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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • My grade school bully is serving life in prison for attempted double homicide. IIRC he’s also a sex offender.

    Obviously the decisions he made as an adult are his responsibility, but honestly I feel bad for him. He didn’t have much of a chance. His home life was terrible, and he took it out on those around him. He had no positive role models in his daily life besides those at his school, who were always punishing him because he couldn’t conform to a world utterly foreign to his own where people weren’t constantly shitty to one another, and the school didn’t have any better idea how to handle him. The kid had no support. His father was in and out of jail/prison, his mother was overwhelmed. He fell through the cracks.

    It’s no surprise he turned out a piece of shit.

    That doesn’t excuse his actions. Plenty of people come from difficult origins and are good people leading decent lives.

    But I do pity him.


  • Some of that has disappeared with RCS support, fortunately.

    But yes, Apple successfully positioned their texting app as a rich formatted chat app when used between iPhone users, behaving more like WhatsApp or KakaoTalk or other chat apps than like traditional texting. But when messaging people without iPhones, it was just standard texting (worse, since they would degrade the quality of MMS images more than necessary, as I understand). To the uninformed, this seemed like everyone else were the ones lagging behind. “How could your phone be any good? Images you send are terrible. I can’t name chats that have you in it. If I react to your messages it spams the group chat.” Etc.

    Brilliant, but absolutely evil, move by Apple. Unfortunately it worked. The only reason I use an iPhone today is that years ago I got tired of being left out of conversations and media sharing by my family and my wife’s family, who all use iPhones. So when my OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren Edition died an early, watery death (rest in peace, king among phones) and nothing else really wowed me in the Android space at the time, I bit the bullet and went to the dark side. I enjoy the iPhone, but I’m still bitter about why I got it.




  • You can make it do a bunch of stuff if you get creative with shortcuts.

    My action button silences the media volume (and the phone just in case) and then vibrates the phone to tell me it has done this IF the phone is in a face-down orientation. Otherwise it toggles the flashlight on or off.

    I’ve seen people with dozens of actions tied to the button depending on focus mode, orientation, time of day, location, all sorts of stuff.









  • I often hear americans (even scientists) say that they prefer the Fahrenheit scale for weather forecasts, but I believe the perceived higher accuracy is an illusion. Forecasts aren’t that accurate for any given micro climate.

    When I switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius I used a rough heuristic to get the Fahrenheit value from Celsius. What I discovered was that my heuristic, which was rounded and would skip entire degrees Fahrenheit, matched most weather apps’ Fahrenheit value.

    For example, if my app said 20°C, the other person’s said 68°F. If mine said 21°C, theirs said 70°F. If mine said 22°C, theirs said 72°F. If mine said 23°C, theirs said 73°F. It is very rare that mine has said, say, 21°C and theirs has said 69°F (or any temperature where the value was converted with decimals and then rounded).

    That is to say, my experience certainly seems to indicate that for people using the same weather sources but in Fahrenheit, the value was still rounded to the nearest degree Celsius, then converted to Fahrenheit and rounded again.

    That’s not to say you’ll never see 71°F or 69°F or other values that aren’t converted from an already rounded Celsius value, it all depends on what your data source is providing you. But nearly always, my rounded conversion from a rounded Celsius value matches what other people see in Fahrenheit.

    This makes complete sense, because most people cannot tell the difference between 70°F and 71°F. And it’s difficult to predict regardless.

    Edit: this could also just be a lack of sampling and dearth of values where the rounded-converted-rounded value differs from the converted-then-rounded value. I don’t know.


  • Copying this post I made elsewhere recently:

    I used to say this. But being a curious person, and one willing to test my own hypothesis, I decided to learn Celsius. Like, spend enough time with it to intuitively understand it, so that I could compare the two.

    Almost six years later, I haven’t switched back. I much prefer Celsius for weather. Having 0° at freezing is far more useful than I suspected it would be, and having less granular degrees gives them more meaning, which makes understanding them easier.

    Seriously, I struggle to express just how useful below-freezing temperatures being negative is. -5°C means so much more to me than 23°F, and that’s after thirty years of using Fahrenheit and only six of using Celsius.

    Edit: this isn’t to discount what you’re saying, just to offer my own opinion on the matter. Having experienced both, I much prefer Celsius. But obviously everyone will have their own opinions.



  • And it’s on the IAEA to declare that they are indeed working on a weapons program, not speculation and assumption like yours.

    Okay. Don’t use your reason if you’d prefer not to. It does make me wonder though:

    Do you think the killing of the civilian scientists was wrong because they were civilian scientists, or because they were ostensibly working on an energy program?

    Because as I said, I’m not claiming the murders were justified, just that we ought to be honest about the why.

    There are plenty making the argument that Iran needs a nuclear weapons program to prevent exactly these types of attacks. That is intellectually honest. I’m not sure where I fall on that argument, I’d rather no one have nuclear weapons (but obviously that’s not going to happen).

    The difference between 5% and 60% enrichment is pretty huge. And the research and effort required to get there is neither cheap nor easy. If what they’re after is nuclear energy, there is absolutely no reason to continue risking the ire of the international community and the repeated attacks by Israel. They’ve had energy-level uranium for a very long time already.