phantasmish

I’ve sworn off Rails development for anything short of stupid-high compensation for similar reasons.

Implicit imports (“… which package defined this symbol? Who knows!”), dynamic definitions all over the place (“where’s this defined? Literally nowhere until the program runs!”), all that stuff. It’s awful. I feel blind not being able to answer basic questions about a codebase with grep. And that’s not even considering the lack of static typing.

All of housing, education, and healthcare have gotten more expensive way faster than wages have risen, in the US.

People are upset about it because together those things, plus the end of the pension somewhat earlier, mean the death of the middle class, the idea of which was a pretty big part of American post-war identity.

More economic drag on getting educated, more economic drag on becoming a property owner and the security that provides, healthcare costs are a drag on accumulating money for younger generations and will soak up anything their parents managed to accumulate. Middle class = dead.

> The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment.

It’s typically not done quite so intentionally, but this sounds like most folks’ junior high and high school years. Sometimes also college.

I know I totally changed in those years, and it was mostly by noticing what “worked” and leaning into it.

The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)

> it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them

It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.

It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.

You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.

The opening chapters of A Passage to India include an Indian man thinking about how irritating it is that these uncultured Brits don’t understand a polite lie as a refusal, and always want to try to solve the “problem” to get around the refusal. How unrefined!

… and I tend to think of it as the safest route to doing OK at consequentialism, too, myself. The point is still basically good outcomes, but it short-circuits the problems that tend to come up when one starts trying to maximize utility/good, by saying “that shit’s too complicated, just be a good person” (to oversimplify and omit the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” parts)

Like you’re probably not going to start with any halfway-mainstream virtue ethics text and find yourself pondering how much you’d have to be paid to donate enough to make it net-good to be a low-level worker at an extermination camp. No dude, don’t work at extermination camps, who cares how many mosquito nets you buy? Don’t do that.

Better, it’s a small step to “being a small part of something that’s doing a little evil to a shitload of people (say, working on Google ~scams targeting the vulnerable and spying on everybody~ Ads) is not just OK, but good, as long as I spend a few grand a year buying mosquito nets to prevent malaria, saving a bunch of lives!”

Which obviously has great appeal.

I’m skeptical of any consequentialist approach that doesn’t just boil down to virtue ethics.

Aiming directly at consequentialist ways of operating always seems to either become impractical in a hurry, or get fucked up and kinda evil. Like, it’s so consistent that anyone thinking they’ve figured it out needs to have a good hard think about it for a several years before tentatively attempting action based on it, I’d say.

I dunno… median OECD state modern person, or median modern person globally?

I might go with being one of the richer medieval kings, in the latter case. Global median is pretty bad.

Only things that might sway me otherwise are antibiotics and if we’re factoring in the whole “sword of Damocles” aspect for despotic rulers.

I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing.

An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them.

Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.

The standard for medical interventions usually isn’t “could it work?” or “should it work?” but “does it work?”

This is why the efficacy of every single contraceptive method isn’t way higher than it is. Lots of them should work almost perfectly… but the harder they are to use correctly, the less effective they in-fact are.

A lot of the issues are hydration-related, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the eye ones are, too. Some water intake is from food, so if you eat less, you need to drink more. If you also tend to drink with food, and you’re eating less, you may drink less instead of the more that you need to be. Add in a generally dulled “I crave something” sense and you’ve got a recipe for not just going all day without eating, but also without drinking.

GLP-1 agonists? Well they derived them from a lizard, so, uh… sort of? But no, no foods you eat are really going to have GLP-1 agonists in them, not to any meaningful degree anyway. Plus if you’re eating them they have to survive at least part of the digestive tract, which means you need even more since some of it’ll be lost.

Your body produces GLP-1, but it lives in the blood for like minutes. The innovation was finding a chemical that tickles the same receptors but survives in the body for days at a time.

… and the mechanism by which GLP-1s cause weight loss is, more or less, by making fasting really easy.

Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.

It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.

USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.

Their new mini PC isn’t ARM (the Frame is, though), it’s AMD hardware like the Steam Deck. Appears to be x86, should play basically anything in my library at 1080p or higher as long as it works under SteamOS.

It doesn’t require it. There may still be (I dunno) fixed per-gallon taxes in the tenth-penny-per-gallon range, but stations aren’t forced to handle it the way they do.

Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post.

6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more performance instead of battery and screen that I don’t use) is great. Not a lot of games I want to play won’t run well at least at 1080p with specs like that.

Gas stations price to the tenth of a penny per gallon. There is no 1/10 cent coin. Works fine.

When we got rid of the half-penny, it was worth more in 2024 cents than the dime is now.

We waited so long past when we should have gotten rid of the penny that now a coin ten times as valuable is also worthless enough that we ought to get rid of it.

Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.

Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.

Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?

Me at every AirBnB: turn on TV "OH MY GOD WTF MY EYES ARE BLEEDING where is the settings button?" go turn off noise reduction, upscaling, motion smoothing.

I think I've seen like one out of a couple dozen where the motion smoothing was already off.

I dunno if it was manufactured as early as 1995 (though it couldn't have been more than four years later, absolute max) but some time around 2002 I picked up a pair of used 19" (IIRC) IBM flat-screen (that is, the screen itself was flat, not flat-panel) CRT monitors in a flea market that had both more total pixels and greater pixel density than any screen in my house until I started picking up devices with Apple Retina displays. I believe the short side of the 4x3 on that thing maxed out at 1920.

My boring, 17" consumer Trinitron monitor in 1995 could do 1600x1200 IIRC.

Max resolution and pixel density (plus, for a long time, color gamut, contrast/depth-of-black, latency, et c) on typical monitors took a huge dive when LCDs replaced CRTs. "High res" in 1995 would probably qualify as fairly high-res today, too, if not quite top-of-the-heap. Only expensive, relatively recent displays in the consumer space really beat those '90s CRTs overall to a degree where it's not at least a close call (though they may still be a little worse in some ways)

I've played Mario in emulators where I could play just fine, and others where I kept falling down holes and such on friggin' level 1, which at times I could probably have beaten literally blindfolded, and had a hard time progressing at all. The latter might not (or, if extremely bad, might) be laggy enough for me to be able to tell you by looking, but plainly the feel is off enough to be a problem.

I find a good test is Punch Out!!! If it's much trouble at all for me to reach at least Great Tiger, the latency is really bad (even if I couldn't tell you just by looking). If I can get to Great Tiger without much trouble but struggle to do much damage to him before getting taken out, the latency's still unacceptably high for some games, but not totally awful.

Another good one's High Speed. If I can't land the final multi ball shot at least a decent percentage of the time (the game pauses the ball a couple times while police chatter plays, when you're set up for a multi ball, and after the last pause you can land the shot to initiate multi ball immediately and skip all the flashing-lights-and-sirens crap if you're very precise with your timing, it's like very-small number of milliseconds after the ball resumes its motion) then the latency is high enough to affect gameplay.

If I can land that shot at least 60-70% of the time, and if I can reach Bald Bull in Punch Out!!!, then probably any trouble I have in other games is my own damn fault :-)

I suppose as I age further these tests will become kinda useless for me, because my reflexes will be too shot for me to ever do well at these no matter how many hours of practice I've had over the decades :-(

Anyway, even in the best case you're always going to have worse display and input latency on a digital screen with a digital video pipeline and USB controllers than an early console hooked up over composite or component to a CRT. I've found it's low enough (even on mediocre TVs, provided they have a "game mode", and those are a ton worse than most PC monitors) for me not to mind much if the emulation itself is extremely snappy and is adding practically no extra latency, and there are no severe problems with the software side of the video & input pipelines, but otherwise... it can make some already-tough games unplayably hard in a hurry.

I do wonder about the experience of people who try these games for the first time in an emulator. They'll come to the game with no built-in way to tell if they keep slipping off ledges because the latency's like six frames instead of the ~ one it was originally, or because they just suck at it.

Gaming OS? I guess if your gaming's heavy on online multiplayer games that insist on rootkits, and you're not willing to do that on a console instead (you can connect mice and keyboards to those now).

2025 is the year I finally removed Windows entirely from my life, thanks to SteamOS and Bazzite. It'd been solely for gaming for 25ish years, for me, having been (in various versions) my primary desktop OS for another sevenish years or so before that (3.1 was my first, and before that, MS-DOS) and now it's for... nothing. I truly have no use for it whatsoever.

The original has a green tint to the matrix scenes, it's just relatively subtle and blends into a general coolness to the color temp. The heightened green from later home printings is really, in-your-face green, to the point you don't really notice the coolness, just greeeeen.

The original DVD was way, way less green than later releases, which were changed to match the more-extreme greens used in the sequels. IDK if it was as subtle as in the theater (I did see it there, but most of my watches were the first-run DVD) but it was far subtler than later DVD printings, and all but IIRC one fairly recent blu-ray that finally dialed it back to something less eye-searing and at least close-ish to the original.

The ignited sabers used spinning sticks with reflective tape covering them, and some rotoscoping applied in post to get the final effect. There are spots in the un-retouched Star Wars where the effect is missed, or something, and you can indeed see the raw stick. Something similar's also behind that one weird shot where Obi Wan's saber seems to almost fizzle out (the tip is pointed too much toward the camera, and messes up the effect)

The careful eye may also notice they almost never strike the sabers against one another in that scene... because it'd break the spinning sticks. Apparent contact is usually gently done, or a trick of perspective.

Is getting something like this wrong why e.g. The Hobbit looked so damn weird? I didn't have a strong opinion on higher FPS films, and was even kinda excited about it, until I watched that in theaters. Not only did it have (to me, just a tiny bit of) the oft-complained-about "soap opera" effect due to the association of higher frame rates with cheap shot-on-video content—the main problem was that any time a character was moving it felt wrong, like a manually-cranked silent film playing back at inconsistent speeds. Often it looked like characters were moving at speed-walking rates when their affect and gait were calm and casual. Totally bizarre and ruined any amount of enjoyment I may have gotten out of it (other quality issues aside). That's not something I've noticed in other higher FPS content (the "soap opera" effect, yes; things looking subtly sped-up or slowed-down, no).

[EDIT] I mean, IIRC that was 48fps, not 60, so you'd think they'd get the shutter timing right, but man, something was wrong with it.