• 0 Posts
  • 549 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 20th, 2025

help-circle

  • Driving is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you at any second you’re in a car, than flying is at any second you’re in a plane.

    This is an oft-repeated factoid that comes straight from the airlines bending statistics to meet their desires. It’s true that on a per mile basis, planes are safer. But on a per trip basis, cars actually win on safety.

    And this makes some sense once you actually think about it. A car ride is typically going to be a frequent, short distance; An average of like 90% of all driving happens within 5 miles of the person’s home. Whereas air trips are infrequent and cover huge distances. So the accident-per-trip stat is watered down with cars having lots of trips, but the short distances tend to inflate the accident-per-mile number. In contrast, the accident-per-mile stat is watered down with planes covering a lot of miles per trip, but the infrequent nature of the trips means the accident-per-trip number is inflated.

    And airlines conveniently only ever quote the accident-per-mile number when comparing safety statistics, because they have a vested interest in making airplanes seem statistically safer. If anything, seeing this factoid repeated is just a reminder that even math can be intentionally biased to fit a certain agenda.


  • My guess is that the script ran repeatedly, even after a good connection was established. Telecom companies only billed whole minutes, so a call of 13:01 would be billed as 14 minutes. Or to put it simply, if her script made multiple calls every second, the library would get billed for multiple minutes per minute. If I made fifteen 1-second calls in a minute, I would get billed for 15 minutes of calls in that single minute.

    Also, phone companies would typically bill a large flat fee for each long distance call. So making a ton of short calls was more expensive than a single long call. If her script was configured to reestablish the connection in between each upload (instead of simply starting it the once, then uploading multiple times), then the library would get billed a lot of those flat fees for each individual call.

    I also found out the hard way that cell phone providers’ “free minutes” plans (back before virtually every phone plan had unlimited minutes) didn’t kick in if the call was started before the time. If your minutes were free after 8PM and you started a three hour call at 7:59, the entire call would be billed, instead of only the first minute.







  • If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:

    Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”

    It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:

    That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.

    Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.




  • Because cats want to warm up to people on their own time. And people who don’t like cats (or are allergic) give them lots of space. So then the cat warms up to them.

    The best piece of advice for getting a cat to like you is to ignore them until they approach you. If you approach before they’re ready, they’ll spook. But if you let them approach when they’re ready, they’ll love you.


  • Our local and state elections are 100% gerrymandered, but the presidential doesn’t use districts. Instead, republicans have focused on suppressing blue votes. Things like shutting down voting locations in blue areas, so people in blue areas need to travel farther, and wait times at the remaining locations are 6-8 hours, instead of minutes. Making it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in line. Voter ID laws, to bar people who can’t afford the fees+time off work to get an ID. Plenty of others too, but those are the big ones. Usually they use the “ensuring the integrity of the election” messaging to justify it, but it’s really about eliminating blue votes.






  • Yeah, I understand the mindset behind “if I tell people Linux is easy, they might actually switch.” Getting people to switch means overcoming a lot of social inertia. But the issue is that this makes you an unreliable source when a newbie inevitably runs into issues. They’ll be more likely to go “eh I was told it was easy but this isn’t. I guess it’s just not for me.”

    Providing a realistic outlook may make Linux sound less appealing, but it will mean those who do try it are more likely to stick with it.


  • There’s a setting in windows that opens snipping tool when print screen is pressed. This allows to select a screen, window or a rectangle. More than that, it also has screen recording functionality. Very good for quick screen grabs with no additional software required.

    Win+Shift+S is the keyboard shortcut. You can even do screen recordings. I use that shit all the time at work, to send bug reports when the useless fucking software we’re forced to use has a repeatable crash that the dev team can’t replicate with text reports alone.


  • Yeah, dB is a measure of difference, not an absolute value. Every increase of 10dB represents twice as much volume, but that means 0dB is essentially just a reference point. Going from 0 to 10dB means you have doubled the volume. 20 is twice of 10, 30 is twice of 20, etc… But what is twice of 0? If 0 were an absolute value, the entire scale would break down because 0x2 is still 0.

    People have a really hard time wrapping their minds around the logarithmic growth of the dB scale… For reference, a rock concert can easily hit 120dB, but the loudest sound that earth’s atmosphere can support is ~194dB. Because sound is a pressure wave with a compression and expansion. After 194dB, the atmospheric pressure isn’t enough to fully expand into the void after the compression. Once you get above that ~194dB threshold, it stops being a sound wave with a distinct push-pull, and becomes a solid shockwave that is all push. Above 194dB, it’s essentially an explosive wave.

    And to briefly touch on what you mentioned about perception, there’s also the fact that different frequencies require different amounts of power to produce the same volume. Lower bass frequencies require more power to produce the same volume, because the bass waves are physically larger and require more motion from the speakers to produce. If you want a demonstration, go look up the difference between white noise and pink noise.

    White noise has the same amount of power throughout the entire audio spectrum, but it tends to sound relatively high pitched and tinny. This is because those lower frequencies are quieter. In comparison, pink noise has a curved power distribution, mapped to how much power it takes to produce the same volume. This means it sounds much more “full”, as the low end is actually balanced with the highs. But listening to pink noise will be wildly different on a phone speaker vs a car stereo, because the phone speaker physically isn’t large enough to truly produce those low notes.