red369

I'm interested how this works too.

Is there some sort of specific meaning or rule in this domain that makes this problem mean something different to how it would be read at face value?

Without knowing anything extra, to me this reads:

1. Alan is young, round and kind

2. Alan is sometimes rough

3. Kind with rough skin are usually red

(Alan has not been stated to be in this category - unless "sometimes rough" implies "rough skin")

4. If red, then green

(As above, no information yet on whether Alan is red, so this gives no additional information about Alan)

5. Young, round and green are usually blue

(No information yet on whether Alan is green, so this gives no additional information about Alan)

6. Statement: Alan is not blue = ??

(No additional information since statements 1 & 2: Alan is young, round and kind, Alan is sometimes rough)

BTW - I have just numbered the statements in the order I used them, in case anyone wants to correct or discuss anything. This isn't the order they were given.

Edit: I am forgetting my predicate logic, and didn't recognise this. I think this example has more decoration (is more loosely worded) than I was ever used to. I now think "sometimes rough" and "rough skin" are intended to be interpreted as meaning the same thing.

That makes everything I wrote above this edit wrong. With the statement that Alan is rough, it is implied that Alan is usually blue

Just to start a list of consoles that only allow saving to a paid cloud service, I believe the Nintendo Switch is the same model:

https://www.nintendo.com/ph/support/switch/data_management/i...

I've been following a Wikipedia rabbit-hole on this - I really did want to steer away from that pun, but now it's occurred to me, it seems the sensible way to say it!

The Lunar Farside Highlands Problem is interesting too! I can't believe I've never wondered why the two sides look drastically different. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/early-moon-baked-in-earth...

I suppose I thought it was just an artifact of space photography - like the colour of Neptune.

Mid-Autumn Festival coming up, and I was extremely satisfied to learn that the rabbit is a symbol of the moon in Chinese tradition. I never saw a person or a face in the moon - only ever a rabbit.

I think I agree with the idea that it is better to turn the smartphone into the phone you want, but I think it might require a bit more work than just not installing TikTok :)

I doubt you'd see many ads in the iPhone Assistive Access mode, which can (sort of) turn an iPhone into a feature phone. You might also need to swap out a few Apple apps though. https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...

Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-18/what-happens-if-prope...

I love walking - checking distance tracking on my phone, I walked over 20km in a day a couple of weeks ago. But when it's hot in Singapore, the distances I don't want to walk can become crazy-short at times.

I'm hesitating to judge someone taking a ride-share around the corner. Among many other reasons, I can imagine scenarios where someone would think it worth paying to not arrive a sweaty mess.

Are taxis exempt, but car-sharing like Grab not exempt? I have seen Grab drivers turn down taking a child without a car seat a few times.

I've just remembered whichever version of Sim City I played as a kid used to have the option (and encourage?) to take on debt. I found the interest a killer.

I don't envy politicians having to run a country, knowing that 10% + of all government spending is just going towards interest payments for past spending.

As with all debt, you hope that it was used to buy assets that are earning more than the interest cost, and not just on a consumable.

There are high numbers here that must be difficult: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-government-expen...

Thinking about it, I wonder if this doesn't capture the whole picture. It is the percentage of spending, but doesn't capture whether that total spending denominator is itself more or less than the government is earning. Suppose one year, a government spent twice as much as it earned. Even if the interest payments stayed the same, wouldn't the "interest payments as a share of expenditure" halve that year?

~$100,000 every 10 years is expensive, but I think even in a lot of countries with good public transport, there would be a large number of people who would consider paying $1,000 a month to be able to have a car if that was the only way to have one. It seems to me as though a lot families share a car quite widely too.

Even in countries without an expensive on-road tax, people do often choose to pay more than $10,000 a year in depreciation cost, rather than the option of buying a car that has already gone through the early, rapid depreciation. People also choose to get a car loan, again increasing the cost. I'm fairly uninformed whether the interest on those is significant.

Of course, the COE is in addition to depreciation and maintenance, and those are both also expensive in Singapore. Plus people buy the cars through loans. And, excluding everything I've said above, the cars themselves are very expensive to buy!

As an example, a 2.0L e:HEV Honda Civic is US$195,000 including the COE, so approximately US$90,000 without it. Looking on the US Honda site, it looks like the same car is under US$33,000. There must some on-road taxes in the US, and difference in specs, but that's a big difference in price, in addition to the ~$100,000 COE.

Even knowing they're expensive, there's something I still can't get over, seeing a 6-figure price across the windscreen of a base model (and knowing you don't get to take off any zeros when doing a currency conversion to what you're used to).

Thanks for looking into that - that claim also surprises me!

It makes sense to subtract the taxes for a comparison between pension and salary, but by taking investments into account, and probably living expenses too, since they depend upon investments, I think you're doing too much work to support that claim.

Presumably it is fairly standard for the average retiree to have more assets/investments than the average worker. Those assets generate income (or reduce living expenses). I think that is too different from the claim that the pension is higher.

I 100% agree regarding Apple charging adapters. It is mostly their cables I have a problem with, and even that seems mostly around strain relief. I don’t mind being careful with the stain on cables, but I don’t want to have to convince others. They also do make some that have a braided exterior which seem to last much better. In general, when I see people using cheap power adapters, I encourage them to use cheap cables if they have to, but at least the adapter should be from a company that would be embarrassed if it exploded or killed you. Usually people have enough adapters around from when they bought old phones. My mum has an odd habit of plugging in the phone and then turning on the power switch afterwards. A knock-off Apple charger she was using caught fire with a bang, and somehow threw the phone some distance. I’m not clear how that is possible. The fact she wasn’t holding the phone may have been very important.

Why such a personal attack? I don't think I even know you!

I'm kidding, but what you say is hitting pretty close to home. I always mean to vote with my wallet, and I usually try, but for every Mikrotik router or Framework laptop I buy, there are so many Aukey Magsafe chargers, or McDodo Lightning to USB hubs. BTW, I'm not specifically calling out Aukey or McDodo, but for me those decisions were based on moments of weakness where I needed something to solve a problem, but I wasn't convinced it was significant enough that it was worth paying for what I thought was the best solution (The Aukey being the most recent purchase, and the McDodo having a memorable name).

As an example, I was recently looking for a replacement for my fraying 2m USB-C to Lightning cable, and Apple's is US$30 and it looks like it's made of the same buttery-soft plastic as all the short-lived cables that came with past phone purchases. Anker is finally a valid option where I now live - so I guess I should be giving them my business. They're a similar price, but look more resilient. I haven't quite reached USB-C on all my devices, so whenever I'm buying some accessory, it may only work with a device or two, and there's a decent chance that I might need to shuffle things around, and need a different length or a different connector on the input end.

That was a lot to write on an unimportant topic, and I didn't even touch on the temptation I sometimes cave into to fly a low-cost spin-off of a good airline.

I also share the feeling with another sibling-poster, that digital subscriptions all seem to be either free, or double digits a month, for just one small aspect of my digital existence. Things that only cost a few dollars a month are easy decisions, like Bitwarden, or leasing a domain name, or iCloud+. For anything that crosses into double digits a month, I never get around to it if there is a free alternative which I don't feel horrible about using. A grand-fathered Google Workspace, the free-tier of Protonmail, etc. However, I do feel guilty for not also paying for Kagi, Protonmail/Fastmail, Mullvad, etc. Should I be giving some money to Firefox in some way?

I wish more of these companies that were doing the right thing would offer a cheap tier that was a no-brainer, and there was a service where I could bundle together a bunch into one subscription. Feeling pretty entitled as I write this :)

But lacking that, I end up just sticking with the free options, and then every now and again donating some small amount to a cause I think is worth supporting - Lichess, Putty, VLC, etc.

Thanks for the comment - I love the assumption about choosing to see black. I find it a very amusing reversal of the usual Aphant confusion about whether people are "literally seeing something with their eyes closed or not".

I'm fairly sure I used to commonly see things with my eyes shut when I was a kid, and now don't. That may seem like something that someone really couldn't be unsure of, yet I am!

I do see when I dream, although I'm not sure how vivid it is. I can occasionally see things vividly when falling asleep, and there was a period where I was practicing, and I felt I could visualise things more often. Sometimes I was literally seeing them with me eyes (closed), and other times it felt more like picturing with my mind's eye. I'm still confused about whether people are literally seeing with their eyes or not.

"...choose to see black" :)

Actually, I've just remembered Tolkien writes from the point of Dwarves, about Elves' memory being more like waking than dreaming. I don't know what I thought when I read it before I had heard of Aphantasia, but now it reminds me of the spectrum of mental imagery.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/w5g9iq/the_mem...

I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords.

One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.

As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.

I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.

I wouldn't criticise that view, because it was better than the 1st Gen SE (2016) in many ways, but did you ever use that first SE? It was even nicer to hold, and I preferred Touch ID.

I think most people would agree the 13 Mini is the better of the two to try to use now.

Maybe after a few more iOS updates, and they're both equally impractical for current websites and apps, the SE will overtake the 13 Mini again :)

I regretted it too after I went with an SE 2022. I thought the battery life would be better, and I thought I didn't want to swap Touch ID for Face ID.

18 months ago I bought a used iPhone 13 Mini, and much prefer it. I used to feel unhappy every time I held the SE 2022. I never liked the wider, rounded-edged shape of the iPhone 7/8. I'm finally going to get a battery swap for the 13 Mini from Apple this afternoon.

I'm hoping that stops me vaguely wondering about battery swapping for my SE 2016 (1st gen) and going back to using that. I don't think I'd want to go back to a camera that old, and too many apps are not supported. That was the last iPhone I really loved. Fastest smartphone on the planet in benchmarks when it was released, and in the rare event that it slipped out of your (someone else's) hand, it felt unbreakable compared to newer iPhones.

At least some of the time, when people refer to using their phone as a computer, I think they're talking about plugging into an external monitor through USB-C, and using the phone as a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.

I've tried every so often, and while I think all the hardware is there, the software wasn't. Perhaps Android has improved on this recently? I know there have been niche attempts in the past, like Samsung DeX or Ubuntu Touch, which may have been more solid. I've never tried out any of those.

I also remember reading this - that unless there is oil and grease which requires soap to remove, then water alone is effective. At the time it seemed to me it was somewhere fairly reputable. From memory, the idea was that soap reduced the friction, and actually might lessen the effectiveness. I think it wasn't comparing best-practice handwashing with and without soap, but focused instead on the kind of handwashing that people actually do.

Hard to find anything on it now, and I understand soap was particularly effective against SARS-CoV-2 compared to water alone (can I just call it the COVID-19 virus?) so it looks like the idea is mostly gone now.

Thanks! That makes it more understandable how he ended up in that situation.

Love this story. There is something interesting that nags at me though.

- There's a test pilot on staff at the base, but they're not qualified for the Lightning.

- There's a test that needs doing, which doesn't require a test pilot (unless something goes wrong).

- There's no qualified test pilot available for the test, so Holden decides to run the test with someone who knows how to move the plane down the runway, but not necessarily fly it.

Of course you're deviating from the proper process at this point, but isn't the obvious choice for this still the test pilot who isn't qualified for the Lightning, but at least flies fighter jets?

It seems like Holden thought it through - it wasn't spur of the moment. Did he ask the test pilot? If so, did they say "no"?

Safari with the uBlock Origin Lite extension works well for me - even with "Web page Contents and Browsing History" permission set to 'Deny' for all websites.

I like "Vinegar - Tube Cleaner" for this.

It's not a perfect solution - I have occasionally noticed it leading to some buggy behaviour in the YouTube/YouTube Music sites using Safari, but nothing anywhere near as bad as using those websites without it!

The only odd behaviour I can call to mind was one time that it continued playing audio when I answered a phone call. It was easy to stop the music playing, and the other person on the call couldn't hear the music. I was actually disappointed that the other person couldn't hear the music, and I've been disappointed every time I've taken a phone call since and the music hasn't continued playing. I wish that was a feature :)

I think Vinegar was well worth the small one-time price, and I like supporting the developer. I've heard that Brave allows playing with the screen off, but I like my setup enough that I don't want to install Brave just for that.

Even further off-topic, but I recommend you and the parent poster watch the Buffy episode Normal Again, and the 116 episodes before it. Not waking up, but also an example of the "none of this is real" idea.

I'm not sure if I'm entirely joking with this recommendation. For those who haven't watched - even for a show about a vampire slayer, it gets decreasingly plausible as the series go on (as do many long running shows). I remember being hit pretty hard when this episode suddenly offered a sensible explanation for everything, but a stone-cold path to get there.

Should I feel compelled to not offer spoilers on what is probably a joke recommendation anyway (117 episodes of a decades old TV show)?

I haven't got any experience with talking to Opus in different styles, but was surprised by the difference in style ChatGPT had talking to my niece. Lots more crying emojis for a start.

That's not a good sign. Have you checked that you're not a robot?

I liked this short movie on the theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU

Sigh! I am so far from having this ability.

Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head.

It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums:

- Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia

- Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?)

- Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to imagine someone's voice?)

- Memory vividness

Most of these things seem rarely discussed. How much is known about the relationships between these?

Also I've often heard, and now seen one example myself, that it's easier to dispute a credit card transaction than a debit card transaction.

Yes - sadly extinct. There are still a few seeds that mostly fail to grow. I know next to nothing about it, except that the seeds must be very rare.

Interesting that this works. I know I have been frustrated recently when trying to take a screenshot of a bank transfer or something similar, but I couldn't find which app that was to test again. I tested on the iOS Passwords app, and I couldn't get the trick to work in that. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong, or it only works in specific apps.

Each time I tried to take a screenshot of a password, the password was missing from the screenshot - even when I kept the control centre pulled down far enough that the Password app was starting to look blurry.