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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • By then, I don’t think that the use of earth’s orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you’re living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn’t make a good unit of measurement. And don’t get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times…

    I’d prefer to base the new unit of time based on “Plank time”. About 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It’s about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that’s it.

    That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.



  • Israel cares a whole lot about its hostages. Evidence for that are the prices they were willing to pay in the past.

    But sure, let’s go with your logic. Why can’t Israel just go carpet-bombing the crowded part in the south of the Gaza strip that all the refugees fled to? It would be a very effective way to eradicate them all. They are so crowded in such a small area that it’s possible to kill a couple hundred thousands in a single day. Wow, Israel has a lot to learn on how to ethnically cleanse a region.


  • This is simply not true.

    There were talks about up to 15 hostages, of 239 in demand for 4 days of ceasefire. Hamas needs this ceasefire desperately to regroup and assess the damages. The chaos now serves Israel well and apparently it puts much more pressure on Hamas. The ground invasion proves very effective. Maybe as Hamas becomes more desperate the “price” for the hostages will drop. Alternatively, if Israel will allow them to regroup, the war will take significantly more time because it will be much harder to eradicate them. Maybe the Israelis know where the hostages are held and after a ceasefire the hostages will be transferred to a different hideout, or smuggled via the tunnels to Egypt and from there to who knows where.



  • I am quite comfortable finding my way around ArchLinux, and recently decided to give Gentoo a try. I didn’t expect it to be that much harder but all the cflags, emerge, conflicts and updates feels like black magic. I guess that if you know your way around Gentoo, reverse-engineering a deb file is not a real challenge. However I’m assuming that most Linux users would hope for a less involved solution.



  • It’s intentional. They’d like to drop features to cut on design and manufacture costs, while taking out features most of the target audience doesn’t really care about. Some of these are just greedy. Phones used to rely on microSD expansion, but once you drop this option you could charge for additional space much more than what the equivalent microSD card would cost. You can also stop shipping phones with chargers because most people have them anyway. This is pure profit as the customer is paying the same price, but doesn’t get a charger.

    As for other features, they probably dropped them because people just didn’t care enough.

    It seems to be incredibly difficult to design a phone from scratch, and that’s why we only see a handful of manufacturers, with the small endeavors being able to make something that looks obsolete by the time it rolls out and even then it takes a few months to overcome all the bugs and glitches. Fairphone is the closest we’ve got, but it’s still far off and strays further with each generation.


  • There are gaming phones, phones with crazy cameras, and iPhones where the lack of features is a feature. What I wish to have is a phone with as many features and functionality as possible.

    That includes (but not limited to): IR blaster Headphone jack MicroSD card slot FM Radio RGB Notification/Status LED

    Rather than a slim phone with a glossy finish that will pick up scratches right away unless wrapped in a phone case, the outer cover of the phone should be rugged and replaceable. Like with old Nokia phones. I don’t care about few extra grams, or another millimeter of thickness. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

    I was hopeful about the Fairphone at first, but they started removing features as well.


  • I think it’s like exoplanets. They were hypothesized on the basis that based on observation at that time they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of planets outside the solar system, and that the sun having planets couldn’t have been that unique. It’s just that it was believed that we wouldn’t be able to observe these exoplanets directly.

    The same thing goes with alien life. We have no conclusive evidence to deny extraterrestrial life, nor (to the best of my knowledge) conclusive evidence to confirm it, and it’s highly unlikely that the Earth is that unique. The question is whether we will be able to confirm the existence of alien life, and while that enough is thrilling, will humanity be able to interact with them within our lifetime. My guess is that sometime in the future we will have a breakthrough and we will be able to at least confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life beyond doubt.


  • Facebook kind of died and used the momentum it had to reinvent itself. Back in the day I used to see updates from my friends, and I used to interact with them. I stopped using Facebook at some point a few years ago and recently got back to it. I use Marketplace, and in my country people with the same hobby as me seem to interact over Facebook more than anything else. Younger people rarely upload except for a few very active outliers. Most of the content is these clickbaity short videos of 5-minute crafts or live-feeding frogs to slightly larger frogs because Facebook thinks I’m into it for some reason. They just made an addictive never-ending stream of content.


  • I really liked the times when features were added and not killed off.

    10 years ago you could purchase a flagship phone with IR blaster for controlling whatever you couldn’t find a remote for, or trolling people in public spaces by turning off their TVs. Cloud storage wasn’t as popular, but if your phone died, the images were safe on the micrSD card. Bluetooth headsets were a thing, but you could always just use a cheap pair of headphones to stick in the headphone jack. People who desired it could install a custom ROM with all kinds of optimizations and less bloat. It used to be a lot more popular back then. Other than cameras, battery life, and reversible and more robust USB-C connectors, there isn’t much innovation. I used to feel like I owned my device much more back then. Now I only use the stock ROM, can either use wireless headphones or ones that use the charging port. I can’t insert a microSD, or test new features for Android ported from other devices by someone on XDA Developers. I’m not using the phone the way I want, but the way the companies who made it decided on.







  • Chances are that Lemmy has about the same makeup of people as Reddit, mostly. I’d say that where the difference lies is in the amount of tolerance they have for Reddit shenanigans.

    Stupidity on the internet is amplified with resonance. One says something stupid, trolls or being rude, the other responds and the intelectual level of the discussion is plummeting. So my theory at least is that there’s about the same percentage of “stupid”. We just haven’t yet reached critical mass.