BorgDrone

@BorgDrone@lemmy.one

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This feels wrong. I love it.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Now calculate the angles

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’ | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish TLoU 1 gave you the option to sacrifice Ellie. Have an alternate ending where they find a vaccine and everyone lives happily ever after (except Ellie).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why does every single flashlight have multiple settings that you have to scroll through?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lights using a 18650 seem to be the rage these days, at crazy cheap prices, but they all use some UI with clicks, holds, etc.

  I have an Olight Seeker Pro 4 and it’s pretty simple to use. The on/off button rotates and controls the intensity. You do have to either hold it for a few seconds to turn it on or rotate the button 90º and then click but that’s unavoidable with these kinds of flashlights.

  These lights are very small and yet very powerful. That means you can easily pocket them, but because they are so powerful they also get very hot. You don’t want a flashlight like this to accidentally turn on while in your pocket. If you look at these lights, the head is almost always ribbed, it’s basically a heatsink. Even then when you run them at full strength they usually throttle themselves down after a few minutes to prevent overheating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people impressed with SpaceX?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They are also very different organizations with very different goals.

  NASA is focussed on science, they are trying to learn as much as possible about our solar system and the universe.

  SpaceX by contrast is focussed on engineering. They aren’t trying to find life on Mars, they are trying to build the ferry service to it.

  When NASA built rockets back in the 60’s, space flight was a science problem. We needed to figure out if it was even possible to do so. Can we even get a capsule into space? Can humans survive in zero gravity? Nowadays space flight is an engineering problem. We know it’s possible, we know the math, but can we actually build those things?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never been to a grocery store where the self checkout doesn’t weigh everything. That’s why people keep getting the “unexpected item in bagging area” error that requires an employee to come over to check and clear the error each time.

  Sounds like a stupid system.

  What stores in what country are you referring to?

  Pretty much every supermarket in the Netherlands.

  Here is a video of it in action

  The anti-theft equipment for a system like this that would prevent someone stealing by simply not scanning something is probably a lot more expensive than the usual self checkouts.

  There is no anti theft system other than randomized bag checks where they check up to 10 items from your bag to see if you scanned them. Takes about 1 minute and with daily supermarket visits this happens maybe once a month or so. (I think there is some kind of reputation system linked to your store loyalty card).

  Do you exit the store through a specific gate that scans stuff or what?

  You scan your receipt af the exit gate (you can also scan a barcode from the store’s app or choose a tiny receipt that only contains the exit barcode). You have to go through one or these gates regardless of wether you go through self checkout or not.

  If the store is busy I never try to self checkout since there are lines at all of them

  There are almost never lines at self checkout. There are 16 self checkout stations vs only one regular cashier. Self checkout is super fast and even if they are all occupied one usually frees up in less than a minute.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your entire comment seems premised on the mistaken assumption that every self checkout system is implemented in the exact same way.

  It basically is implemented the exact same way in every supermarket in my country.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Netherlands.

  Here is a video of the hand terminal in action (in Dutch, but you’ll get the gist of it)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Clothing and tech in a supermarket?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never seen anti-theft devices on items in a supermarket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Self checkout works fine for large amounts of items. You grab a portable scanner at the entrance and scan items as you put them in your cart. When you arrive at checkout you already scanned all your items and all you have to do is pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Self checkout customers cannot verify their own age for age-restricted items.

  Age verification happens asynchronously and causes zero delay for anyone who doesn’t look like a teenager. The employee overseeing the self-checkout gets an alert on their tablet-thingie, they take one look at me and press approve. You can just keep scanning items while this happens. Usually the ‘your age may be checked’ alert disappears within seconds.

  Self checkout customers cannot scan something and report the number of duplicates (e.g., scan a can and punch in that you’re buying 8 of them).

  They can where I live.

  In most stores, self checkout customers are policed by the system to make sure that each item is placed onto a scale that weighs everything, and stops the process if weights don’t match up.

  I’ve never seen that, and I’m not aware of any supermarket chain in my country that does this.

  The ergonomics and flow of self checkout doesn’t allow for a conveyor belt style rapid scanning, because a self checkout station is a tighter space and tends to require bagging as you scan, instead of scanning and bagging separately and independently.

  The conveyor belt slows things down. You take an item out of your basket, scan it and put it in your bag in one go instead of it being two separate actions. You’re only handling each item once instead of twice. Besides, if you’re planning to get a lot of items you scan while shopping, not at checkout. You get a portable scanner, put it slot on your cart and just scan each item as you put it in your cart.

  As a result, self checkout tends to be slower for customers who have more than 20 items.

  If you scan while you add items to your cart it takes less than 10 seconds to check out, regardless of how many items you have

  That might be offset if there’s a longer line for regular cashier, but if there’s no line the employee cashier is much faster.

  My local supermarket has a grand total of 1 regular cashier, versus 16 self checkouts. If you go during a busy time you have to stand in line. Since the regular cashier is basically only used by people who don’t want to or can’t use self-checkout for some reason (that is: usually elderly people) this line doesn’t move very fast.

  When it’s a quiet time of day there often isn’t a regular cashier at all and you have to ask the person overseeing the self-checkout who then has to call someone to help you out as they cannot leave the self-checkout isle unattended so you end up waiting for a cashier to arrive.

  Self checkout is always faster, by an order of magnitude.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ok boomer⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would you be pro self checkout? Besides the extra time and effort for the customer to check out if they have more than a couple items

  In what alternate reality does self-checkout take more time and effort?

  • If you go to a cashier then you have to wait in line. At my local supermarket there is one cashier vs. 16 self-checkout machines. Even if you go at an extremely busy time there is almost always a self-checkout machine available.
  • With self-checkout you simply scan the items from your basket and put them in your bag. With the cashier you have put all your items on the conveyor belt, wait for them to be scanned, then put them in your bag.
  • If you have more than a few items you simply grab a hand-scanner or just use the app on your phone and scan the items as you put them in your cart. Then you just go to a self-checkout machine and pay. No unloading the cart at checkout, you just pay and take your cart to your car.

  the problems and delays they cause where they have to provide employee assistance anyway (“Unexpected item in bag”, etc)

  What do you mean unexpected item in bag? The self checkout machine can’t look into my bag.

  The article also talked about people getting in trouble for accidentally not getting something scanned.

  Never seen that happen. You get random bag checks before you pay (so at that point it’s technically not theft). If you missed something, they simply re-scan all the items and you pay the correct amount, that’s all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I always get them confused.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are disappointingly few epic space battles in fantasy though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expanded Steam gaming compatibility likely coming to Arm chips with hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fat binaries contain both ARM and x86 code, but I was referring to Rosetta, which is used for x86-only binaries.

  Rosetta does translation of x86 to ARM, both AOT and JIT. It does translate to normal ARM code, the only dependency on a Apple-specific custom ARM extension is that the M-series processors have a special mode that implements x86-like strong memory ordering. This means Rosetta does not have to figure out where to place memory barriers, this allows for much better performance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expanded Steam gaming compatibility likely coming to Arm chips with hundreds of Windows games — Valve testing ARM64 Proton compatibility layer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s transpiling the x86 code to ARM on the fly. I honestly would have thought it wasn’t possible

  Apple’s been doing it for years. They try to do ahead of time transpiling wherever they can but they also do it on-the-fly for things like JITed code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨after 40 all meals are horror⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is because bread that is not only “made with 100% whole wheat” (which just means it contains SOME 100%-whole-wheat flour!) but is made with ONLY whole wheat flour (plus any other whole grains) doesn’t rise very well.

  I don’t know anything about baking bread so I can’t tell you how they do it, but in my country (the Netherlands) whole grain bread has to be made from 100% whole grain flour by law. If you add any other kind of flour you cannot sell it as whole grain. There is plenty of delicious whole grain bread for sale both in supermarkets and bakeries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨after 40 all meals are horror⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What do you consider ‘good bread’? Don’t buy supermarket bread, go to a good bakery and get some nice, freshly baked whole-grain bread, that should be much more difficult to turn into sugar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨after 40 all meals are horror⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Or just put it in the fridge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5 Pro announcement plans and console design have been leaked [VGC]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I agree they should. Physical game sales are a PITA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5 Pro announcement plans and console design have been leaked [VGC]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet that hardly anyone buys the add on drive and they use that as a reason to completely drop physical media support in the PS6.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Getting PSVR2 working on PC isn't as easy as it should be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a Mac guy so I’m a bit out of touch with the state of PCs. I know PCs usually are a few years behind technology wise, but I’m kind of surprised they still don’t have bluetooth as standard. The technology is decades old.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨McDonald's Experience by non McDonald's patron.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And if you fuck up even a tiny bit, it starts screaming that you are an idiot loud enough for the whole store to hear until an attendant comes to help.

  What is there to fuck up?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It will outlive us all⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what server you’re running, but I have never had any issues with USB keyboards. They just work, including in the firmware. No drivers needed. Besides, a proper server motherboard will have IPMI so you can just remote into it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube's web UX team is a joke.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the worst pieces of UX is when you turn on subtitles in the phone app. It will pop-up a banner that says something like “Subtitles turned on” that appears on top of the fucking subtitles and stays there for about 3 hours, making it impossible to read the subtitles. Why is there a banner for this in the first place, I know the subtitles are on. First of all I was the one that turned them on. No need to inform me. Second of all I can tell by the fact that there are subtitles on the screen.

  What bloody UX genius came up with that crap?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need new glasses. The only insurance-approved place I can shop online will cost $250 with my needs. I went to a "cheap" glasses website that doesn't accept insurance: $250. Yay, America.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  $250 for glasses like that is very cheap. I also have bifocals, not the thinnest lenses either, IIRC they were one step up from the standard ones. A light frame but nothing special, the frame was like €100, the entire set of glasses was around €650. The lenses only have a cylinder in them; no prisms or anything like that. If you need more complicated or stronger/thin lenses they can easily go over €1000.

  Even if you have the optional insurance for it, that doesn’t really help you. The amount they cover is basically the same amount you pay for the additional coverage. You’re better off putting the money in a savings account earmarked for your next set of glasses.

  Also, if you need anything but the most basic single focus lenses without any cylinders or prisms, get them at a real optician. The online store can’t properly measure where to place the lenses in the frame (they need to be properly centered in front of your pupils).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need new glasses. The only insurance-approved place I can shop online will cost $250 with my needs. I went to a "cheap" glasses website that doesn't accept insurance: $250. Yay, America.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC it’s because there isn’t really much of a point to add those to insurance. With health insurance some people will need very expensive treatments but lots of people don’t. It works because you spread the risk over many people. The people who don’t need expensive treatments pay more than they would without insurance, the ones that do need those treatments pay a lot less. Since you don’t know which one of those you will be insurance is a good idea.

  With dental and glasses this is not the case. There isn’t too much variation in how much a person will need to spend on those during their lifetime.

  If you get additional insurance for either you’ll see that the maximum payouts are pretty much the same as what you pay extra during the same period. You might as well just put the money in a savings account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  An RC aircraft is basically a guided missile with a meat grinder at the front. The electric ones are surprisingly more dangerous than the nitro ones. A nitro engine can stall if something gets in the prop. An electric motor just keeps going.

  Go talk to some old geezers at your local RC club, they’ll undoubtedly have some nice tall stories about what happens when props get in contact with body parts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨don't use ladybird browser lol⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What does coffee have to do with anything?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on how busy it is. It’s mainly the time it takes to make the pizza. Delivery is a 900 meter bike ride. I think Dominoes uses e-bikes so that’s maybe 2 minutes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming we had proper bike infrastructure(which we don’t); you’d be hard pressed to top the speed a car can go, and you would still have to stop frequently at lights, just like a car

  Here it’s the exact opposite. There is no way a car can keep up with a bike in the city. Let’s say I wanted to go to the city center by car, which is about 2 kilometers. I would encounter 5 traffic lights just in that short drive. On a working day it would be slow, on a Saturday? Forget it. It would probably be faster to walk. Alternatively, I could go by bike and encounter exactly zero traffic lights. I would ride from my house to the bicycle highway (few hundred meters), and from there it’s an uninterrupted route to the city center. It’s a completely separate path and there are bridges crossing all major roads. Near the city center it turns into a shared space where bicycles have priority over cars. The city center isn’t accessible by car at all, so if you go by car you have to park your car at the edge of the city center (paid) and walk the rest. By contrast, I can cycle right up to any store and park my bicycle right in front of it.