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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

    I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

    Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

    The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?


    Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to


  • I’m aware of how computers use numerical methods to get numbers that are good enough for a given precision.

    I meant more like a robust way to create physical slide rules for arbitrary uses. Here’s a set of tables of baking ratios, I want to comfortably look up x for a known y. That kind of thing.


  • You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

    Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.



  • Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.

    Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.

    I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?

    See some of today’s most watched reels!

    Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.

    Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

    I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.

    They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —

    Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

    (This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)

    And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.

    postscript

    This being Lemmy, I’m going to politely ask people to leave me be with my locked down phone OS and corporate malware. Yes yes I know, the only phone really worth using has a bare metal OS, you gotta ask your relatives to resend the family photos as ascii art so you can see your niblings in the CLI, you gotta laser out your phone’s processor’s clock and replace it with a mechanical switch that you flick back and forth so you can be 100% sure the phone isn’t running when you don’t want it to. I get it, I hear you, I’m just generally content with this phone and I’ll probably get its overpriced underwhelming successor in 5 years when I need a new one. It’s fine. It’s not a PC. The only thing missing is a headphone jack really.



  • Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

    I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

    Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?


  • If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

    I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

    Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

    At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.


  • I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

    Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

    At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

    Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

    A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

    I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems


  • Shame it’s not on iOS. I’ve corrected a few things on local maps directly on Google’s platform (hilariously, it keeps rejecting some of them which are clearly visible from the satellite image), but I’ve always wanted to fix up the local OSM map. It’s just really intimidating as someone with only a very surface level understanding of how GIS works.


  • I’ve seen those, and while the appeal of something I can set and not have to turn off at an exact time is there, I always felt like cleaning it looks like a bigger hassle than cleaning a small pot.

    The one I remember seeing had you puncture the base of the eggs, and then they sit on a plastic tray over a heated metal pad. The metal pad is attached to the heating element so you can’t just scrub that with soapy water if any egginess sticks to it. The plastic tray also looked like it had a lot of nooks and crannies where all sorts of eggy proteins can get stuck.

    That and single-purpose appliances don’t really appeal to me as I don’t have much space. Not to discount how helpful they are for people with different physical needs than me, but I don’t know.

    I eat enough hard boiled eggs that I consider getting one every so often, which is why this comment is as unnecessarily long as it is.