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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

    There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

    But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…



  • A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

    If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

    • Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

    • Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

    • Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

    Etc.





  • Share pictures of yourself, or your children, only with actual friends and not for the whole world to find

    Good advice but let’s be real: in practice, this means having no social media profile, and even that is a half-measure.

    Even if I carefully curate my friends list (most people don’t), and share my photos with only my inner circle (most people won’t), I have no control over what my friends do. If my cousin posts a photo he took at Thanksgiving, it’s probably going to be visible to all his friends, and even friends-of-friends. That’s thousands of people I’ve never met and there’s not much I can do about it.

    There are pictures of me on Facebook, and I do not use Facebook. The social cost of getting on everyone’s ass about taking/posting pictures with me is too high even for a grumpy old fart like me. At least I’m not tagged (since I don’t have a profile), so it’s not neatly pre-sorted for potential attackers. But that’s at best security through obscurity, and it isn’t even very obscure. Anyone targeting me specifically would have no trouble finding pictures of me, and none of that is realistically within my control.

    It’s more like “beater bike security”. Any bike lock can be thwarted by a dedicated thief, so the best strategy is simply to be a less attractive target than the other bikes around.

    This is a systemic problem. It goes beyond individual choices and even beyond social media policies.




  • Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.

    Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth that breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.

    But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

    It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.


  • The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

    Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

    They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

    Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

    If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

    Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

    It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.










  • I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.

    The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.

    Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.