Giver of skulls

Verified icon

  • 0 Posts
  • 843 Comments
Joined 101 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 1923

help-circle
  • I don’t really know what people are doing to enrich their vocabulary and fluff up their language to be honest; my vocabulary and writing all stem from high school. However, my experience is that in order to write well, you need to read a lot. Learn what works for others, consider why it may not work for you, and pick up the good bits. If all else fails, open a dictionary, pick a word every day, and try to use it in a sentence before going to bed, just so you learn more synonyms and specific terms.

    I’m pretty sure that when it comes to job applications, most people are probably using AI these days. Unless you think you can beat AI, it doesn’t hurt to let the some kind of AI go over your text and steal some or the good bits.






  • Light warmth is something the manufacturer controls. There’s nothing (except for maybe regulation somewhere) preventing manufacturers from adding high-CRI LEDs calibrated to warm white to cars. The price difference isn’t that high compared to the price if a car. The harsh, blue light is a choice.

    And while there is a difference between LEDs and halogens, it’s not that big of an issue. Especially with competent diffusers over the LEDs.


  • LEDs are brighter at the same voltage and amperage, but not necessarily blinding. What’s blinding is the idiotic height at which headlights are mounted today, misconfigured headlights (you’re supposed to adjust them as you add more load to your car so they’re angled right, which many people don’t seem to know), and above all, people who don’t know what they’re doing replacing light bulbs with LEDs without the necessary load in series.

    If anything, LEDs having MUCH better lifespans than bulbs is saving people.


  • uBO effectively blocks every ad that can be blocked. Youtube has started to insert the ads directly into the video stream and that’s not practically blockable.

    Combining multiple ad blockers can interfere with ad blocking, though. Try creating a new, temporary profile with default settings and no addons, installing uBO, and see if it’s still broken.


  • Because you’re not paying extra for those problems to get fixed. And no, when you receive millions of forms per day, not every piece of feedback makes it back to someone to actually fix the issue. Especially when half those issues are “when I don’t have internet I don’t receive new emails”.

    Software, like hardware, is a balance between supply and demand. People would rather pay less for a phone crammed full of ads than pay for a service. Just look at YouTube for that one.

    Also, those clunky interfaces are there for a reason. Maybe the interface element that’s a lot better doesn’t work in right to left languages. Maybe the information overload of too many buttons and labels made the old interface impossible to extend. Maybe the prettier solution doesn’t work with screen readers or with the font size and colour cranked up for people with low vision. Maybe the feature redesign worked great but SomeCorp Tweaker Software will bluescreen the machine when it finds the word “checkbox” in a settings page for your mouse. Maybe the design team had a great idea but the feature needs to ship next week so whatever needs to happen to make that works happens, and the five other features planned for the month already eat up the rest of the dev team’s time anyway.

    But most of the time, things are suboptimal because there are seven teams of people working on features on the same screen/system/application and they need to make do.

    If you have serious issues with some software, many companies will let you partner with them. In exchange for hundreds of thousands or millions, you can directly get support for your use cases, your workflow, and the stuff you need to get done, over the billions of other people that also need to use the software. And sometimes, that means your super duper expensive preference/feature/demand means someone else’s workflow is entirely broken.

    If you know what you want, there is a way out: going the way of open source and self hosted. Within a few years, you too will grow resentful of dozens of systems made by different people all interpreting standards differently and not working together. You have the power to fix each and every feature, bug, problem, and design flaw, but none of the time or the detailed knowledge. You don’t have the money to pay experts, and even if you did, what they do may not entirely suit you either. Trying to fix everything will drive you absolutely mad. And that’s why companies and people often don’t try for perfection.



  • Arbitration court with one person is a win for the company. Arbitration court with a thousand people is a massive loss for the company. That’s why these arbitration clauses aren’t always bad. If anything, for small cases they’re good for the people because the bulk of the legal charges are paid by the companies that write these clauses.

    A bunch of large companies went through a phase where they all went for arbitration clauses, and a bunch of them moved back quickly after they found out how much more expensive paying for ten thousand arbitration cases was compared to just one single class action lawsuit. Maintaining ten thousand legally binding, individually composed outcomes can haunt them for decades if they’re unlucky.

    Steam has learned the same lesson here.



  • Based on my experience with drunks around roads, the cars generally aren’t at fault. People do real stupid shit when they’re drunk, like taking a highway tunnel instead of walking the extra 500m for the pedestrian tunnel. You can have all the protection you want, but if you’re to drunk to walk straight and end up in traffic there’s nothing to protect you. Same shit also happens with train tracks every now and then. Hell, I’ve even read stories about traffic deaths when drunk people and bikes collided (especially if the person on the bike was elderly).

    If you’re drunk enough that you can’t navigate the streets about as well as when you’re sober, take a cab or the bus or have someone pick you up. That’ll also help in case you run into health issues because of excessive alcohol intake.

    As a bonus for drunk accidents: because of the delayed response you may walk away from certain crashes with fewer injuries because your body doesn’t tense up to attempt to distribute the impact. On the other hand, you’re much worse off with other accidents.



  • Bad chargers, clearly damaged devices that are still used, you name it. Several exploding iPhone stories turned out to be the result of cheap, shitty chargers. Anything with a lithium battery can light on fire or even explode if you handle it wrong.

    There’s a good chance that Samsung should still be made to pay up for the damages and compensation, but I’ve seen people do very stupid things to portable electronics containing batteries.

    Based on the pictures, the earphone looks like it was on fire on both sides. That’s not a literal explosion at least (there’d be more than just hearing damage if it were). My guess is the lithium battery got damaged somehow and the escaping hydrogen gas caught fire One reason not to use earphones that have batteries inside your ear; had the batteries been hanging from the bottom like those Apple ones, the hearing damage probably wouldn’t have been as bad.


  • I’ve never worked for a company with the shitty HR people complain about online. Must be a regional thing.

    I don’t have the expectation that HR will always be there to protect you (though one company I’ve worked for had HR that actively fought upper management for things like raises and pension stuff). HR is there so the company, and by extension everyone in the company, can do their work properly. If you have a conflict at work, they’re not obligated to be on your side.