[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I think Discovery had the worst. It isn't the technobabbke it self that was the problem, it was how it was delivered.

Everyone seemed to be needed to be the most intelligent person in the room. So one person would start with some sudden realisation and solution, and then another would interrupt them and pick up the idea and then either back to the first person, or yet another person would interrupt. Between then all they'd build a tower of technobabble and deus ex machina, and self congratulatory nonsense. It was just so silly.

Person 1 "wait if we reveresed the polarity of the neutron projector..."

Person 2 "yes! It'd cause a build of tachyons and we'd be able to resonate the electron confabulaotr! Oh but there wouldn't be enough plasma."

Person 3: "no wait, that might work! We'd have to recomboulate the manifolds and..."

Person 1: "...that would allow us to recrystallise the warp matrix! Of course!'

Whose a genius? Everyone in the room is a genius! Let's all give ourselves a round of applause.

That and all the space kung fu.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 hours ago

Disc and disk are varient spellings of the same word that pre-exist computing. Disc is more common in British English, Disk more common in American English. But yeah since computing came along disk has also been used more for magnetic media (hard disk) while disc has been used more for optical media (compact disc). I wouldn't be surprised if this only happened because of how the CD was marketed and branded as a "compact disc" as a trademark while hard disks and floppy disks etc were more generic terms.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago

Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.

This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I'm not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a "material deception" - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?

Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to "defraud" rather than take advantage / game a system.

It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.

Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice's of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

No I thinks is basically right although could be better worded maybe

/sys is virtual file structure for kernel system info

/proc is virtual file structure of kernel process info

My understanding is /proc came first but was abused/free for all and started being used for all sorts of non standard/process kernel access. So /sys was created with stricter rules to make it more standardised.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

The US healthcare system is built around money and profit. A cheaper procedure which does not require general anaesthetic costs less, and reduces profit. That can be beneficial to the providers but bloat is incentivised in the US healthcare system as providers battle with insurance companies for money. Crudely healthcare providers don't care about saving you money; they want to take as much money as they can get.

Meanwhile, countries with tax funded health care opt for the most cost effective procedures, investigations and treatments. The incentive is to reduce costs and offer the most effective things to the most people possible. That can also sometimes have negative side effects if not carefully regulated but in such systems generally Doctors advocate for the best procedure and best medical practice, as they themselves do not directly benefit financially from which procedure is pushed. The downside is you do get the opposite side of things where patients are dissuaded from things as they're not deemed cost effective by those who control the spending.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

Yea it is user friendly. If you're using your computer once a week presumably its for things like web browsing or working with documents - these are very easy and straight forward to do in linux.

The other big benefit is the cost - linux is free and you'll save £120 on a basic version of Windows which can be used to get get a better PC or just saved.

Add to that no advertising, much more private and entirely yours to do what you like with. And if you don't like it you can easily install Windows instead, so its zero risk to try Linux.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago

Might be even simpler - the elderly can decline very quickly mentally and also physically, and that may he what we're seeing with here.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

Fossify Phone is better. Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps which has a history of bloating apps with advertising, telemetry, and charges etc. Fortunately Simple tools were open source and Fossify is the free and open source fork of all the apps in the suite, some even maintained by original makers from Simple Mobile Tools.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 6 days ago

Well there is more to this than avoiding the sun. He also looks like he hasn't been though puberty which has nothing to do with the sun.

[-] [email protected] 204 points 6 days ago

This is a fluff piece written by someone in a rich bubble.

The 2 year old and 4 year old have no concept of money, the 4 year old did not "do most of the work" in a lemonade stand, and they do not have "their own money" to spend. Picking up after yourself and putting dishes in the sink are not chores, and kids this age aren't taking out the trash - of course they enjoy it when mummy does it and makes a big deal of how grown up the kids are for helping, and probably rewards then for it.

None of the ideas are innovative or relevant to most parents, and particularly not with a kids that age. This is just one rich bored parent with young kids sharing their "experiences". Pretty out of touch with reality.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

Yeah the why is laziness I guess? Why walk when you can drive a smaller electric buggy for small distances and a big car for big distances?

Golf carts make sense in retirement communities - presumably the companies behind them are "growing the market" by targeting families as an alternative to push chairs and walking? Also I'm guessing these are American neighbourhoods which still are designed around cars than true walkability?

[-] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago

The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.

It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.

The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).

Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?

Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn't going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The New York Times has used a DMCA take down notice to remove an open source Wordle clone called Reactle

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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I'd been having problems with the scale of the VLC interface at 4K on my Linux machine (KDE Plasma, Wayland).

I found a solution from a mix of previous solutions for Windows and other Linux solutions which did not work for me. The problem is with QT (which is used by VLC) and the linux solution was to put extra lines in the /etc/environment file but I found while this fixed VLC it mucked up all other QT apps including my Plasma desktop.

The solution is to use VLC flatpak and set the environment variables for the VLC flatpak app only using Flatseal or the Flatpak Permission Settings in KDE.

Add two Environment variable:

Variable name: QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR Variable value: 0

Variable name: QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS Variable value: 2

For the second variable, scale_factors, set it to match the scaling you use on your desktop. 1.0 means 100%, 1.5 is 150%, 2 is 200% and so on. My desktop is set to 225% scaling, so I set mine to 2.25 and it worked. In the end I went up to 3 for VLC because I liked the interface even more at that scale (it's a living room TV Linux machine)

Hopefully this will help other people using VLC in Linux.

If you don't want to use Flatpak, you can add the same variables to your /etc/environment file (in the format QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0) but be warned you may get jank elsewhere. This may be less problematic outside of KDE Plasma as that is QT based desktop environment. For Windows users it is a similar problem with QT and there are posts out there about where to put the exact same variables to fix the problem.

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BananaTrifleViolin

joined 1 year ago