jimmycrackcrack

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Wouldn't the hydrolysis of the water take energy that required fuel though? The claim seemed to be more that the water was the fuel so to speak, as in the same way that petrol is in current combustion engines.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

My guess is they got confused with the concept of "flame wars" and "flaming" from forums. It doesn't quite match their definition of "unwanted" messages exactly, but it's not entirely far off either.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

I was told a similar thing but the claim was that the person had invented an engine that ran on water haha.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Never thought of the idea of "alright" being an issue. I can see why it makes sense, it's obviously derived from "all right", though funnily enough that never occurred to me because I've always just thought of it as a word in its own right and never pondered its derivation.

So do you also "all ready" and "all though" and "all ways"? That just seems weird.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I don't know, not the worst in this thread at least.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

They are quite exceptionally good and I really wish other consumers products had a website like that one with as much trust as that one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wouldn't you just get distracted and put it off for later like you already do when you already have control of yourself albeit through the very same ADHD-addled brain you were hoping would for some reason spend the one, in some way supernatural minute, highly effectively?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeh I think people like this idea because of a kind of ironic poetic justice since it's those guys who wanted to replace everyone else except themselves with AI, but if you think about how much you hated those uncaring bastards operating like robots just to extract an ounce of profit at whatever the human cost, imagine now actually being a robot. Also, if you ever had to deal with bullshit from those guys and resented having to grin and bear it even though you don't think they're particularly qualified and also know nothing about your job, imagine having to be "managed" by a fucking robot that tries to say patronising encouraging things because it's learned the very best pattern of speech to get the behaviour it wants out of you. Admittedly at least some of the decision making might be a bit more rational, but then every now and then AI gets things totally out of wack in the strangest ways and you'll have to just take those decisions, from a damn machine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

It's also good since it's low stakes. I mean I'd be furious if misidentified after I paid to use the game and but at the end of the day it's only a game.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Did you guys ghost one another or just lose contact? Because I think those are different.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The problem with answering that, is that there's no set standard for the appropriate amount of apathy so really however much there is, that's how much there should be and not too little or too much, that's just how apathetic humans are and there's nothing to compare against for judging appropriate levels. Why are we as apathetic as we are? In my opinion it's pretty similar to why climate change is so difficult to address, which makes sense as apathy is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to addressing it. In general, it's more difficult to energise, co-ordinate and sustain collective human effort on a large scale for issues that don't seem immediate, tangible, easily attributable, physically visible and where the solution and action to be taken isn't simple to understand, or the improvement simple to observe and also reasonably short term (or at least promises to be). Long term, society wide projects usually require more than just an appeal to better nature. People caring, people wanting to help each other, people wanting fairness or kindness or just treatment, as innate desires does work to motivate, but I think tends to work on mostly on the smaller scale, when it's for small in-groups, preferably people we've actually met and with immediate social pressures to reinforce these pro-social desires.

Human beings are capable of complex, difficult, awe-inspiring projects for "good" or "bad" but those tend to involve more diffuse motivations and more immediate rewards/incentives where those motivations are their most removed from the original instigators. Some few people involved might be motivated by altruism or something esoteric like an interest in science or a religious belief, but if their goals involve the masses it's usually going to mean filtering their motivation down through stakeholders, to careerists, money makers and then on down to people looking for subsistence and in many cases down to people who are enslaved and don't want to be killed or harmed and so work.

To top all that off there's the more obvious problem of the difficulty in keeping more and more people in bigger and bigger projects all on the same page about what to do, how to do it, or if we even want to do it. If the important issue you're thinking of is for example inequality, it's going to be very hard to get agreement on what that actually is, if that's even a good or bad thing, how we should deal with it or even if we should deal with it and many of the people in this debate will probably be passionate in their position. Complex "important" issues also tend to involve beneficiaries who would somewhat understandably not want to work against their own interests and so shape their environment to the best of their ability such that the easier thing to do is tolerate the issue making the near impossible mountain of getting human beings together for the greater good harder still by design. This theory maybe has some flaws, depending on how you frame the important issue. If for example the important issue were crime, you could argue that for the most part for most people it's fairly easy to get them not to just murder strangers on a whim or for some petty gain, even racists probably walk through an average day surrounded by people of many ethnicities and cultures but don't generally (with notable exceptions) need to be convinced or induced not to physically harm everyone they walk past and this tends to hold true on a larger scale not just the in-groups as I described, but as a rule of thumb, in my view I think this is basically how we operate. How much we care, how much we can muster courage, how much personal risk or resources or energy we can spare for manifesting ideals is usually proportional to the degree of direct impact they have upon us personally, how close we are to the people affected by an issue and how easy it is to identify and rectify the issue and also how long it will take and how often you'll have to act. I think you could probably draw direct, inversely proportional lines on a scale of how much apathy is shown and a declining slope on any of those measures. I suspect this is from our nature and biological origins, but this is not an assertion I can back up rigorously.

Finally, depending on the issue, sometimes it really is rationally better to tolerate an issue where all the solutions are bad and could make things worse. Tends to be difficult to reach consensus on when we're in such a situation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Well if we're here seeing the post and responding...guess

 

The confirmation page says the order is confirmed but instead of providing tracking information, it has a button that says 'Download Shop to track package'. Obviously I'm not going to do that, but I do want to track my package.

I thought I could at least click the link to see if somewhere in the chain of steps that would normally follow if one were going to download the app, I might glean the tracking number so I can track the package, but unfortunately, the shop app that I refuse to get on principal because of the shady tactics used to coerce people in to downloading it is even worse than I expected because it can't even scam people competently. The download button is supposed to generate some kind of QR code for you phone. I hoped this QR code might actually have embedded the tracking number in it, in which case I could just grab it that way, but it looks as though the QR code is failing to generate, instead I'm seeing what looks like a heavily zoomed in screencapture of a website with home search trolley and account icons and a sentence partially covered up by a swirly arrow logo. I thought it might have been my browser, but it's the same even on Chrome.

I now can't even use the shop app even if I wanted to, because whether I allow it to be installed on my phone or not, there will be no means I can think of where the tracking number can be transmitted to it so, and because the online store hasn't provided a real tracking number I can't do things the normal way either. Anyone know how to get around this? Or at least force the QR code to actually generate so maybe I can extract something useful from it?

 

I'm backing up my photos from a trip to my computer and have just discovered how frustratingly difficult it seems to be to use a computer to make my selection of a single still from the image sequences the Pixel sometimes takes (forget what it calls them).

I know you can you use the photos app but I want to use my computer (a mac). Preview just considers them stills, so it essentially picks one for me (I assume it's the last still in the sequence), that's usually what I want but they take up more space and if I can't choose a different still then it defeats the purpose.

EDIT: As it turns out, Top shot (the Google name for these 'image sequences' I was referring to), doesn't do what I thought it did. I thought it was just fancy burst mode where the shots in the burst are treated as one file on storage, and where the decision to use burst or not is automated with clever 'AI'. That's not totally wrong except that it isn't an 'image' sequence in the sense that I know it. It records a video and a still when you take a top shot. I'm not exactly sure, but I think basically the last frame is a still and everything you see before is a 'video'. The distinction here is that the video is a video in the sense that it isn't comprised of still images in common stills formats nor at the resolution and other capabilities of the pixel's still cameras. The video is a video file recorded in a video format, using a video codec, at a lower resolution, minus HDR and with the compression techniques of video leading basically to just drastically lower quality images. In essence if you use the photos app as intended to select a still from the sequence recorded as a top shot, you can select between 1 photo of the best available quality (depending on your stills settings) and multiple useless video stills of poor quality. This explains why all the posts I found whilst researching my query were from people who wanted to extract a video and a still, which I thought was odd because surely you would want the constituent stills comprising the video with which you could do whatever you wanted including making a video from them for some reason if it floats your boat. Now I realise it's because there is only a video and a still inside the 'MP.jpg' files and they just want to split those 2 elements apart, in fact I think a lot of those asking were trying to split them apart so they could delete the useless video and save space. Not thrilled to learn this. Definitely switching off top shot from now on as it is both useless in almost ever scenario, but also, due to the automated nature of when its used, taking up greatly increased storage space whilst delivering so much less benefit than I had presumed. Icing on the cake, Google apparently introduced this top shot feature some time ago and replaced an existing burst mode that actually worked as one would expect so now I can't invoke an actually useful burst mode on demand when I want it as one would have done in the past because the function... doesn't exist anymore, great!

 

Planning a trip to 2 countries. Want to buy travel insurance for the leg of the trip taking place in the second country, after the first.

As far as I understand, this should be fine, I specify the dates of the trip to the insurance company from the day I arrive in the 2nd country to the day I leave it and if need be I'll be able provide proof that I was there (boarding passes, tickets, passport stamps) if needing to make a claim. I'd also buy the insurance prior to leaving my home country, which I know is important. It all sounds theoretically fine but I'm just worried there's going to be some unexpected gotcha in doing this.

Obviously this will depend on the fine print of my specific chosen insurance and I'm reading through all 100+ pages of it, but nevertheless the ability for this to somehow contravene something in a counterintuitive or unexpected manner even if I don't see it explicitly spelled out worries me given how tricky insurance companies can be and I wondered if this was something generally known to be a problem.

UPDATE: called the insurance company I was considering. They said there was no problem with this, as long as I bought the insurance prior to leaving my home country, which was always the plan anyway. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if the 'journey' as they define it begins after departing from a different country to my home country.

 

Really as similar as possible but I guess the must haves for me are:

  • Dark theme
  • Swipe to type ability (I usually tap but definitely want swiping as well)
  • Searchable emoji's
  • Word suggestions

Nice to have:

  • Text editing tools for moving cursor just one character at a time through button presses
  • Clipboard button
  • Copied text automatically becomes next suggested word the first time the keyboard is invoked after copying the text
  • Suggested next word.
view more: next ›