoyingly explaining simple items with complex words cause you're a nerd' starter kit 5 weeks ago:
Also known as Spock Speak.
- Comment on Mandarin 🍊 5 weeks ago:
Random Internet pedantry/trivia: In the context of this comic, the apple or whatever it is doesn’t need to be able to speak Mandarin to understand the orange because they live in a comic and everything they say is written. It only needs to be able to read either simplified or traditional Chinese.
The various dialects spoken throughout China are variously divergent, but the written language is by and large the same across the board. Denizens of different regions may pronounce what’s written differently, or even very differently if you’re in a Cantonese vs. Mandarin situation, but the underlying meaning behind the written words is still the same. This is as it was explained to me by my boss when I worked in a Chinese restaurant, anyhow.
As he tells it, when traveling even as a native “Chinese” speaker to remote corners of China (he primarily speaks Cantonese) you’ll find that you and the locals are completely unintelligible to one another if you try to talk. Always carry a pen and paper with you; if you write down whatever you’re trying to get across pretty much everyone can magically understand it.
…Also, based on what the orange is offering the apple might want to learn to read Chinese in a hurry.
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 1 month ago:
Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.
It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.
All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.
So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.
- Comment on everyone talks about chip bags being 50% wasted space but no one talks about creamed corn cans being 50% wasted space 1 month ago:
Chip bags are full of air to protect the chips from being crushed in transit.
Your corn is full of… uh, whatever it is that’s in there with creamed corn in order to protect your corn. Obviously.
