BitwiseFool

Sometimes I feel like the universe really is a simulation and these names are the result of QA testers having a little bit of fun keeping track of who's who.

Did they still get in trouble?

Now we have to wait for the French to have another revolution.

Charging $49.99 for each wrist band was a huge misstep in this regard. Yes, Apple does like charging high prices but the cognitive dissonance around the 'Apple Tax' is usually softened when people feel like they're getting a higher quality product than the competition. But with those wrist bands, I really don't feel like I'm getting a unique and special product for that price. If the bands were $19.99 I would have bought at least a few others. I just can't justify buying some silicone for $49.99.

I noticed two things very quickly, my arms started getting tired and I was never quite sure if I was holding my hands in the right place to have my gestures get picked up properly.

I enjoyed demoing my friend's Vision Pro but I regularly found myself displeased with the gesture controls. Once the novelty of interacting with the demo features wore off, I found myself thinking that the device was best suited as a monitor replacement. To that end, I would absolutely need to use a mouse and keyboard.

I also wonder if Apple's decision to eschew any special pointing or peripheral device in favor of hand tracking was the best idea. If I owned one of these things and used it for casual internet browsing, I would much prefer some little handheld accessory so I could press buttons without having to gesticulate and make sure my posture was correct so that the cameras could pick up my hand movements.

While I am no apologist for the measurement system we use here in the United States, I realized something interesting when trying to explain why almost all of our units consist of easily divisible sub-units. Imagine you needed to split something up into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, etc.. If you imagine doing this with paper, it's fairly easy.

Now imagine Metric, and the need to split something into 10 even pieces. We can make this a little easier knowing that we just need to split into fifths first, and then halve each of those. Do you know how to fold a piece of paper into fifths?

It can be done, and it's remarkable how to do this with a straight edge and a pencil. However it is definitely more time consuming than being able to fold using easily divisible numbers. To that end, once you have a decimal ruler you can just use that, but I can see why decimal based measurements were not more common in the past.

All that being said, I really wish metrication had been completed here in the US before I was born.

I have an internal monologue and I struggle to imagine how someone can think without one. Yet I also wonder if bypassing the need to articulate thoughts in words is actually more efficient. Do those people have a higher thought throughput? I suspect we may never know.

As well intentioned as this may be, I suspect the ultimate result will be to make the hiring process even worse for applicants as employers will be incentivized to avoid people who have gaps in their employment history or seem to have a propensity to job-hop. Not only that, I suspect employers will also try to add even more tests and competency-checks to the interview process.

Squares tessellate better than hexagons so I have no idea what advantage hexagons could bring.

No need to test, just give me treatment.

I honestly thought someone posted an old April Fool's article and this was a cheeky reference to the movie Stargate.

How incredible is it that a single photograph of a single dog has had so much of an impact on culture?

I also have this weird feeling I can't quite describe. This dog had no way of knowing her likeness would be seen by billions of people in some way, shape, or form. She lived her entire life without knowing or even being able to comprehend how significant it was. I have no idea if doge memes will still be popular a decade from now, but when people look back at internet culture from this era they're going to see her image all over the place. Maybe they'll see the appeal too, or maybe they'll wonder how in the world we ever found this funny.

Almost a decade ago I worked for a bank and in our little corner of the organization I was rapidly becoming the "Excel Guy". While I was happy to help people, the prospect of being pigeonholed into such a role terrified me and I switched jobs. That wasn't the only reason, but it was a major factor.

One thing that has continued to baffle me about Excel is the fact that they force worksheet tabs and the scrollbar to co-exist in the same pane. Why in the world can I not have a full horizontal scrollbar and a full width tab collection?

Steve Ballmer was hoping people would call it "the one". This was also around the time that SkyDrive had to be renamed to OneDrive due to trademark issues with Sky.

I always judge corporations whenever they resort to "One" as a brand because it signals a total lack of creativity and is likely the result of executives fighting each other and settling on the most mundane and inoffensive concept to represent "it does everything".

I was so engrossed in the animation that I didn't notice the music.

Is there a word for feeling fascination and discomfort at the same time? These little molecular machines are so sinister.

Talc deposits are often found around asbestos ore. From what I can tell the issue is cross contamination rather than talcum powder itself being carcinogenic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Association_with_asbestos

Reddit's culture fosters such a toxic discourse. I believe any LLM trained on it's data will end up being terribly sardonic and obnoxious.

I sense that real world people are a more serious problem when it comes to Reddit's manipulation. It seems relatively easy for a coordinated group of moderators and power-users to sway a subreddit's tone.

I browse with a plugin that keeps track of a user's cumulative upvote/downvote score based on my votes of their content. I quickly noticed that the most downvoted users crosspost the same low effort content on a regular basis.

What I find incredible about the progress of computing power is that there isn't anything that actually makes Moore's law a given. Engineers keep discovering advances in materials science and manufacturing that enable advancements on such a consistent pace. Is this a fluke? Luck? What enables this?

>"If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again," Google said in the memo. "The company takes this extremely seriously."

Sounds like past protests and symbolic gestures on other topics were tolerated because those views had no effect on Google's bottom line, or because management agreed with those views. Not on this one, though. When it really counts dissent will not be tolerated.

Definitely worth the customer goodwill for something that is extremely unlikely to happen. Plus, for an insurance company the financial impact of replacing one house is completely routine. Yet, being able to advertise your situation would be golden.

I've used Linux before. I like Linux. But, Windows is my native language, so to speak. I've been using Windows since childhood and quite frankly I'd like to stick with it. I know there are variations of Linux that get really close to emulating the Windows experience but it's just not the same.

It's going to take a lot of straw to finally break the camel's back.

With all the shenanigans Microsoft is pulling I no longer feel any guilt or trepidation about getting an LTSC key through a gray area.

Not just a quick flip, the old-school days of working hard and being a loyal employee are long over. When the more steady routes of gaining wealth are increasingly out of reach, gambling becomes more enticing.

At the rate we're going I suspect there will be far fewer married couples.

And then eventually the paper itself is worth more than the banknote.

Such things have been around for at least a decade. It didn't start with the same kind of AI that's being talked about recently, but there is a large automated scoring component: "Targets are often chosen based on metadata."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix