All dates should be formatted according to ISO 8601 standard (YYYY-MM-DD).
Months should be adjusted so September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month respectively (so the literally meaning of the names accords with their actual meaning).
Not cleaning your kitchen knife after sharpening is trashy and contaminates your food with metal shavings.
If a company has a bad interface on their electronic item I’ll not buy it. To me it’s a big hill but I guess it’s how you want to look at it. I’ll stop buying anything from that company if they keep doing it
I would agree with you, but I still want to own a microwave. There are none with reasonable UI behavior as far as I can tell.
One dial is power level, the other is time.
Looks good actually.
But how does it handle the door opening early? Does it still leave unused time sitting on the time dial?
Yeah, it doesn’t clear the dials, and if you want to manually reduce the time you do need to adjust the time dial, but you get a delightful bell sound when you do so. The door does stop the magnetron when open though.
Neat! I’ve only ever seen commercial-grade ones like that.
If i need wifi, bluetooth, or an app to use a product that shouldn’t need it (eg a toaster, toothbrush) i will not buy it. i also won’t buy a wireless device (say a bluetooth speaker) if it requires an app. I would be willing to pay $500 more to have a tv with no smart features than a ‘smart’ tv. corporations: keep your shitty malware. my phone is a temple.
My new corollary: If your online e-commerce site asks customers to add a tip, even if $0 / no tip is an option, I’m not buying shit from you.
“catsup” is the better spelling; “ketchup” looks about as proper as “nite lite”
Anything with cats is inherently superior
Search engines should not use locational data including IP address to provide “more relevant” results. Checking for restaurants or weather forecast? You should have to manually add the relevant search terms. Want results in a specific language? You should have to manually apply this filter.
Convenience is not worth the potential harm of locationally biased search results.
For example, where I live is like White Nationalist Central Station. My search results are thus far more likely to net me results with a pro-US/nationalist skew, thus potentially entrenching or normalizing harmful beliefs.
Whenever I’ve tried bringing this up with Techlords, I get a feeble, “B-but then you couldn’t say ‘restaurants near me’ UnU” and like … good? It’s not like it’s hard to type city and state in the search field.
I’ve never found a search engine that even has this as an option. Even Sear XNG instances net results that are clearly aligned with the location of the instances server.
A Kagi dev even lied to me when I was looking into that as an alternative, saying they don’t use location, when it’s pretty easy to determine that they do.
I also don’t want a “good” algorithm. I also don’t want to see big corporate sites prioritized either. If some backwoods nobody has a site that’s more relevant, show it to me. I feel like pre-Google search engines were better, but that’s another vent for another day.
Now where did I put my false teeth and walker???
ip adress only gives the nearest big city. information like this is pretty useful to show you info based on your state/province.
yes I don’t think a search engine should promote more extremist views but it’s pretty nice if when I search ‘left party’ I get a left party from my country, and not the American democratic party.
The first time i searched for a business online the results came from a city on the other side of the planet. I’m ok with getting search results in my area.
Not a small hill and I could not agree more. This is relevant to Noam Chomsky “manufacturing consent”.
With duckduckgo you can disable the country filter thingo to get international results, and you can also change it to another country
Oh believe me, I know. DDG was the first one I tried, and I tested it with every configuration possible. Like many other search engines such as startpage and kagi, you sure can do this in the settings, but it will do absolutely nothing to stop it from using your IP address to net locationally biased results specific to your current location. You may assume it would function like this, but it doesn’t.
I even tried their html and lite versions, but although it was less cluttered and much more pleasant to use, it still provided results that were very clearly based on my IP address.
I’m not even sure what those settings do because they appear to have no function. Maybe they change language and currency on some sites for convenience, but again, that’s not what I’m talking about in my comment! I’m saying a search engine should not use any locational data whatsoever to adjust results. And if you reply “well, good luck finding one because it doesn’t exist,” then congratulations, you understand my comment! They don’t exist because we’ve all sacrificed our societal wellbeing for the sake of the smallest convenience.
Even if changing it to another country/region worked (it doesn’t), we’d still have the problem of netting biased results based on what country I switch it to. That would be akin to searching while using my VPN, which once again, does not solve the problem of search engines using IP address to provide locationally biased results.
have you actually properly tested that the results in your location are more extremist? like compared with using a vpn on ddg?
You know what’s hilarious about this basically non-functional setting? If I toggle the switch off, it provides results based on my IP address’s location, but if I toggle it to “UK” it will also provide some results for the UK city that my town is named after, without me ever providing the name of my town lol
DDG is a for-profit brand that’s a lot more nefarious than people think. They’ve even succumbed to AI.
Just tried setting no country, then ducked “wine”.
Results were definitely still from my country first.
When I set display language to US English, results came up from the US, instead.
When I set it to French, it shows French websites at the top.
So the language you set affects what websites you are shown in the results. That sucks.But you can actually just turn off ads in the settings. That’s pretty fucking neat!
Even the lite and html versions of DDG will provide locationally biased search results. There’s no way around this. Best you can do is use a VPN, but then you’ve still got the problem of reading locationally biased results, just for a different location. It sucks.
100% agree.
To add to this, when I’m looking up something online I want info provided by the internet in general, not just by my next door hillbilly.
There absolutely was a cornucopia in the fruit of the loom logo. That is the sole reason I know what a cornucopia is. It wasn’t on any table or in any thanksgiving decoration in my childhood, it isn’t a popular thing to exist in media, it was an obscure item that was a main part of an underwear logo.
Anyone that says differently is objectively wrong. I don’t know why the logo changed and why besides a patent entry even the company itself denies it. I don’t really care if this is an alternate earth or aliens or time travellers or an entirely natural quirk of existing in a quantum universe, but I know for an absolute fact the sole reason I know what a cornucopia is is because of my underwear, and not because my dick is coincidentally called the horn of plenty.
I honestly believe this one is a gorilla marketing gimmick. Like they purposely went back and removed references to it so any time someone brings up the Mandela Effect their name gets mentioned.
I remember this as well, just like I remember Mandela dying in prison. Felt like I was Looney Tunes when I found out as an adult he was still alive.
Nobody thought Mandela died in prison. He was one of the most high-profile people in the world in the 1990s, constantly in the papers after his release from prison. How could you believe he died in prison?
I didn’t forget that he was released, but enough people thought he died in prison, that we named the term after him.
But then how could he have been released to huge fanfare and shaken up politics?
Do these people believe Narendra Modi died in 2009? It just doesn’t fit major world events.
Most people aren’t really familiar with the history of the world, especially the period of time that would correspond to ≈ 30-50 years before they graduated secondary school. I assume this is because there seems to be a pattern where you just don’t actually catch up to current events in many history classes.
Also expecting the average person in the US to be familiar enough with world events to even know who Nelson Mandala or Narendra Modi are, is a good way to have a bad time. I don’t like it either, but as Carlin said, “think of the average person, now remember that 50% of people are stupider than that.”
Maybe the real Mandela effect is we were all tricked into thinking there are people out there believing Nelson Mandela died before leading the ANC, being president, winning the Nobel, and ending apartheid.
Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.
There absolutely wasn’t. Snopes did a good piece on this in 2024.
Yeah, snopes isn’t a trustworthy source, and more importantly, there absolutely was. I know that for an absolute certainty, and gaslighting isnt going to work.
Your passionate certainty and value of your own judgment/recollection have convinced me! 😅
Denying that the logo used to have a cornucopia is a thing? Sheesh, TIL.
Unfortunately it is the truth, weird as it feels
100%
It is NOT “habañero.” If you pronounce a “y” in the word, you’re commiting what’s called a “hyper-foreignism” where you over apply something you learned a foreign culture does.
It’s just an N sound. Habanero.
It’s not even my culture/language but damn this gets under my collar.
I hear this as often as I hear “jalapeno” (missing the eñe) 😑
Jallapeeno
I think part of the problem is that it’s hit or miss whether or not it’s spelled/spoken with ñ or n, in advertising and labels. Here in the US anyway.
What’s funny is that the ñ spelling and pronunciation has bled over into native spanish speakers. My friend’s husband is from Nicaragua, and his entire family pronounces it ñ. One of my neighbors though, from Guadalajara originally, it’s n only.
I’d also say that habanero is ñ friendly. It looks like it should be pronounced habañero, unlike a fairly similar word, Enero. It’s easier to say habañero than eñero as well. The a leading into the n does that for some reason I can’t figure out.
However! Pero and perro blows people’s minds. While I don’t hear it with native speakers, damn near everyone else I’ve run into pronounces them the same. I do, and I know better, because I can’t make my tongue work right.
That is how languages grow and change: by the native speakers collectively changing their minds. I’ll leave them to be the gate keepers. I feel strongly because I knew a family from a El Salvador that lived down the street from me growing up. They corrected me and I did not want to be wrong in front of them again. I wanted them to feel accepted. I still do.
hãbanero
Likely due to jalapeño, no? Chile pepper = ñ to non Spanish speakers
Strong take, and new to me
Everyone should use the Oxford comma.
Chocolate soda needs to make a comeback.
It never went away for me, I just make it myself!
I’ll have like 1/4 glass of milk and add chocolate syrup then as I mix that I add seltzer and if stirring correctly it won’t fizz up. I know people say adding the acidity of seltzer spoils the milk, but I’ve never noticed it when I make it.
Spoiling milk is all about the ratio of the fat. It’s why cream is used in alcoholic drinks. The higher fat content of the cream means it can take more without spoiling. Try yours with skim milk vs. whole and taste the difference.
What does that taste like anyways?
Delicious. Canfield chocolate fudge soda was bliss.
How about no
No one said you had to die on this hill. This is my hill.
how do you feel about Coca Cola Blāk?
Wait what
it was coca cola mixed with coffee. sweetened both with high fructose corn syrup, and two artificial sweeteners, simultaneously. I still remember the aftertaste… it’s not something you forget.
Having devices require a USB-C charger might be great for small devices, but it’s awful for laptops. That thing is so flimsy it’s only a matter of time until it starts having faulty contacts. I’ve had one for a year and now it connects/disconnects everytime I touch the cable. Gimme back my huge Dell barrel jacks 😭 😭 😭
Grab a thin needle or piece of wire, thin enough to easily insert into the USB-C port, and scratch all of the dirt and lint out of it. Always point the needle towards the outer surface so you don’t scratch the electrical contacts in the middle.
There is often a surprising amount of junk inside even if you can’t see it from the outside, and that can greatly affect the connection quality.
My phone recently had a similar issue where it would only charge if the cable was inserted in a specific way, and any movement would cause it to stop charging. The cable also wasn’t really held well even though it looked like it was fully inserted. I cleaned out the port even though I couldn’t see anything inside, and managed to pull out a bit of dust anyway. And now my phone no longer has charging issues and holds on to the cable much better.
USB-C unfortunately just seems to have a design that makes it very easy for dust to get stuck in it, while also having a relatively low tolerance for foreign material buildup before the connection quality gets affected, making this a quite common issue.
Thanks for the tip I’ll try that ! I’ve had the same problem on a tablet, but there it was definitely caused by the port being bend out of shape (it won’t be horizontal) so I had assumed it was the same problem on the laptop. But I’ll try cleaning it to see if it fixes it ! I assume a toothpick or something else or wood or plastic would be better than metal ?
A wooden toothpick is probably a bit too thick. You’d want something thin enough that it can be inserted without touching the electrical contacts. If you do have something plastic then that’s probably better, but if you do the cleaning when the device is off the USB port should be unpowered and there shouldn’t be a risk of causing a short, and modern USB ports are quite well protected again shorts anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause damage just by being conductive. You mainly want something that is long and thin enough to get all the way to the bottom of the port without having to apply any force. If the only things you have that are long and thin enough to reach the bottom of the port without having to be forced in are made of metal, then that’s still a safer option than jamming something too thick into the port that can deform the center contacts.
Thanks for the tip ! ❤️
Every barrel jack a different size and voltage.
After further reflection, the hill I’ll die on is that we should replace ALL types of USB by barrel jacks, not only USB-C. Cause circular connectors rule! Make a standard one, I don’t care, as long as I never have to plug a USB-A three times to find the right way.
I have also had issues with type C connection reliability, but every single time so far it has been an issue with the cable. I thought that the port on my phone of 4+ years was dying, the connection felt loose and it would charge unreliably, but changing out the cable has completely removed all issues.
The main problem I have with USB-C is that the “U” is a lie. Always has been to some extent, but seems like it’s particularly true with USB-C. This is closer to that meme that’s like “There are 12 competing standards. We created a new universal standard to replace them all.” Except instead of there now being 13 competing standards, USB-C is a fractured mess so instead it’s like there’s now 20 competing standards. This cord supports passthrough power, this one doesn’t, but even the one that does only supports 20W so you have to have a special one to deliver 65, and that USB-C power brick only gives 15W, so you have to buy a special one that does 80W, and this USB-C port on my phone doesn’t support the USB-C to Aux jack adapter I bought, so now I have to buy a different adapter. It goes on and on and on and frankly I’m old and tired.
The issue with that is the old cables had the same problem, they just were less noticeable because you didn’t expect them to do what the USB-C is capable of. I had some USB micro cables that would pass power only, and it drove me nuts if they ended up near my computer.
True but at least you can buy replacement cables if they break and you know the spec.
barrel jacks were great until you lost them and had to buy a new one for way too much money. but, I’d rather have a standardized barrel jack than usb c
yeah my problem is not with having a standard, but with choosing USB-C for it instead of something better.
I get that USB-C was probably the more pragmatic choice since it already existed and a lot of devices were already using it. But I’m still team “Let’s make a new good standard rather than use one that’s just okayish”
English verbs have historically had present form, past form, and past participle form, eg. go / went / gone. I’m sad to see the past participle form being phased out of American English. People I went to school with and who I’m sure were taught differently (not to mention innumerable podcasters and public radio personalities), now say things like: “By the time I got home I found he’d already went,” eliminating the past participle and instead using the past form. Had saw is not uncommon either. I am old enough I refuse to incorporate this development in the language. If I ever encounter had was/were in the wild I might blow a gasket. Now entering my fuddy-duddy years :(
I’ve also noticed an increase in using “had [done]” instead of [did] in places I wouldn’t expect. I’m sure a linguist could break that down more thoroughly.
Oh no…
Okay I believe you and all, but I genuinely don’t understand. My partner has even criticized this in my language but I don’t get it.
Sincerely someone who wants to understand and was unfortunately homeschooled by dumb fucks
Thanks for asking–I’ll try to keep it brief (so as not to bore), and my apologies if I am retreading stuff you already know, but I’ll have to do some lead-in to explain why I care about this at all.
Why past participles?–and why I love them:
Starting with a couple of example sentences that could help differentiate the “simple past” form versus the “present perfect” form that uses the past participle:
- I saw a shooting star last night.
- I have not seen a shooting star.
In the first example, the time mentioned is “last night”-- a time period that in the mind of the speaker is finished or closed.
In the second, there is no time frame mentioned, but we intuitively understand that it is making reference to a period of time that is unfinished or still open–in this case that period is “in my life.”
I really appreciate the nuance that a change in verb form can impart, and so elegantly done!
Participles in telling stories
When it comes to telling stories to each other we almost exclusively keep the main actions in the sequence of events in simple past forms, eg.:
- I woke up.
- I got a shower.
- I ate breakfast.
- I couldn’t find my car keys.
- I had to take the bus to work.
But what if I wanted to have a little twist in the story where I make reference to stuff that happened before my narrative? In English we’ve got this great trick up our sleeves. I could use the past perfect, formed by had + past participle, eg:
- I couldn’t find my car keys. Little did I know that my wife had accidentally dropped them into the laundry basket. So I had to take the bus…
Simple, clean, elegant, and provides a satisfying twist :) Otherwise I would have to tell it like:
- My wife accidentally dropped my keys into the laundry basket. I woke up. I got a shower…
Or like this:
- …I couldn’t find my car keys. Earlier my wife accidentally dropped my keys in the laundry basket, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had to take the bus to work.
I guess all are valid, but I certainly find option 1 the nicest. Option 2 has spoilers. Option 3 is what many other languages do.
Verbs and simplification in languages
If I recall from my dabbling in linguistics, there’s a tendency among most languages to become simpler in terms of their grammar over time. Most English verbs are now “regular,” and you can make the simple past and past participle just by adding -ed to the end of the verb, eg.:
- yell - yelled - yelled
- ask - asked - asked
- smile - smiled - smiled
But among our oldest and most common verbs we’ve got bunches of “strong/irregular” verbs, eg.:
- go - went - gone
- take - took - taken
- see - saw -seen
These are the verbs that people are changing in spoken American English at present. People are “regularizing” the past perfect forms by dropping the past participle and using had + simple past. I know it mainly comes down to linguistics drift and personal choice, but I appreciate that these irregular participles have purpose (by being a part of the perfect tenses, and the nuance they can create), and history. Moreover, I think having greater mastery of these forms in your speech and writing helps make reading texts written in English before the end of the 20th century so much easier.
Long story short: people can and will speak English however they want. No big deal. But in the case of excising the irregular past participles from English, I’ll hold on to what I was taught and grew to love about English grammar.
got a shower
That made me shudder. Are you a dog and being showered by someone else, or was it a gift granted to you for hard work that day? ;)
In my dialect it’s the equivalent of took or had a shower. :/
A steel ball is not a ball bearing. A bearing is something that bears load and allows for motion, usually rotation. There are sleeve bearings which are just one material or journal bearings which have pressurized oil to separate the spinning shaft. A ball bearing is an assembly with rolling elements (balls, rather than rollers). Those steel balls are just called balls. The whole assembly is called a ball bearing. I used to work in bearing manufacturing and they were just called balls.
Would it be better if I clarified by calling them “ball bearing balls”? Or would that lead to my unpleasant pummeling by steel balls?
Yeah that’s accurate. Or just “bearing balls”.
Yeah, I think this is the best option. It sounds a little weird at first, because we’re so used to hearing it the other way around, but it makes more sense if you think about it.
It does sound a little weird. I usually just say balls
Anyone who puts always-on blue LEDs in electronics deserve the oubliette. People who put such LEDs in electronics meant for the bedroom deserve an oubliette that’a slowly filling with water.
“Because fuck your sleep cycle that’s why”
Or just excessively bright LEDs. Just because LEDs are super efficient, doesn’t mean they should take them as bright as they can go.
That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.
But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.
My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.
Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(
The beeping! My damn air fryer has to let everyone in the neighborhood know that I’m making food at 3:00 am, I hate it so much
Gonna ignore the fire alarm someday because I’ll just assume someone is air frying something
You can muffle the beeper pretty effectively with some tape, the old air fryer we had terrified one of the dogs because of the incessant beeping. My coffee scale by default beeps whenever you touch it, thankfully that’s 100% mutable.
I also hate this.
Allow me to try and persuade you. The problem is bright blue LEDs. It’s still stupid that they make them so bright, but the problem isn’t the color. A hypothetical bright red, green, or amber LED would also be a problem.
Shorter wavelengths hit different though. That’s why we have blue light filtering glasses, Redshift, etc.
a non-diffused, bright, monocromatic red led would still be painful to look at in the dark, it’s just that blue LEDs tend to be brighter + our eyes are more sensitive to blueish green light at night + the damn companies don’t bother putting a diffuser in front of the diode.
Diffusion and overall brightness do make a difference as well.
This is fair. I have had to put tape over a red alarm clock because it was too bright before. Those manufacturers also get the oubliette
None. I rather change myself than wasting time on changing something that won’t last forever anyway.
Code indentation should never use tabs, only spaces.
I would die on the opposite hill. No spaces, only tabs.
What’s your reasoning for liking spaces?
My big reason would be “it hurts readability”. That is, when writing code, readibility for others who aren’t familiar with it (including future me) is my top-priority, and that means indentation and alignment are HIGHLY important, and if I spend the time to write code with specific indentation and alignment, to make it readable at a glance, I want to be certain that it’s always going to display exactly that way. Tabs specifically break that guarantee, because they’re subject to editor settings, which means shit like the below example can occur:
I write the following code with an editor that uses a tab size of 4.
myObject.DoSomething( someParameter: "A", someOtherParameter: "B", value: "C");If someone pulls this up in an editor that uses a tab size of 8, they get…
myObject.DoSomething( someParameter: "A", someOtherParameter: "B", value: "C");Not really a big deal, in this simple case, but it illustrates the point.
My second reason would be that it makes code more difficult to WRITE, I.E. it’s not that hard to insert spaces when you mean to insert tabs, considering that you’re not LITERALLY using only tabs just only tabs for indentation and alignment. And if you do accidentally have spaces mixed in, you’re not going to be able to tell. The guy on another machine with different editor settings will, though.
I’m aware there are fonts that can make spaces and tabs visible and distinct, but that sounds like a NIGHTMARE to write and read code with. I mentioned above, my top priority is easy readability, and introducing more visual noise to make tabs and spaces distinct can only hurt readability.
Because when I move left in tabs, the cursor isn’t clear which tab I’m on. It also tried to sit off the left edge of a terminal in some editors because it aligns with the right side of the character (the tab), instead of the left.
I do see how tabs are a better option : they allow the one editing the file to decide how wide the indentation is. That’s actually good User Interface design, by separating the data from the rendering layout.
I can see the argument both ways, but I like to use spaces so the visual and editing interfaces are more standard.
Richard Hendricks would like a word.
I don’t understand why this is such a big deal for anyone. With all the UI utilities available it would be incredibly easy to have a setting to interpret 5 consecutive spaces as a tab or a tab as 5 consecutive spaces and just let whoever prefers what to choose how they are going to interface with the code. Hell, you could even make it so 5 is the default and have custom consecutive values as an advanced option in the interpreter for edge cases. So many incredibly more challenging issues have been resolved in IDEs, I just don’t get it.
Reading a tab as however many spaces is trivial, and the point of tabs.
Reading however many spaces as a tab is a gross hack that has to be dialed-in for whatever standard the document chose.
Just use tabs in the first place. God damn. That’s what they’re for.
I’m on team tab 100% I guess I was saying if someone felt they had to use spaces then they shouldn’t handicap everyone else because of their choice and an interpreter could normalize their code.
5!?!? Are you trying to get yourself sectioned?
Water is wet
I had and endless argument with some someone about this a while ago here’s how it works (in my opinion) wetness is not a fundamental property of water instead wetness is having water on or inside something so a towel is wet when it has water in it. But a singular water particle by itself is not wet because it is not surrounded by water but most water is wet because they are all surrounded by other water particles.
A particle of water may be surrounded by water but when we talk about water we’re usually referring to a body of water like that in a glass or pot rather than one particle thereof.
Is the water in that glass wet? No. The glass is wet.
A room can be “airy” but the air in that room is not “airy”.
A car can be painted but paint is not painted.
… and so on and so forth.
Water is dry then?
I disagree if there is paint on the paint which there would be unless the paint is 1 particle thick then the paint has been painted. I don’t know what airy means so I can’t comment on that though.
H2O is not water
Is water a collection of H2O particles but not a H2O particle by itself?
Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.
