I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.

A Post-It and a pencil, usually.

Not because “app bad” or “return to monke” or anything like that. Mostly because if I stow the note in a dedicated app, that somehow just makes me less inclined to write it down and read it later.

A scrap of papersticking out like a sore thumb on my desk or burning a hole in my pocket? I’m going to be cognizant of that all day long. But an obscure text file chilling in a disused part of my phone, or a txt file lost in the shuffle of random shit on my PC? Outta sight outta mind.

I also find all digital input schemes to be frustratingly less flexible than physical paper. Provided I have a writing utensil on hand that is functional (not always a given, granted) it is trivial to put anything I want on a note. Write anything I want. Draw diagrams. Underline or strike text. Write some things larger or heavier than others. All of these things are possible in note taking apps, but they come with the idiosyncracies of needing to know the selection techniques and menu options to activate them. In this way they’re all death by a thousand tiny annoying cuts for me.

I even had a smart phone with a built-in stylus for a good long while. It definitely extended the things you could do with ease, but it was a far cry from a pencil.

The only thing a note taking app can do in my mind that paper can’t is yell at you with a loud noise at a pre-programmed time. If I need one of those, I just set an alarm in my clock app.

I live in the US and I consider it unusual to fly more than once every two years.

I always hear this statistic on how proper zipper merging increases traffic flow rate over no strategy at all, and I simply do not understand how it helps.

They keep pointing to how much of the upstream second lane is “wasted”. But like, from a strict perspective of flow rate, is it really?

The bottleneck restricting flow is the reduced speed single lane. Put a vehicle counter on it. Assuming no one wastes time getting through whatever funnel point there is, this flow is consistent. The same number of cars passing at the same speed are getting through regardless of whether the zipper point was a few cars back or ten kilometers back. Unless I can hear an explanation on how zipper merging changes this I remain unconvinced.

Zipper merging still has unquestionable advantages that are obvious to glean, of course.

Putting the merge point as close to the blockage as possible minimizes the time spent in the shared lane. Flow is the same, but the overall time spent in the jam is averaged over all drivers.

That “wasted lane” does not, as far as I can tell, improve flow. But it does improve storage. If cars are piling up at the choke point, utilizing the full extra lane keeps the pilup from backing up as far down the road, reducing potential domino effects through the road system.

Zipper merging is fairer to all vehicles by promoting a FIFO processing order. No one in the closed lane gets screwed, everyone gets through in roughly the order they showed up.

It has lots of advantages, and is clearly the winner, but I fail to see how increased flow is one of them.

Of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about perfect behavior of drivers, while this statistic is supposedly real-world empirical data. That suggests there are significant inefficiencies in real-world human driving, and that the zipper merge addresses them somehow. But I can’t fathom what those are or why zipper merging is relevant to them.

Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.

I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account’s name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.

I’ve also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I’ve done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.

MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.

The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.

When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…

Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.

The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).

I have a fair amount of crap, but not a lot of it is of much interest to most people.

Unless someone out there wants me to show up with a laundry basket full of Fumos and subject them to an unsolicited three hour lecture on Touhou lore…

we are throwing accuracy out the window by using milli anyway so who the hell cares

It’s a factor of 8 we’re talking about. That’s not far off from a factor of 10. If a factor of 10 difference is important enough to get its own prefix in SI, I think a factor of 8 difference is plenty enough to care about having clarified notation. This isn’t like the mega/mebi thing where the drift is only on the order of 3%.

My thoughts exactly when reading this.

I believe people when they claim to develop free software. Often because it’s software the dev wants for themselves anyway and they’ve merely elected to share it rather than sell it. The only major cost is time to develop, which is “paid” for by the creation of the product itself.

You (OP) are proposing a service. Services have ongoing fees to run and maintain, and the value they create goes to your users, not you. These are by definition cost centers. You will need a stable source of funding to run this. That does not in any way mix with “free”. Not unless you’re some gajillionaire who pivoted to philanthropy after a life of robber baroning, or you’re relying on a fickle stream of donations and grants.

You indicate in other comments you will not open the source of your backend because you don’t want it scooped from you and stealing your future revenue. That’s fine, but what revenue? I thought this was free? What’s your business model?

It sounds like what you want to do here is have a free tier anyone can use, supported by a paid tier that offers extended features. That’s fine, I guess. But if you want to “compete with DuckDuckGo”, you are going to need to generate enough revenue to support the volume of freeloaders that DDG does. If your paid tier base doesn’t cover the bill, you will need to start finding new and exciting ways to passively monetize those non-revenue-generating users. That usually means one or more of taking features away and putting them behind the paywall to drive more subscriptions, increasingly invasive ads on the platform, or data-harvesting dark patterns.

Essentially what I’m saying here is, as-proposed, the eventual failure and/or enshittification of your service seems inevitable. Which makes it no better than DDG long term.

It is, at any rate, a very intriguing project.

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

I’ve never seen transfer rates given in MBps in the wild. It’s always Mbps.

Serial network connections give no care to byte alignment, they operate either bit by bit or symbol by symbol (which are rarely byte aligned).

They mutually imply one another.

If something was private, but not secure, well, that implies there are ways to breach the privacy, which isn’t very private at all.

If it’s secure, but not private, that implies it’s readable by someone other than the consenting conversational parties, which makes it insecure.

That sounds like it’d be fantastic for reading but, depending on how it’s implemented, hell for posting.

Lemmy already aggregates posts from communities you follow into one feed. If it allowed the creation of an arbitrary number of sub-feeds configurable by the user, that would be incredible. But every user would have to build these on their own from scratch. Great for user choice, but no communities will come bundled by default, so small communities won’t get a discovery boost.

If instead there was some kind of first-class notion of a “supercommunity” offered on the server side, where it acted as a transparent view of other communities, that’d be a great visibility boost for small communities. But if you tried to post to it, which underlying community would it post to? You’d have to either designate a default community to receive posts (which would be unfair to every other community there), randomize where it goes to (which would be a quagmire, what if your post is allowed in half of the communities present but rule-breaking in the others?), burden the user with choosing (which would be hell if there are a lot), or simply make it read-only. I don’t really like any of these. It also raises hairy questions about who will control which communities are and are not part of the group, how the groupings react to defeds, etc.

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Hydrus?

Doing alright, I think.

Had a good weekend. Went to a rodeo and played a lot of Factorio SE.

Discovered yesterday that my clothes dryer vent is plugged. Probably has been for some time, maybe years? Put in a maintenance request to have it fixed. Hopefully in the next couple days I’ll finally be able to dry clothes in a single cycle instead of two. Pretty stoked about that.

Work is a tad stressful. Boss kinda shot from the hip with a new overhaul of our logistical processes and suddenly needs our in-house software restructured with a plethora of new features it was never designed to handle. I fear I won’t meet any of the deadlines at the pace I’m going. Boss seems to understand this at least and isn’t the type to hold me over hellfire about it.

Looking forward to next weekend. Going to an annual Paddy’s Day pub crawl and visiting my parents.

Generally my policy is that if it’s news I need to hear, it will find its way to me one way or another. I need not go seeking it out. I will look up something I’ve heard if I want more info, but I don’t read news for its own sake.

The great bulk of news that reaches me being second, third, fourth-hand and beyond means I’m not well-informed about anything. But at least I’m not wasting brain cells on whatever dumb shit <celebrity> did, or what shit <politician> said, or what breakthrough <scientist> made that does not remotely lead to the conclusion the article implies, or some journalist’s speculative opinion piece masquerading as news.

If I could just get a dry listing of everything that happened the previous day, only including events of actual consequence like “law passed” or “person died” or “business discontinues product/service”, and leaving behind any event that can be effectively retold as “<person> scrawled message on public toilet stall” (like many celebrity and political articles) or anticipation pieces that try to predict future events, I’d be satisfied.

Tab hoarding is just poor man’s bookmarks.

Oh wait, you’re on Gelbooru. Nevermind, I get it.

No one said it was shameful?

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

these sliders are very thin, but not thin enough. neither of my laptops close correctly with one equipped. :(

Ah well. Masking tape suffices.