merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on 3's grip looks the most comfy 3 days ago:
These days I use a pen maybe once a month. I’ve probably used some of these, I vaguely recognize 1 and 7. I use pens so rarely that I don’t really have a preference. I guess if one of them is best for avoiding dried-up ink, that’s the one?
It can’t just be me, right? I don’t use pencils either. I use keyboards, either virtual or physical. Other people must also do virtually all their writing electronically.
To me this is like choosing your favourite buggy whip.
- Comment on frenly warnin 1 week ago:
I get what you’re saying, but it’s still just really clunky writing.
Like, you want to include children for the “think of the children!” aspect, then just add “and our children” to the existing clause. There’s no need for a whole secondary clause about the future of the children when that’s already covered by the clause about the existence of our people.
It’s not that I expect Nazi writing to be good. It’s just that someone has to have said it better than this, even just accidentally, and yet this version is the one that Nazis have decided to immortalize.
If this version was the winner, what were the early drafts like?
- Comment on frenly warnin 1 week ago:
It’s funny because it’s hardly an inspiring or memorable 14 word sentence. It’s just awkward and clunky.
Like, why “secure”? Why not “safeguard” or “defend”? IMO those are stronger, more emotionally resonant words.
And why “existence”? Why not something stronger like “survival” or something more than survival like “prosperity”?
And just “a future” for white children? Not “a glorious future” or “a triumphant future”?
And, why “white children”? Not the white race?
Also, how is “a future for white children” distinct from “the existence of our people”? Are white children distinct from “our people”?
I could get it if it were framed as: we must defend our survival now so that our children can prosper. In that case you’re saying that the present might be tough but the future will be bright. But they’re not painting the future as bright, just “a future”, which is really the same as an “existence” so it’s basically saying “Our people must survive and so must our children, who are also our people, but smaller.”
Like, they memorized the first draft of some dumb saying and revere it as “the 14 words”, but it’s just badly written, nevermind all the racism.
- Comment on Physicists vs Normal People 1 week ago:
gasoline, not gas.
- Comment on Physicists vs Normal People 1 week ago:
I’m aware that British people think it’s called petrol, but you’re mistaken if you think that it’s only the US that calls it Gasoline. That’s the term used for most of the English-speaking Americas, including Canada and many former British colonies like Bermuda and the Bahamas. In fact, if you include Latin America’s “gasolina” it’s almost the entire Americas. And if you include variants on that name you’ll also have to include Japan and Korea. In fact, “gasoline” has even invaded the British isles. Variations of “gasoline” are sometimes used in Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish.
But, anyhow, my point was more that “gas isn’t even a gas” is as dumb as “petrol isn’t even petroleum”. “Gas” is just a short form for “gasoline”, nobody’s suggesting it’s in a gaseous state, just like nobody is suggesting that petrol is literally just a short form of petroleum, despite the obvious similarity of the words. This is English, the language where “read” and “read” are two different words pronounced differently. It’s no major issue to have “gas” be a short form of gasoline as well as being a state of matter, though it does sound funny if you say something like “gas is a liquid”.
- Comment on Physicists vs Normal People 1 week ago:
In common usage, “accelerate” means “go faster”.
In physics “accelerate” means “change of velocity over time”. It doesn’t just mean that the velocity increases, just that it changes.
In common usage “velocity” is the same thing as “speed”.
In physics “velocity” is “speed in a specific direction”. So, “80 km/h” isn’t a complete velocity statement. “80 km/h going west” is.
So, a car going at a speed of 80 km/h has a velocity of 80 km/h in the forward direction. Pressing the accelerator causes an acceleration in the forward direction, increasing the speed/velocity. Pressing the brake causes an acceleration in the backward direction, decreasing the speed/velocity. Turning the wheel causes an acceleration in the left/right direction. In this case, the speed might not change, but the velocity changes because the direction of travel changes.
If you imagine blowing on an air hockey puck it’s a bit easier to understand. There’s a fundamental rule in Physics that F = m × a, force is equal to mass times acceleration. Or, force divided by mass equals acceleration. If you blow on an air hockey puck, you exert a force on it, causing it to accelerate. If the air hockey puck is moving away from you, blowing on it will cause a forward acceleration increasing its velocity. If you blow on it as it’s coming towards you, you cause an acceleration backwards, decreasing its velocity. If you blow on it as it’s passing by you, you accelerate it sideways. In every case the same F=m × a equation applies, but sometimes the speed gets bigger, sometimes it gets smaller. The trickier one to calculate is when the force causes the direction of travel to change. Then instead of just needing an “x” variable you need “x” and “y”, or if you’re talking about velocity, vx and vy.
So, in a car, the accelerator increases the engine output which causes a force on the tires that results in a forward acceleration. The brake pedal causes the brakes to exert a force on the tires which results in a backwards acceleration. The steering wheel causes the tires to exert a force on the car accelerating it left or right.
- Comment on Physicists vs Normal People 1 week ago:
Breaking doesn’t cause acceleration, it just causes damage.
- Comment on Physicists vs Normal People 1 week ago:
Gasoline not petroleum.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 2 weeks ago:
OP said “overseas”. Generally Canada and Mexico aren’t considered “overseas” from the US, since you can drive there. Probably most people would consider South America to be “overseas” from the US, but I think it’s more commonly used for routes that involve crossing an ocean: Europe, Asia, Africa, etc.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 2 weeks ago:
Birthright citizenship is an absolutely stupid idea.
It’s no more stupid than citizenship by descent. Why should someone get citizenship just because of the citizenship of their parents? Shouldn’t they have to live in the country? Shouldn’t they speak the language? Shouldn’t they go through the country’s school system?
Europe’s combination of freedom of movement and only Jus Sanguinis has resulted in a situation where there are lots of people with citizenship to a place they’ve never lived, and no citizenship to the place they’ve lived their entire lives.
Really though, how citizenship should be awarded depends on if it’s an obligation or an opportunity. If a country is at war and drafting all citizens of a certain age, citizenship is an obligation the state puts on its citizens. If a country is at peace and provides a social safety net to all citizens, citizenship is an opportunity for its citizens. If the world were fair, people would be able to choose whether or not they wanted citizenship when they reached adulthood. It shouldn’t be something that happened automatically to children based either on who their parents were or on where their parents were born.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 2 weeks ago:
They just elected Claudia Sheinbaum, who is seen as being extremely close to the outgoing president AMLO. Some people were suggesting that she was so close to him that it was really his way of getting another term as president, similar to how Putin stepped down as president of Russia to become PM while Dmitry Medvedev became president in name only.
How true is that? It’s hard to say. My guess is that a lot of it is sexism, thinking that a woman can’t think for herself and a woman president will turn to someone else for the important decisions.
But, it’s true that under AMLO, there was a lot of democratic backsliding in Mexico. OTOH, Mexico has been dominated by PAN and PRI for decades. In fact, PRI won 14 elections in a row between 1928 and 1994. It wasn’t until Vincente Fox in 2000 that PAN was even a factor. So, there’s a lot of the power structures in Mexico geared towards supporting PRI and PAN.
They were probably undermining a lot of the things AMLO wanted to accomplish. If he had followed all the rules and norms he might not have been able to accomplish anything because the establishment would have blocked everything he tried to do. That doesn’t excuse his rule and law breaking, but it does contextualize it.We’ll see what happens with Sheinbaum. I, for one, am fucking thrilled that Mexico’s president has a PhD in energy engineering. The fact she’s a woman is also historical, but to me the doctorate is more important.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 2 weeks ago:
It’s pretty telling about how much Americans know about other countries that the assumption is that Jus Soli is the norm.
- Comment on The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025 2 weeks ago:
Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.
My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.
AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.
It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.
External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.
If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.
- Comment on The Simple Act of Buying a Graphics Card Is the Defining Misery of PC Gaming in 2025 2 weeks ago:
The Crypto to AI transition was brutal. Just as demand for GPUs was coming down because people were starting to use ASICs to mine Bitcoin, along comes AI to drive up non-gaming demand again.
The only good news is that eventually when the AI bubble pops there will be massive R&D and manufacturing geared towards producing GPUs. Unless something else comes along… But really, I can’t see that happening because the AI bubble is so immense and is such an enormous part of the entire world’s economy.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 2 weeks ago:
And there are lawyers who have been raked over the coals by judges when the lawyers have submitted AI-generated documents where the LLM “hallucinated” cases that didn’t exist which were used as precedents.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 3 weeks ago:
Because Trump has a toddler’s level of understanding of how international trade works, along with a toddler’s tendency to throw tantrums when challenged.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 3 weeks ago:
I mean… it might make the eggs cost less relative to other things.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 3 weeks ago:
You might come down with a severe case of Eric.
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 weeks ago:
I think there is, but it doesn’t apply universally. I think it was one of those things designed to catch the ultra-rich who were renouncing their citizenship to get lower taxes elsewhere, but it ends up catching a lot of people who are middle class.
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 weeks ago:
If you go somewhere where the main language isn’t English, you should make an effort to learn the local language. Yes, there are places like the Netherlands where virtually everybody speaks English well, but not putting in the effort means you’ll always be an outsider.
Things are smaller outside the US: vehicles, apartments, kitchens, refrigerators, etc. It can take a while to get used to not having the same space you’re used to. Also, some devices like clothes driers are rare.
Europeans take recycling seriously. In some places you have to pay to throw away garbage, while recycling is free. But, recycling is sometimes a real effort, like there’s not a “glass and plastics” box, you have to take the clear glass to one place, the brown glass to another, etc.
Tipping mostly doesn’t exist. That means that if you go to a restaurant you don’t normally have one assigned waiter. Whoever is free will help you, which tends to speed things up a lot. OTOH, since they’re not working for tips, the waitstaff don’t feel the need to fake a smile, pretend to be your friend, etc. Some Americans think that comes off as unfriendly.
Electricity is more expensive (part of the reason for the smaller appliances) so sometimes will completely unplug things that an American would just turn off (like a TV).
Businesses don’t have the same convenient hours as in the US. In some places, like Switzerland, they almost completely shut down on Sunday. 24 hour places are much more rare.
The European take on freedom of speech is different. You are simply not allowed to say certain things. Some things, like libel laws, are much more friendly to the person who is the target, rather than the “free speaker”.
Oh, and smoking is still much more common in Europe, and it can be pretty disgusting. In the US it has been largely eliminated from public spaces, and smokers are confined to small smoking areas. Even in private homes people will often smoke outdoors either to be considerate or because their landlord doesn’t allow smoking indoors. In Europe, smoking is still common indoors in many places, and… ugh.
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 weeks ago:
The US is one of only 2 (?) countries in the world that does citizenship-based taxation.
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 weeks ago:
Even if you plan to renounce your citizenship, that’s a long (and often expensive) process and you have to keep filing and paying taxes until it’s done.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 3 weeks ago:
Even that is often treated as something non-negotiable for the HR people reviewing applicants, when the group that needs the dev would probably say “ok, this guy doesn’t have 8 years experience, but clearly knows his shit” or “so what if she doesn’t have any Spring Boot experience, look at all the rest of this, she’ll pick it up in no time”.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 3 weeks ago:
LLM’s assisting people in writing soul-sucking corporate drivel is a good thing
I don’t think so, not if the alternative is simply getting rid of that soul-sucking corporate drivel.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 3 weeks ago:
All this really does is show areas where the writing requirements are already bullshit and should be fixed.
Like, consumer financial complaints. People feel they have to use LLMs because when they write in using plain language they feel they’re ignored, and they’re probably right. It suggests that these financial companies are under regulated and overly powerful. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be able to ignore complaints when they’re not written in lawyerly language.
Press releases: we already know they’re bullshit. No surprise that now they’re using LLMs to generate them. These shouldn’t exist at all. If you have something to say, don’t say it in a stilted press-release way. Don’t invent quotes from the CEO. If something is genuinely good and exciting news, make a blog post about it by someone who actually understands it and can communicate their excitement.
Job postings. Another bullshit piece of writing. An honest job posting would probably be something like: “Our sysadmin needs help because he’s overworked, he says some of the key skills he’d need in a helper are X, Y and Z. But, even if you don’t have those skills, you might be useful in other ways. It’s a stressful job, and it doesn’t pay that well, but it’s steady work. Please don’t apply if you’re fresh out of school and don’t have any hands-on experience.” Instead, job postings have evolved into some weird cargo-culted style of writing involving stupid phrases like “the ideal candidate will…” and lies about something being a “fast paced environment” rather than simply “disorganized and stressful”. You already basically need a “secret decoder ring” to understand a job posting, so yeah, why not just feed a realistic job posting to an LLM and make it come up with some bullshit.
- Comment on a strong beak, of course 3 weeks ago:
Apparently 10% owned by Wal*Mart and 67% owned by TDR Capital.
- Comment on a strong beak, of course 3 weeks ago:
Hmm, I wonder how they named it? Maybe with a keyboard they weren’t sure was working?
- Comment on a strong beak, of course 3 weeks ago:
The only “asda” I know are the letters I type when I’m trying to make sure my keyboard works. (Sometimes “f” sneaks in there too.)
- Comment on a strong beak, of course 3 weeks ago:
I’ve always wondered how much alien life is out there that we’ve actually seen (or seen signs of) but not recognized because we’re blind to life that doesn’t seem earth-like.
- Comment on Murica 4 weeks ago:
Most anything the average person will be doing with their vehicle on a regular basis
That’s kind-of the point right? In the past it used to be common for people to do a lot more maintenance on their cars. These days because they’re so complex and involve locked down electronics, the average person will only do something like change their oil. Anything else requires taking it to the shop.
