OliveMate

>And it's far less painful than going cold turkey.

As stupid as it sounds I forgot that it was an option. There's something clean about saying "I won't have any more of X after this date" and sticking to it. Although I could've tapered off beforehand!

I've been on the decaf wagon for a good few years now, I can't say it helped me out with anxiety or productivity but I can echo the sentiment that I can sleep within minutes. Also not relying on caffeine to keep me going pretty much forces me to sleep at a reasonable time.

The hardest thing about giving up caffeine has to be the immediate effects. Your body takes it as a massive shock and you're stuck with what feels like a migraine for 2 days. Not fun.

I know decaf still has some caffeine in it, but it's a compromise for something different – for a month of cold turkey I thought I had cravings for caffeine, but it turned out it was hot drinks I was after. I think it's the one luxury I couldn't be without.

Bought a Quest 2 in 2022, I got a lot of use out of it initially (mostly played Pavlov Shack, SUPERHOT VR, and community-made ports of classic FPS games), then fell off using it after ~8 months. When I built my new PC I had a blast with it again, I blitzed through Half-Life Alyx and was hopping on a community VRChat meetup every weekend... Then I fell off again.

Messing about in VR and shooting has to be the most fun I've had with vidya since I was a kid, but it's the dedication required which kills it for me. I have to be in the right mood to go into my cupboard, take it out the box, connect it to my PC, and play about for a few hours – when I come home from work if I want to shoot some baddies it's way easier to sit down at my desk to do it. And I don't end up drenched in sweat at my PC.

The last time I picked it up was back in November for a VRChat meetup. It's a shame really because playing VR games is such a joy, but it's marred with each little roadbump to get there.

I remember a decade ago when people were up in arms about Wolfenstein TNO and Titanfall being over 40GB. Feels like a quaint thing to complain about nowadays.

One day I'd like to get into wood carving, making little decorative figures and the like, but the lack of space + storage is currently a major roadblock for me.

There's a little part of my mind pining (heh) over getting a hobby that's more physical and scratches a technical itch, but unfortunately I don't have an adequate workspace.

The old Wadsworth Constant[1] is being worn thin with each passing year. Half the time it feels like you should skip all the way to the last 30% of whatever to get what you're looking for.

A side note about YouTube in particular, I find SEO tactics to be like dart frogs. Bold titles with garish bright thumbnails means avoid!

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wadsworth%20...

As someone who's more of a social recluse in my day to day life, I'd never have considered what you've just said. Thank you for the eye-opener.

I still share what I've read with friends and coworkers and it's lovely to have that spark when you've both read the same thing... But as someone who used to read physical books at work I wasn't comfortable with broadcasting what I was reading – my e-reader feels much more discreet.

It's swings and roundabouts with what you're comfortable with socially. Maybe I'm too closed off for my own good!

I'm put off by the focus of the article. As already mentioned it feels like it's peddling a book club and merch first and making strenuous connections to try and justify it.

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I don't really like putting on my cynical hat, but despite the final paragraph I still feel a good chunk of the preference for physical books and libraries comes down to being performative. I'm not doubting if the books are being read, but if you're putting yourself forward on TikTok having read a book, having a physical copy lets you flout it – something you can't do well with an e-reader.

Do I expect certain celebs to go out with certain books to tacitly promote them, even if it's just because they think they the book is good? Sure. Does it give their fanbase something to bond over? Yeah, and that can be nice.

Can't properly comment on it as I'm watching on a phone, but my 2 cents:

Last week there was an Ask HN thread about live-rendered video games graphics still looking worse than 20 year old Hollywood CGI. A lot of the comments were about balancing performance and having less power, true, but there was something that wasn't being considered: what we expect CGI to look like.

I couldn't word the comment right so I didn't post it, but I was going to bring up the game Unrecord[1] as an example of fairly realistic looking game – it still has general limitations other live rendered work has, but the choice of using a high field of view to emulated a bodycam (alongside cold, high contrast lighting) sells a certain vision of reality.

I see it the same here. Maybe our idea of what CGI looks like clouds us, and something as simple as using a high FOV / fisheye lens throws us off. Also consider that due to the distortion of the lens, real life fisheye footage can have an almost unreal vibe to it.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/

Seeing as we don't have any wolves around, I'm all for it.

... Thankfully, I don't live in California.

The sad thing is that our political class and media used to actively ridicule China's Great Firewall, but now when the internet nasty of the month pops up they all froth at the mouth over controlling what people can see.

I feel the issue is with human filters. Creating a seamless and believable image edit requires time and effort, regardless of how experienced the editor is. You were limited by what images you could source, how they'd fit together (does the lighting and perspective match?), and there was often a contextual paper trail people could follow ('I recognise that picture of X').

With these image generation models, the only things filtered by human involvement are the creation of the prompt, and whether or not they believe any generated image is believable. The required time and effort is minimal, and on top of that you can generate hundreds by the time a single person can make a convincing Photoshop edit.

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In terms of being able to sift through generated images across the wider internet, I've no idea what can be done. But I feel a potential defence against them would be for news sources to publish the exact images they were sent online, keeping the original resolution, removing cropping, and retaining Exif data.

I can't thank you enough for sharing that site, bloody tired of all the dodgy TTS YouTube pronunciation vids out there.

From my experience in the UK most telecoms have the same system, although I've only ever used it by accident and each time it left the person on the other end confused.

At one point BT hired Tom Baker to use his voice on their TTS system. I'm sure more people would use it if they kept his voice: https://youtu.be/aFsOhJgCSpw

Although Stoicism isn't for me I'd recommend Meditations any day, although I find the earlier translations of it to be more poignant and lasting than modern ones.

I find it fascinating how as Emperor, Marcus Aurelius had most of his known world on a plate, with all the power a man could dream from. If anyone remotely irked him he [probably] could've had them executed on the spot, but what does he do? He retreats to his diary and reminisces that despite how troublesome people are, he shouldn't be annoyed as humanity was put on earth to help each other.

Dude had a patience I could only wish for.

Not in response to the article but the general vibes in the comments.

Writing a published book and having it out there is a thought that really resonates me. I wonder what I'd write if I had more time to myself, a clear mind, and /if I was a radically different person who wanted to do it/.

The thought of having written something, put it out there, and to have someone enjoy it is lovely – I'd be happy writing schlock if it came straight from my heart. But in terms of being the sort of person to sit down every day, concentrate, and slave away at it... That isn't me. Props to people who manage to put anything on a single page, let alone finish a whole book.

>The voters of Britain made their choice and now they must deal with the consequences as best they can.

I get why I've seen this sort of comment for the last 7 years but I dislike the idea that Brexit was a unaminous decision when when Leave got ~52% of the vote share.

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I don't know what else I can really say. I resent the political elite and news sector for turning what ought to have been a serious discussion into an energised hellscape that made us all belligerent arses. A ~4% vote margin felt rather middling for what was championed as a total victory and casus belli for immediately pulling us out of everything EU – and then everything after became omnishambles.

And then despite all of this, no-one had any solid unified idea on what leaving actually meant. Some folks wanted to stay in the customs union, the common market, a good contingent wanted us to leave without any deal with the EU for... Reasons? No-one really sat down and seriously discussed it, which was why it was a surprise when the prospect of leaving Euratom and losing encryped access to the Galileo Satellite System[1] eventually came up.

Now for the voters going for Boris Johnson's Conservatives in 2019? People were absolutely fed up of the years of political deadlock and dither, especially after the EU extended the Article 15 period which was promptly wasted. Johnson's pledge to get it over with was what vast swathes of the coutnry wanted to hear (alongside the opposition leader at the time being unpopular), and unfortunately that was tied to everything else his premiership brought.

... God, I haven't thought about Brexit in years.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44232269

>The font isn't optimal to my eyes.

I wouldn't be surprised if the default font looks as bleh as it does on Mac as it does everything else. If I stick with the system default font (which I'm now doubting) I could try and make it thinner with CSS.

>One thing that leaps out to me is that, at half-screen width, it's easier to read your site.

This is what really clued me on while checking it myself. When I'm on a single screen setup I usually squash my browser to be 2/3 of the screen, which made looking at it much better. That, and I found reading things back on mobile to be much more concise.

Thank you for the fresh perspective on all of this, cheers!

That's trade mark laws for you. If you don't try and protect your trade mark at every opportunity it can be stripped from you and every Tom, Dick, and Harry can put out whatever they want with your name/term.

I get it, but still, that's the law for you. The most of us will still say Velcro because it's what we all know it as.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

And it wouldn't be a HN post without an archived link – https://archive.is/mYfaY

Daft question: would it be possible to attach an accelerometer (edit: or gyroscope) to the monitor and connect it to a script to update the display angle on the fly?

God, I hate how every time I see a new Linux Distro I want to ditch what I have and try it out.

At some point I'm going to become like the rest of you and buy a few hundred extra ThinkPads to satiate my curiosity.

I went into this expecting another 'hurr UK surveillance hell CCTV cameras' hot take but what I got was much better. I wish I could write something as good as this.

As someone who doesn't live close to London, it perfectly captured my thoughts on how alienated I feel in a world where I'm seen less as a person, but more of a consumer or even product. The world is feeling less legitimate as more of Big Finance creeps in and resells everything around me.

A lot of people overseas have the idea that British newspapers are prestigious titans of journalism due to how old and widespread they are, and I could scream from the heavens about how wrong that is. The tabloids are a dire stain on our society.

This wasn't just Prince Harry or celebrities who were victims of phone hacking, it was ordinary people who weren't prepared for such an industrial violation of privacy and sheer decency from multiple newspapers. And it went on for decades[1]. In one case the mother of a dead teenager thought her daughter was alive because her phone's voicemail was being accessed. It turns out that The News of the World was doing it, it was such a widespread thing. And I'll never forgive the Conservatives for gutting the Leveson Inquiry[2] which went neck-deep in exploring how much of a mess the industry was.

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The sad thing about the court finding that Piers Morgan knew of the phone hacking is that it'll do nothing to him. The man is mired in decades of scandal and certain connections he made allowed him to bounce back every time. That, and the tabloid industry has an incentive not to act against their own lest all their dirty secrets get out there.

I could talk about Morgan all day, but I'm still in awe at how we let him recover his career after 2004. He put British soldiers at risk when he published faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis, and when they were found as fake, he outright refused to apologise for it and got fired. That ought to be a career-ending move, but having connections with Murdoch lets you get away with anything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_news_media_phone_h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry

I'm currently away from my PC so I can't check myself, does it embed a single noise texture and use it multiple times, or does it generate a texture for each use of noise?

As someone who can't justify an Adobe license and can't wrap their head around InkScape, Designer has been a perfect alternative bar quirks like this.

Despite this being piloted in Germany, there's still a way to access and enable this setting (although it only currently works in private windows). Thanks to Michael Veale[1] for bringing this to my attention:

> Go to the URL about:config

> Set cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled ->True

> Go to Settings->Privacy, turn on Cookie Banner Blocker.

[1] https://someone.elses.computer/@mikarv/111538624638087626

You never see an old man eating a Twix.

Much like Salad Fingers, Burnt Face Man was created by David Firth - https://www.youtube.com/@davidfirth

I don't remember where he originally uploaded each series, but his Jerry Jackson series (a personal favourite) were first uploaded to Newgrounds as a series of troll animations.

I needed something mundanely weird to make my afternoon, thanks to whoever at Lenovo decided to get a LLM to make this. I took a few minutes checking out the wider glossary page and came across this on the keyboard layout page[1]:

>What are the most common types of keyboard layouts?

>The two most common types of keyboard layouts are QWERTY (which stands for “query, enter, write, erase, type”)

LLMs bluffing hard isn't anything new, but it's weird to see it on a reputable company's site like this.

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/keyboard-layout/