Which is where hybrids have a huge advantage, getting the best of both worlds

You could always put it in a (glass) container, or wrap it in aluminum foil

Damn, that’s actually not half bad

Seconding this. My company issued me a MacBook and I was really surprised by how well the touchpad worked, and how smoothly gestures work with it. For as much hate as Apple gets, a lot really Just Werks™. Windows and KDE (Wayland) (I haven’t tested other DEs) are certainly improving, but they’re still nowhere near as smooth as what MacOS has had for a pretty long time now.

The crazy thing is that I’ve hackintoshed a ThinkPad T430 and T480, both with full gesture support (but no force touch, though to be fair I don’t use that anyway). In both cases, using their touchpads on MacOS was much better than on Windows or KDE. Though some touchpads aren’t that great to begin with (like, the one on the T430 is pretty small), it’s crazy how much of a difference good software can make to how they feel to use.

5 meters is definitely way too short for the chair swing ride. Look at the people in the seats. It’s definitely at least 10 meters.

Assuming 10 meters and 100 km/h, that gives about 7.9 g. That’s in the range of what fighter pilots might experience and well beyond where most people black out, so that’s still definitely too high.

Looking it up online, this is a pretty classic physics problem and the numbers you might see around it are closer to a radius of 12 meters and a speed of 13 to 17 m/s. Taking that as 15 m/s (54 km/h), that works out to about 1.9 g, which I can subjectively say feels much closer to the real value if you ever ride on one of these.

So, the second one is about 1.9 g

Of note, it also straight up doesn’t work on Tom Bombadil. He is immune to its temptation, and it doesn’t make him invisible.

Not all trains. I’ve yet to see a subway with one

I recently had a complaint with a website:

“Users are having trouble scrolling!”

My response:

“Are they using the scroll wheel/directly scrolling with the touchpad, or using the scroll bar?”

They were, of course, using the scroll bar. I am now somehow responsible for design choices made at the level of the browser, because browsers have decided that the scroll bar should be nigh impossible to use. Yippee.

Evolution doesn’t really care about quality of life, so long as an organism still reproduces. If every organism in a species is in horrendous, absolutely unconscionable pain and suffering for their entire existence but always manages to successfully pass on their genes, then the species can absolutely be deemed “successful”. In a way, we have a symbiotic relationship with e.g. cows: even if we cause them mass suffering as individuals, as a species our relationship is mutually beneficial and that’s all evolution really cares about at the end of the day.

There are billions of cows, chickens, etc. in the world. Purely by numbers, those species are incredibly successful. Yet, If not for humans finding them tasty and easy to manage, we would not have bred them to this degree and they wouldn’t have reached this degree of success. Somehow, against all odds, being tasty/something we want to eat has somehow become an incredibly valuable and successful adaptation.

Evolution is absolutely wild, and this really drives home the fact that evolution isn’t about the individual’s likelihood of survival, but their likelihood of reproduction.

FINALLY

She’s not even holding the flute right. I’m not sure the Lord will appreciate her fingerings

Actually, it’s spelled curb in the US

Maybe they’re double-sided PDFs? /s

As well as the “U” in USB, interpreted rather generally

I’ll just leave this here. In short: a guy wrote a physics engine to simulate any combustion engine, and then further got it working with an electric motor so electric motors can use a simulated vroom vroom

https://youtu.be/4U41OxHiqI8

tl;dr: my PHEV does change gears when in EV mode, as weird as it sounds

So, I drive a Hyundai Ioniq Plug-in Hybrid EV (PHEV). It’s a hybrid with a larger battery so you can plug it in and drive fully-EV on the battery for about 30 miles/50 kilometers or so. The freaky thing is that the EV motor is connected to the transmission, so it does switch gears sometimes and you can feel it when it does. Even freakier is that this also applies to regenerative braking: when you slow down from a high speed, you can sometimes feel it switching gears while you brake. That all isn’t too bad since it’s got a dual-clutch transmission and so it switches gears pretty quickly, but it can still be a bit freaky at times.

Additionally: there are some people who have converted antique cars to EVs, but to save money they didn’t touch the transmission and instead elected only to replace the engine. They still have manual transmissions in them, though I suppose you could probably just find a suitable gear to leave them on 100% of them time. Still, you can, in principle, switch gears on them.

and your phone only has one number… right?

Dual-SIM phones are a thing and have been for a LONG time. They’re not as common in the US (where I’m assuming you’re from given you aren’t familiar with dual-SIM phones) but even my S22 supports it, and I think even iPhones come with it stock now. A lot of people use two SIM cards for a multitude of reasons, and so many people have two numbers. Heck, some phones even support three SIM cards.

Dig they bring out a PC client yet btw?

It’s been out for a long time now. You have to set it up on your phone first but then you install the application on your computer, scan a QR code to link it, and at that point you can just disable notifications on your phone if you don’t want them.

I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.

I’ll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy

It wouldn’t necessarily collapse (it wasn’t exactly suffering before FOSS stuff “hit the shelves”, so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation