cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Input is an Embarrassing Disaster⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Disaster” is obviously just hyperbole for clicks. He raises some valid nitpicks, but they’re just nitpicks. It’s a reasonably good system. I wouldn’t mind having some of the quality-of-life features he suggests though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The more miserable you get about it, the less likely you are to “get picked”. The more unfair the world is to you, the angrier you get, the angrier you get, the more unfair the world will become to you. Do you see how this is an endless spiral that doesn’t lead to a good outcome? It can’t lead to a good outcome. Nobody wants to be around an entitled, fragile, angry, miserable, unstable powder-keg of a human being like that.

  The only way you’re going to solve this is by changing yourself and disconnecting from the idea that you’re “owed” fairness. You may argue the world is a bad place because of reasons. You might be right. But how does that help you? You can’t change the world. You can’t fix the world. So are you going to be angry about it, and confirm everything the world is already telling you about yourself?

  Or are you going to move on, ignore what the world says, accept that the world is going to do whatever it does, and learn how to relentlessly be a good person for its own sake, without expectation of reward? If you can do that, there’s a good chance you will eventually find love. It’s not guaranteed, and you have to stop imagining that it is. You don’t have a right to it. Maybe you think you should have a right to it, but you don’t. The sooner you accept that the better off you’ll be, and the better your chances will be. But it’s still only a chance. Life doesn’t have guarantees.

  If you can’t accept that, you’re going to end up on the incel path, and that isn’t going to work out well for you, you’re never going to build a functional relationship on that foundation, but if it makes you feel better right now, maybe all the misery it will lead to in your future is okay. Is that what you want for yourself? Good luck. I hope it feels really good feeling bad for yourself. Because it’s going to be a miserable future for you if feeling sorry for yourself is all you can do about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s my understanding, I think I’ve grasped at least the general gist of it, if not the specific nuances and details. Granted, I’m not a physicist or scientist of any sort. My dad was an electrician if that counts for anything, I dabble in electronics and I watch a stupid amount of Youtube, but those are pretty much my only qualifications, so feel free to consider this having a similar accuracy and truthiness level to that of generative AI, I won’t be offended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is negative voltage?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a figure of speech in the sense that voltages are almost always being discussed between two things, and the figure of speech part is that “ground” or “earth” is implied in most, but not all terrestrial cases. Especially in microchips, which like you said have very limited safe voltage ranges, it is very important to give them a stable and consistent reference to ground whenever possible to make sure static voltages don’t develop on the other side that can damage them internally.

  Technically, if you’re referring to voltages on an absolute scale (not relative to each other) you’d typically be talking about “electron-volts” which is why powerful electro-magnetic radiation like x-rays, gamma rays, and other cosmic phenomenon are often measured in mega-electron-volts (MeV) for example. This is useful in physics, but just like we don’t use “absolute temperature” in day-to-day life, it is essentially meaningless to us standing down here on the crust of our pitiful little planet made mostly of molten rock covered in conductive water.

  So in day-to-day life, we talk about voltages relative to the closest thing we have to a fixed reference point, and the “zero point” we rely on which is mostly a decent reference to the voltage of Earth’s own water table tends to be reasonably consistent and practical for our purposes. Static electricity is what happens when a particular object starts to lose its reference to ground, and large voltages (positive OR negative) can build up RELATIVE to ground, which then sparks when it finally equalizes back to our stable reference point. When large static charges build up in the atmosphere, they too eventually equalize with ground through lightning strikes. This is why “ground” is important to us. High voltages relative to ground can be very dangerous. Even small voltages relative to ground can be damaging to sensitive electronics. There is nothing special about “ground” voltage in particular, in fact it changes constantly with the weather, and solar output too! The important thing about it is that almost everything on this planet is connected to it, either through humidity, water, plants, the moistness of soil and even rock has enough conductivity to maintain a stable connection to Earth’s average voltage. And of course we’re going to use that as a reference and baseline because it’s super helpful for us. We don’t care how many electron-volts the Earth has. We just care that almost everything is connected to it in some meaningful way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happens when you just refuse to pay and go ... ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Dementia is a terrible affliction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think that’s a fair summary! I have to admit I’m still fond of ANSI (and some of the old DOS extended ASCII that included all kinds of fancy UI and box drawing characters) but it’s mostly nostalgia, and there’s the whole different rabbit hole of extended ASCII code pages to get into. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So you’re talking about Markdown. It’s a specific format, popularized initially on Reddit, that has now become so widely used it is almost universal nowadays (and only growing more popular since so many AI seem to use it natively), and while I agree with you in general and I’d even go as far as to call this a fundamental anachronistic design flaw of Markdown, I think to gain any understanding of this issue you have to understand the historical context that Markdown was born from, and for that you need a history lesson.

  Let’s start by establishing some terminology: “ASCII” is the most basic standard for computerized text. It’s quite limited, 127 characters, ~30 of which are non-printable control characters (including CR). This is pretty much the most universal, most compatible form of transmitting text over the internet. It’s built into almost every other standard as its foundation, and we basically can’t live without it anymore. We often call it “plain text”, although nowadays we also have unicode, or “UTF-8” in its most common form, that would also like to claim that title, even unicode contains those original 127 ASCII characters hardcoded right at its base.

  Anything beyond pure ASCII or sometimes unicode typically falls under the umbrella of “rich text”. “ANSI” was one of the earliest and most basic forms of rich text, again completely built on top of ASCII, and is still used sometimes for terminals today. It allows some basic colors and bold/underline, occasionally supporting double-width or italic. It’s very primitive compared to what we are used to nowadays and it relied heavily on non-printable ASCII control codes to do its work. In the old days, there was no capability for any sort of line-spacing other than 1. if you wanted a paragraph, you typically did TWO newlines to add 1 line of extra space in between the paragraphs to make it clear the previous paragraph had ended and a new one was starting.

  The first truly cross-platform “rich text” that came around was “HTML”, which is still of course what we use for the web today in all its glory. It wanted to do things differently than ANSI, and in a way, this was so that it could be compatible with ANSI. If you’re copy-pasting code out of a terminal and getting a whole bunch of hidden non-printable ASCII that are going to mess up your HTML, that’s a problem. This is where the roots of that issue you’re seeing in Markdown were born. HTML intentionally has a whitespace-agnostic definition. It intentionally wanted to get away from all those ASCII “non-printable” control codes and it consciously chooses to completely ignore them, crucially, including CR/LF (which have all sorts of their own problems with cross-platform implementations, DOS/Windows uses both CR-LF and sometimes only recognizes both CR-LF in that specific order. Unix ONLY uses CR. Older macs ONLY used LF. It was a mess, and it caused a lot of problems (sometimes still does). HTML got around this entirely by completely ignoring those characters and treating them as if they didn’t exist. They can’t have cross-platform compatibility issues if they don’t do anything in the first place.

  HTML instead supports tags that control when to move text to a new line, and just as critically, HTML decided to make a key semantic distinction between “lines” and “paragraphs”. <br> specifies a line break ONLY, without breaking the paragraph. <p> specifies a paragraph break, or a paragraph block depending how you use it, and that caused confusion of its own. But like it or not, paragraphs quickly became the standard method of laying out text on the web, and <br> was sidelined as an afterthought.

  As HTML and the web as whole grew, HTML started to gain a lot of very advanced and powerful features. Early internet forums wanted to make it easy for novices to communicate in some form of rich text without necessarily knowing HTML, and they didn’t want to enable all the advanced features of HTML some of which posed legitimate security or usability risks for the rest of the site especially with javascript and web requests. They created their own forms of tagging like BBcode that they translated into a safe subset of HTML behind the scenes. Again it was typical to use paragraphs here, it was starting to become the expectation for “CR” to mean paragraph. Sometimes, the old typesetting definition of paragraphs was adopted, where two CRs meant a new paragraph, and one CR meant a new line only.

  Meanwhile, you’ve got Microsoft Word and other word processors which are also working natively in rich text and paragraphs, and hitting enter in Word gives you a new paragraph, OR a new line depending on exactly what context you’re currently in, but again paragraph is kind of the assumed default.

  Finally, Markdown enters the scene. It comes from the world of HTML and BBcode and Word, but it wants to go back to the days of ASCII and make invisible choices of whitespace start mattering again, to get rid of all the ugly tags wrapped around all of our rich text up to this point and make text where the whitespace defines how it’s going to be presented, and its choice to resolve this dilemma is that it decides to keep the historical typesetting distinction of two CRs in a row makes a new paragraph, and it translates that into an HTML paragraph so it’s not actually separated by two full lines when you have an HTML rendering of markdown, it’s a proper HTML paragraph. So far so good. At this point, they could’ve chosen to do exactly what you said and what I think would’ve been the consistent thing to do: one CR (not two) means just a single new line, and sensibly, that would translate to an HTML <br> element and everything would’ve been lovely.

  But they didn’t.

  Instead, for whatever baffling reason, possibly because DOS/Unix/Mac line endings were still a bit of problem, and like I said <br> was very, very sidelined by the whole culture and history of HTML, but without being able to see into their minds I can’t say for sure exactly why they decided to go their own way for the <br> implementation, coming up with this wonky “two spaces after a line” to require people to be deliberate about it. But they obviously continued following the HTML tradition of CR/LF being otherwise ignored.

  Not to fully excuse this decision, but in their defense, sometimes copy-paste can insert newlines where you don’t want them, so it’s not always as clear that a CR is intentional the way you’re hoping. Maybe the idea was that these non-spaced CRs aren’t necessarily going to be intended if you’re often copy-pasting long, wrapped lines out of an 80 column terminal or something. I still don’t think that is justifiable, but it is what it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the water to make the medication work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This might piss off some of the hydro-homies out there but when talking about water in this context it’s also important to remember that food often contains more hydration than most people give it credit for. Even “dry” foods can end up being like 50% water by weight, and something like soup is obviously very close to 100% water, so people who overcompensate by trying to drink like 8L of straight water a day can easily get themselves into serious trouble, and water poisoning is actually a real thing that can happen. I think the least controversial take is that for most people, drinking when you’re thirsty is totally sufficient to maintain adequate hydration unless you’re in an extreme situation or you have a personal predisposition towards chronic dehydration. I’m not a big fan of the overgeneralized advice that everyone needs to constantly drink “X” much every day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If someone was shrunk down to the size of an ant would they be able to make a little ant sized campfire with the same principles? Does it scale like that?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To help answer your question, you can also think about what happens to a fire when you scale it up. This thought experiment will help guide you on whether the scaling is linear, or by volume (cubed) or perhaps even more dramatic than that. In the case of fire, if you imagine a campfire that is 10x the width, 10x the height, and 10x the depth, you are probably looking at a fire that has not 10x the energy, but more like 1000x the energy. It’s got a massive energy output compared to a modest campfire, it is going to consume a lot more than 10x as much fuel, and it’s potentially going to set stuff on fire and consume it and keep trying to consume more fuel in a way that you wouldn’t expect a 10x sized campfire to, and it is a huge emergency that is difficult to put out for that reason. It’s not just a 10x bigger fire because you scaled it up in 3 dimensions. It’s a vastly bigger monster.

  So vice versa, if you’re scaling your body from roughly 1.8 meters to 1.8 milllimeters, that’s a 1000x reduction, so you might want to take your campfire down to 1/1000th of its human-sized dimensions too. But you’re probably not looking at a fire that scales down to 1/1000th with you, you’ll be looking at a fire that only has 1/1000th-cubed or 1 billionth as much energy. That is a very small amount of energy, it will barely do anything or even be noticeable at that scale. It may not even sustain a flame. And if you want a campfire with more proportional energy like 1/1000th of a regular campfire for your ant-sized campfire, that means you’ll need a campfire that is still 1/10th the physical dimensions of your human-sized campfire. So it’s still a really, really big fire relative to your ant-sized body. It’s maybe the size of a large candle or alcohol burner, but that’s HUGE compared to ant-size dimensions. So no, put quite simply, it doesn’t scale like that.

  These estimations are approximate and there are probably even more complex scaling factors at play for something as physically complex as fire at such extreme scales, but that should help give you the general idea. You’d probably need much more thorough study and experimentation to get a better idea, unless somebody has already scientifically researched this which wouldn’t surprise me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fine, they can call me a loser if they want, either they will try to compete and fail and end up in the same place as the rest of us losers, or they will succeed and someday I will eat them along with all the other rich. When we all start to get hungry enough it’s going to get real interesting, I think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, because it’s not a competition. There is more than enough to go around, except for the people at the top rationing it out and keeping 99.999999% of it for themselves. That’s why it’s a hard world.

  Being selfish is not the solution, emulating the people who are being successful by being selfish is not the answer. Stop fighting over the crumbs the successful leave for us after they’ve eaten all the pie and thinking you will eventually collect a whole pie if you are just selfish enough. It’s a myth, it’s not realistic. They didn’t put their pies together out of crumbs. They baked it the oven they made us build for them.

  Don’t fight against your fellow crumb-gatherers. We live in one of the wealthiest and most prosperous times that humanity has ever existed in. We simply need to start acting like it. If austerity were actually necessary, we certainly wouldn’t be able to afford having billionaires and trillionaires either. It’s a lie, and people are getting insanely rich because people keep believing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What do you mean by “entire” distro? The distro itself doesn’t download the “entire distro”, it’s made up of packages, like almost every distro is. You’re only installing the base system, the packages are where the rest of the downloads come from. What “parts” of the distro’s base system don’t you want? The dockers are already pretty stripped down and minimalist by default, I’m not sure what else you could cut out to still have a functioning OS?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hooray! Fewer people on twitter is a good thing for all of humanity. I hope all of them get locked out of their accounts for inauthentic behavior, and they keep instituting even more extreme hurdles for people to come back until eventually nobody does. Kill the platforms. Kill them with fire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why does crossing legs increase blood pressure?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The pressure in your arm is not unrelated to or disconnected from the pressure in your legs. They are directly correlated. If the pressure in your legs goes up, so will the pressure in your arm, it’s the same system. The pressure in the entire system is what the arm measurement is supposed to show, that’s why they’re taking it. They usually don’t care about your arm specifically, they are trying to understand the whole system, including the pressure in your legs, which will be reflected in that same arm measurement. That’s the whole point, otherwise it wouldn’t be a good measurement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A proprietary Linux distro⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If they make modifications to GPL programs, they must publish those modifications. But if they don’t modify the actual programs, there is nothing they have to publish, they can just point to the official source code and say “that’s the code we’re using”, it’s published.

  The key thing to understand here is that an OS is not a modification to a GPL program, it is simply a collection of them. While there are enough of them that you can create an entire OS out of entirely GPL components… importantly, you don’t HAVE to, nothing in the GPL says they are only allowed to exist alongside other GPL software and components, otherwise you couldn’t use them on Windows for example. When you’re making an OS, any component you don’t want to use GPL code for, you just don’t use a GPL component for it, you write your own that does the same thing and fills the same role for your OS. As long as they are doing that from scratch, not by modifying the GPL original, they can have as many proprietary programs in their OS too if they want, even required parts.

  The proprietary components might be required for their OS to function, thus making the whole OS proprietary, but it can still be mostly GPL code, as long as they haven’t modified the GPL parts and have written the proprietary parts from scratch or with appropriately licensed libraries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you avoid AI music?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Piracy. Private trackers are genuinely better stewards and curators of their libraries because unlike the the slop factories, they’re made by real humans, for real humans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I went to a mechanic for my car and told them I had a problem with the aft starboard tire would they think I'm a dork?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that would be a strange thing to say, and unless they also happen to be boaters, most mechanics probably have no idea what side “starboard” is, and maybe not even “aft”, so it won’t even be useful information to them, which actually makes it quite frustrating. Similar to someone coming in with a vague and incomprehensible complaint that there car is making “a noise” and they want it fixed, but they can’t explain in any useful way what the noise is, where it’s coming from, when it happens.

  Just to be clear, the correct and accepted terminology options are “rear passenger side”, or “right rear”.

• ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Librem 5. It’s alright, for what it is. I don’t need a lot from a “phone”, I hate them in general and try to minimize my use to the extent reasonably possible in this bizarro-land dystopia we live in.

• ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t know there still were android phones with custom ROM support but from what I understand the radio chip is a totally separate chip that is essentially a black box even in AOSP. I am far from an expert though, and I gave up on Android and all its related proprietary lockdown garbage a long time ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are all of the Bananas and Oranges in FL from California?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because we’ve been lied to and the whole food supply chain is rigged for a variety of complex and intertwined political reasons that make no sense and never did but served political purposes at various times. It’s all fucked up, and that’s on purpose, and that’s the way they like it and as a reward for looking the other way, we get all the fresh fruits and vegetables we want at any time of year and if we have to tariff or bomb a few countries to make sure that happens then by god you’d better believe we will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for Playtesters - We're Building a Fast-Paced Pixel Strategy RPG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good luck! Seems pretty solid otherwise and I hope you guys get the attention you deserve!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for Playtesters - We're Building a Fast-Paced Pixel Strategy RPG⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks interesting, wishlisted, but some feedback (although I’m not sure the Youtube compression algorithm is doing you any favours) is that the pixel art looks a bit badly scaled and muddied at times, it looks somewhat better in the static screenshots, you may want to look at what scaling filter you’re using though because when I hear “pixel art” in a game I’m expecting some pretty crispy sprites.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So they’ve been working together and planning all this shit for at least 20 years, you think? *idly sharpens guillotine*

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨European Commission rejects new laws for Stop Destroying Videogames⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I very much doubt this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and causes us to rebel against the system and tear down these structures of oppression that benefit business and capital at the expense of people and humanity. But it could be, and that excites me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did AI 2027 predict US government restricting access to a very advanced ai?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are really only two options here. Either this is:

  • Late-stage capitalism grift, or
  • Genuine approach to technological singularity

  If I was interested in betting on it, and since we live in late-stage capitalism we pretty much have to be interested in betting to survive, then I would place all my bets on late-stage capitalism grift.

  If it’s the former, then it’s just a thousand monkeys on typewriters hiding inside a gorilla suit and reading the best one and who really fucking cares what “future” these assholes are trying to sell to us. Don’t buy it.

  If it’s the latter, then all bets are off, nobody can predict what happens after singularity is reached, it’s literally unknowable, and if this is indeed the pull of technological singularity that we are feeling, then I think we are either too close and have too much momentum and too little thrust to escape now, or we are already past the event horizon anyway. Humanity as we know it is over.

  I’m 99.9995% sure it’s capitalism grift though. Just watch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I think it will grow organically, and often in bursts when Reddit does something particularly publicly stupid or frustrating. We’ve seen this before, we’ll see it again. I don’t know if we’ll ever see a mass exodus. I don’t know if this will ever “replace” Reddit per se. Obviously it has for me, but on a whole, I think it will continue to be a niche community, and I’m fine with that. There are good people here, my kind of people, and I like it for what it is, not for what it could become. I really don’t need the tiktok-memelord-masses and the teenagers and the onlyfans trolls in my life. I think they’ll find their own places to congregate and feed off each other, and I don’t think it will ever be here, no matter how shitty reddit and tiktok and whatever other dumb apps they use become.

  I don’t want the Fediverse to be massively exclusive but it doesn’t need to be massively inclusive either. Its nature means it can be inclusive, and I welcome any community who really feels like they belong here. But I’m realistic about who is actually going to feel included here, and I don’t think we need to go out of our way to “attract” more users, we just need to do enough that the people who want this sort of thing, can find it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does the word data mean per se ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You have to start by understanding that for mobile phone companies, they are using an extremely specific and industry-focused definition of “data” that relates ONLY to the way mobile phone networks are implemented and billed.

  If you are trying to understand it purely from any sort of more general, widespread definition of “data” which is what most people seem to be describing below, there are way too many steps and details between that and what the mobile phone company calls “data” for you to wrap your head around in a single question.

  So I’m going to tell you what data means to a mobile phone company:

  It means ANY internet traffic you use (upload or download) on your phone (or if you are sharing your phone as a hotspot, any used by the hotspot) AS LONG AS none of the following are true:

  • That internet data is not for the purposes of sending and receiving phone calls to your carrier-assigned phone number across the carrier’s own telephony network (ie, it is a “regular” phone call, you have no control over how the carrier routes its voice calls but even if they do route it across the internet, typically you will not be charged data for this)
  • It is not a SMS text message, and
  • You are not on WiFi at the time (the WiFi goes through somebody else’s physical internet connection where the WiFi is connected to, not your phone’s).

  There are exceptions and edge cases, but as a general rule, that’s what a mobile phone company will consider “data”. Anything you upload or download or stream on the internet almost always qualifies, unless you’re on a WiFi connection like at home or work, assuming you have that WiFi connection enabled. Youtube is data. Netflix is data. Emails are data. Phone calls can be data, if you’re using an “app” like WhatsApp or FaceTime or VOIP or any sort of video-calling feature.

  It is measured in millions (mega) or billions (giga) of bytes. Text and static images, like wikipedia and many other webpages are, use negligible and almost irrelevant amounts of data. Apps, app and OS updates, streaming audio and especially downloading or even just playing games and video content (movies, TV shows, video calls) use very significant amounts of data and can quickly use up the quota in hours depending on the quality settings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On an emergency power supply with AC and DC electrical plugs, which do I use to charge or power appliances?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Changing power types is inefficient.

  Batteries (which is what your emergency power supply uses) and solar panels are DC. They will be most efficient powering other DC devices directly.

  Rotating generators (powered by engines, turbines, wind, anything that creates movement through motion pretty much) are AC. They will be most efficient at powering AC devices directly.

  As soon as you’re changing DC into AC, or AC into DC, you’re losing power (usually a quite significant amount) in the conversion process. DC->AC requires an inverter. DC->AC requires a rectifier. Both are inefficient.

  The direct answer to your question is that your DC power bank will be most efficient powering DC devices, and less efficient powering AC devices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any such thing as "edutainment" shows for adults?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically almost everything is educational in some way, if you’re willing to engage with it in the right way. Like you said, period dramas and historical dramas are often a great way of learning about (some aspects of) history. The problem is you need to be able to sort out the fictional elements from the non-fictional elements and without at least a little bit of background that becomes challenging. Some methods that might be useful is cross-referencing by watching multiple shows about the same topic from different sources. If both shows include the same element, there’s a good chance it’s based on some real historical evidence. But you also have to understand that evidence is not proof, and there’s a lot of disagreement in science and understanding, and that’s good and natural. Not everything is going to match up exactly. You have to do your own research and actually study real sources and do your own experiments. This is why edutainment starts to become of limited value.

  The problem with growing up is that you’re getting to a higher level of education and understanding, and that comes with caveats. No longer can you just rely on simplistic expositions of “this is absolutely how it works” and you start to get into a lot of “seems” and “maybes”. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know with absolute confidence and as we have learned from the historical documentary Star Wars, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

  Most things at the adult level are not explicitly going to teach you things (because they effectively can’t) as much as they are going to motivate you to research further, experiment yourself, or become interested in things you might not otherwise find interesting.

  With that said, there is tons of educational and entertaining content out there. Sometimes stuff that seems stupid is actually very educational. Sometimes stuff that seems boring and educational can be entertaining as hell. If you want a bunch of Youtube channels to help point your recommendation algorithm in the right direction, try some of these channels (in no particular order or topic consistency):

  • Hydraulic Press Channel
  • Technology Connections / Technology Connextras
  • Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
  • styropyro
  • NileRed / NileBlue
  • Xyla Foxlin
  • Chris Spargo
  • Wilson Forest Lands
  • James Condon
  • FarmCraft101
  • Tom Scott

  Honorable mention for bugfishhhh’s insane and comedic hour-long video on the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which came out of nowhere but I’m here for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do people really "need" friends?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A romantic partner is ideally also a friend. They can often handle both, but they’re just one friend and that’s putting a lot of weight on their shoulders. And things in life change. What happens if your romantic partner gets seriously ill and you can’t confide in them anymore? What if the romantic partner is the person you’re having issues with and you need an outside point of view? Not everything is so minimalist in real life. Good luck trying to keep it minimalist like you’re proposing, but life often has other ideas.