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Clamchop

1,106 karma · joined September 21, 2020

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Clamchop··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
They will of course but I don't think kids talking to each other was ever the objection to social media. Very arguably, kids coming together in these ad-hoc online spaces may very well be safer than mainstream social media, whether your complaint with it is advertising or the algorithm or adult content or child predators.
Clamchop··on Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries
I buy "pickup" orders online all the time through the store's app where you can also buy instacart delivery. It's still shopping online but there's no additional cost nor tip for ordering pickup.
Clamchop··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.

Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.

We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.

Clamchop··on Tim Curry has died
It's a fun myth but Parton and Curry already come fast on the heels of a few recent celebrity deaths: Sam Neill, Bonnie Tyler, Daveigh Chase, Hayden Panettiere, and Lindsay Graham.
Clamchop··on I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
Clamchop··on Show HN: Modern Browsers Don't Need the Cookie Anymore
> It asked for zero permissions.

Not quite. It requested to play DRM protected content.

Clamchop··on Show HN: Analog Watch
This isn't anything to do with digital time, it's just a convenience of recent microwaves. The digital microwaves of the 1990s did not have this feature, but they were still digital. If you input 1, you just got 1 second.

On microwaves that do have this feature, set the power first to bypass it.

Clamchop··on Even light drinking raises risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death
They're within an order of magnitude of each other but they're not _in_ the same order of magnitude. 2 would be in the 0th order and 6 would be in the 1st.

But even if it weren't so, I'm not sure what your point is. Do you have a reason for thinking that orders of magnitude is a good way to compare alcohol consumption?

Clamchop··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
A major contributor to this statistic is fire sprinklers. New apartment complex construction for decades has required them but they're virtually nonexistent in single-family homes, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.
Clamchop··on What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)
These don't seem strange to me at all.

Lifestyle marketing, romance, appeals to independence, metaphor, and humor. All timeless advertising tropes. It's cigarettes themselves that are passé.

Clamchop··on Ask.com has closed
I remember most installers bundling such bullshit. It may have been so normalized that no one was sincerely asking if participating would harm their reputation.

I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.

Clamchop··on Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)
It's an acquired taste. All alternative sweeteners taste differently from sugar. These days, I appreciate that such beverages don't leave a film in my mouth and have a little extra bite compared to sugar.

I think it's interesting that people go through effort to acquire tastes for various formats of alcohol, dark chocolate, black coffee. A taste for aspartame is more useful to acquire than any of those, in my opinion, but alas it's not associated with refinement and sophistication.

It's better to think of flavors as different rather than strictly better or worse.

Clamchop··on Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly
Redundancy in natural language isn't a big deal, and it isn't entirely useless, either.
Clamchop··on NASA had to train Apollo 11's astronauts to not use profanity
I think the underlying needle this is trying to thread is teaching kids to know their audience and adjust their register for it (which is a much broader skill than just whether or not to curse), but I agree that the fucking president ;) doing it gives kids ammo to argue against the rule. Idk if that's a good or a bad thing, maybe just neutral.
Clamchop··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
The rest of that same sentence, " – and that if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased," seems to mitigate that concern, no? I suppose it hinges on what the test for a "specialized tool" is.
Clamchop··on Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
La Brea tarpits
Clamchop··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
No more pedantic than the comment I was replying to. My advice would be not to use "eatable" at all because others will just think you're saying edible incorrectly.
Clamchop··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
That's backwards, eatable is the stronger claim that means fit as food while edible just means safe to eat.
Clamchop··on The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew
In the US, photos of food must depict the actual product being advertised. So all the photos of burgers on the McD's menu are what is being sold, albeit with carefully selected "hero" ingredients skillfully assembled for the best presentation.

For a product that is only advertising one thing in a photo, e.g. an ice cream cone with ice cream on a package of just cones, I don't think there are any restrictions on what the "ice cream" can be made of. (It's probably mashed potatoes, though.)

Clamchop··on Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
I agree in fractions.

I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.

I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.

I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.

Clamchop··on YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
Demonetized videos show fewer or no ads. It's something they implemented because advertisers don't want to be associated with some kinds of content.
Clamchop··on iBook Clamshell
And Apple famously struggled for a long time to compete with PCs on price, beyond what their positioning as a premium brand would justify, compounding the problem. And their hardware wasn't exactly setting the world on fire on performance metrics, either.

I'd long thought it'd gone underappreciated how much slow but steady progress Apple has made in the past couple of decades at improving the value of their computers, but everyone has been talking about that since the Neo dropped. Well deserved and overdue, in my opinion.

Clamchop··on Waymo Safety Impact
The way I see it, self-driving cars have the potential to deliver us from the burden of ownership altogether--maintenance, insurance, liability, parking, and all the rest. This hinges on availability, quality of service, pricing, and a rather large shift in the culture around cars and driving but I have hope that we can get there with time.

Cars are very expensive things to buy and own.

Clamchop··on Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks
I mean, yes, it is easy. No adhesive and just a couple of clips on the case. You could replace the battery in 20 minutes with little anxiety that you're going to cause damage getting to it.
Clamchop··on Foods destroying rainforests, in one simple chart
Running uBO here and I see a chart.
Clamchop··on How did the Maya survive?
And later pyramids. As a matter of economy, many were constructed from mudbrick and only encased in true stone. Over time, particularly after the casing stones were removed for other projects, they collapsed into the rubble piles referred to as ruined pyramids.

Cost cutting is ancient.

Clamchop··on Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
In my experience, stirring within the first tens of seconds of submersion is enough and it won't stick together again for the rest of the boil. After it's strained is a different matter, but you might as well wait until then if you're going to oil it.
Clamchop··on 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
Minor nit, cassettes were and are mostly worse audio quality than records and they coexisted for decades with their respective compromises. Cassettes replaced 8-track in the portable space and eventually enabled the Walkman.

CDs killed both.

Clamchop··on 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
What cargo do the cultists think is coming?
Clamchop··on Backing up Spotify
You don't have to pass it through a DAC. There's no equivalent of HDCP for protecting digital audio end to end. Crudely, you could capture S/PDIF but really, skip that and just output to a virtual audio device for recording. No DAC in the path either way.

But yes, it is inconvenient and slow.

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