TheRealKuni

My grade school bully is serving life in prison for attempted double homicide. IIRC he’s also a sex offender.

Obviously the decisions he made as an adult are his responsibility, but honestly I feel bad for him. He didn’t have much of a chance. His home life was terrible, and he took it out on those around him. He had no positive role models in his daily life besides those at his school, who were always punishing him because he couldn’t conform to a world utterly foreign to his own where people weren’t constantly shitty to one another, and the school didn’t have any better idea how to handle him. The kid had no support. His father was in and out of jail/prison, his mother was overwhelmed. He fell through the cracks.

It’s no surprise he turned out a piece of shit.

That doesn’t excuse his actions. Plenty of people come from difficult origins and are good people leading decent lives.

But I do pity him.

Some of that has disappeared with RCS support, fortunately.

But yes, Apple successfully positioned their texting app as a rich formatted chat app when used between iPhone users, behaving more like WhatsApp or KakaoTalk or other chat apps than like traditional texting. But when messaging people without iPhones, it was just standard texting (worse, since they would degrade the quality of MMS images more than necessary, as I understand). To the uninformed, this seemed like everyone else were the ones lagging behind. “How could your phone be any good? Images you send are terrible. I can’t name chats that have you in it. If I react to your messages it spams the group chat.” Etc.

Brilliant, but absolutely evil, move by Apple. Unfortunately it worked. The only reason I use an iPhone today is that years ago I got tired of being left out of conversations and media sharing by my family and my wife’s family, who all use iPhones. So when my OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren Edition died an early, watery death (rest in peace, king among phones) and nothing else really wowed me in the Android space at the time, I bit the bullet and went to the dark side. I enjoy the iPhone, but I’m still bitter about why I got it.

You can make it do a bunch of stuff if you get creative with shortcuts.

My action button silences the media volume (and the phone just in case) and then vibrates the phone to tell me it has done this IF the phone is in a face-down orientation. Otherwise it toggles the flashlight on or off.

I’ve seen people with dozens of actions tied to the button depending on focus mode, orientation, time of day, location, all sorts of stuff.

As I understand it there have been a few towns over the years that have tried to ban them for pearl-clutchy reasons. “Oh think of the children!” or “how indecent!” type of thing.

Apparently they’re illegal in the entire state of Idaho.

And anything as harmless and silly as truck nuts that makes old uptight people lose their shit is something worth fighting for.

Most EVs have transmissions, they’re just usually single-speed. They have to adjust the RPM of the electric motor to a speed usable by the wheels.

Some have two-speed gearboxes, like the Porsche Taycan. This is needed because EV motors produce full torque at 0RPM and it stays there as the power increases, but eventually you reach a point where the power plateaus and the torque falls off. If you want more power at high speeds, you have to use a second gear.

Man, say what you will about truck culture, and I’ll probably agree, but I fuckin’ love truck nuts. I don’t know why, I don’t think it’s just immaturity because bodily humor isn’t usually my thing. But something about truck nuts makes me laugh.

I especially love that they trigger people enough that some places ban them.

I often hear americans (even scientists) say that they prefer the Fahrenheit scale for weather forecasts, but I believe the perceived higher accuracy is an illusion. Forecasts aren’t that accurate for any given micro climate.

When I switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius I used a rough heuristic to get the Fahrenheit value from Celsius. What I discovered was that my heuristic, which was rounded and would skip entire degrees Fahrenheit, matched most weather apps’ Fahrenheit value.

For example, if my app said 20°C, the other person’s said 68°F. If mine said 21°C, theirs said 70°F. If mine said 22°C, theirs said 72°F. If mine said 23°C, theirs said 73°F. It is very rare that mine has said, say, 21°C and theirs has said 69°F (or any temperature where the value was converted with decimals and then rounded).

That is to say, my experience certainly seems to indicate that for people using the same weather sources but in Fahrenheit, the value was still rounded to the nearest degree Celsius, then converted to Fahrenheit and rounded again.

That’s not to say you’ll never see 71°F or 69°F or other values that aren’t converted from an already rounded Celsius value, it all depends on what your data source is providing you. But nearly always, my rounded conversion from a rounded Celsius value matches what other people see in Fahrenheit.

This makes complete sense, because most people cannot tell the difference between 70°F and 71°F. And it’s difficult to predict regardless.

Edit: this could also just be a lack of sampling and dearth of values where the rounded-converted-rounded value differs from the converted-then-rounded value. I don’t know.

Copying this post I made elsewhere recently:

I used to say this. But being a curious person, and one willing to test my own hypothesis, I decided to learn Celsius. Like, spend enough time with it to intuitively understand it, so that I could compare the two.

Almost six years later, I haven’t switched back. I much prefer Celsius for weather. Having 0° at freezing is far more useful than I suspected it would be, and having less granular degrees gives them more meaning, which makes understanding them easier.

Seriously, I struggle to express just how useful below-freezing temperatures being negative is. -5°C means so much more to me than 23°F, and that’s after thirty years of using Fahrenheit and only six of using Celsius.

Edit: this isn’t to discount what you’re saying, just to offer my own opinion on the matter. Having experienced both, I much prefer Celsius. But obviously everyone will have their own opinions.

Rick Sanchez defined the subset of the multiverse where he is the smartest being in the universe as the “Central Finite Curve.”

That’s pretty narcissistic.

Oh wow, that brought me through a wormhole to the past.

And if you like Sawbones, check out My Brother, My Brother, and Me.

It’s a comedy advice podcast from the lovable idiot and his two brothers. It’s great fun, and was referenced in the musical Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda is a big fan).

also I am in therapy figuring myself out and wouldn’t be right to pull someone else through this.

I personally disagree with this reasoning. I used to believe something similar about myself, but it turns out having a partner helped me immensely. I didn’t drag her down, she pulled me up.

Those are just ideas that were previously “generated” by humans though, that the LLM learned

That’s not how modern generative AI works. It isn’t sifting through its training dataset to find something that matches your query like some kind of search engine. It’s taking your prompt and passing it through its massive statistical model to come to a result that meets your demand.

From there it just talks about a lot of things we could do with a fraction of the wealth of the wealthiest 400 Americans. Things like ending homelessness in America, ending malaria worldwide, and many others. By mildly inconveniencing 400 people, who would still all be absurdly wealthy billionaires even if 60% of their wealth were taken, we could dramatically improve the world.

Stop demonizing your neighbor. Demonize the 1%.

Even more than the 1%, the 0.0001%. An excellent resource to illustrate this point:

Wealth Shown to Scale

I feel like everyone should go through this at least once. It’s eye-opening. Even people who we generally think of as crazy rich, like the average hedge fund manager, are just a drop of water in a pond compared to the ultra-wealthy.

I guess I’m searching for another Zelda:BotW. Which isn’t Tears of the Kingdom.

I’m confused by this. TotK is very much just BotW but with more. The construction mechanism is really fun, the three overlapping maps are cool, it’s a good time. You get to see how the world of BotW has changed in the intervening time, and being able to make hover cycles to fly around the world is awesome.

For what it’s worth, choosing the T-Mobile option wouldn’t lock it to T-Mobile. It just includes some extra setup stuff, IIRC. If you’re buying it from Apple it isn’t carrier locked (with the exception of an AT&T installment plan, not sure if they still offer that).

https://imgur.com/enzEapG

If you’re buying it from Apple it isn’t carrier locked. The carrier options on their page just help get your sim ported over or something. They explain this on the site, the only time it’s carrier locked is if you do the AT&T installment plan.

https://imgur.com/enzEapG

I dunno, Fight Club?

In my neighborhood AT&T is offering gigabit fiber-to-the-house for $80/month, IIRC. Been meaning to switch to it, actually.

Edit: my point being, as long as they aren’t colluding to not compete with one another, you can get much better rates.