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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I think the availability of AA batteries is higher, 18650 is much less standard than AA in most people’s homes. I would rather have options, so saying AA but having a swappable battery tray is how I would go, but I like kludgey stuff anyway.

    That said, I just did a battery replacement for a lithium pouch on some TWS headphones and it was a fairly simple process. Making it a port rather than soldered wires would make it much easier and would make battery replacement a quick and routine task. Hopefully more companies will more towards ports for batteries and maybe even a standard port that is the same for a given voltage/amperage combination so swapping out can be done with confidence.



  • I was expecting answers but got jokes, not disappointed, just enjoying the jokes.

    As for asymptotes, many mathematical functions have a value they are going towards but never quite reach. One example would be to start with 1 and then halve it, then halve it, then halve it, and keep going forever. It will trend towards 0 but never ever reach it.

    Another example of approaching 0 is y = 1/x which is a cool graph. There is a curve which starts just to the right of the Y axis at maximum Y value and comes almost straight down, curves out to 1,1 then shoots out along towards the X axis almost but never reaching it. The cool thing is it does the exact same in the lower left quadrant with the line coming from the negative X axis, passing -1,-1, the shooting down the Y axis.



  • Handedness is not constant over the animal kingdom.

    Kangaroos and wallabies tend to be left handed, though wallabies seem to be right handed for strength tasks. In dogs, horses, and cats females have been shown to be left handed, while males are right handed. All of these are tendencies and not at all strict, so specific inviduals may be left or right handed with no regard to their sex or species, but the trend is there.

    The level of handedness that humans have is really white extreme compared to our closest cousins. Other primates are far less handed and one of the things that drives this may be tool use and associated teaching. If you are teaching someone how to do something and they have opposite handedness to you it is harder to teach, and also shared tools are easier to manage if they are not in two different versions.

    The causes seem to be a mix of genetics, developmental cues, and maybe brain structure, though the exact amounts of each and whether there are other factors are unclear.


  • I will say, as a Dvorak user, I think it would be awful for mobile. I don’t know the mathematics for calculating it but Dvorak assumes four fingers per hand spread evenly across the keyboard.

    I wonder what the most efficient layout would be for single digit letter pecking. I can imagine it would be different to both Dvorak and Qwerty, but what exactly it would be I don’t know. Maybe separating most likely next letters by side and having some consistency of vowels on one side, consonants on the other, but all of the stuff about rolls and sequences would be completely changed. Maybe differently sized buttons for more common letters, or reducing the number of shown letters to have a few flick letters that you swipe in a direction to get them? Maybe just having the top ten most common letters displayed as single buttons and then the remaining 16 as four swipe keys?




  • Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.



  • The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

    A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

    So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.


  • I have a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 as a server at home. It is small enough to fit on my printer stand, it has two 4Tb HDDs for data in raid 1 and one 256Gb SSH for the OS and VMs to run from. It has 32GB of RAM and works really well. I have a few VMs for managing media, one for my personal jabber server (Open fire), another for calendar and contact sync, and Syncthing. I also have another 16GB of RAM unallocated so far which makes me itch for another VM to spin up, but so far I haven’t had something come to mind service wise. Because it is all off my main system I can do updates, change my HDD, take my machine with me, and I always know my server is OK. The same goes in reverse, I won’t bork my main system when doing server stuff. It is very handy and I find it useful to segregate things, but your situation obviously could demand a different approach. That said, I would recommend it instead of upgrading just because of the stability and segregation of risk.



  • I think when someone is making a movie or TV show they don’t want to have anything that distracts from the story, so they only show clean lines, clear surfaces, and new enough items that their disrepair or dirtiness is not taking away from the story.

    My experience was pretty poor compared to my peers, but I was actually homeless for a period so I think I was legitimately below the standard of the time. That said, rich people pay cleaners to make their house look good. They have good storage solutions, new items, and throw away and replace anything that looks bad.