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Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 1) 117

I wouldn't call plant-based meat alternatives "healthy" unless your idea of healthy is dying of salt poisoning.

Meat is delicious, but a vegan diet is perfectly healthy.

I'm talking specifically about the meat substitutes that try to taste like meat. There are ways to have a healthy vegan diet, but a lot of the plant-based burgers and fake meat tend to be loaded up with large amounts of sodium salt. So switching to those because you think they are healthier may actually be way worse than not doing so.

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 188

Typically, for people with low vision, the serifs significantly degrade legibility.

This isn't actually true. For screens with low resolution, because of the way scaling works, serifs can degrade legibility, but because of the way human brains and eyes do superresolution with micro-eye movements to compensate for poor visual acuity, serifs should not degrade readability even if your vision is blurry.

More to the point, I have to scale up sans-serif fonts a lot more than serif fonts to work well with my eyesight. So I'm saying this from personal experience.

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 188

Serifs are _only_ for ease of reading if your printing technology is not very good. As soon as you do not have that problem, sans-serif fonts are significantly superior.

You actually have it entirely backwards. Serifs require a higher resolution to render, or else thin lines can disappear entirely. That's why some people incorrectly think that sans-serif fonts are more readable on screen; their screens simply aren't good enough to render serifs properly. (Pedantically, this means that sans-serif fonts are more readable on crappy screens.)

But if you have a screen with a high enough resolution to render them properly, fonts with serifs significantly increase reading comprehension and speed of reading for large blocks of normal-sized text. (citation, original book) And while it is possible to reduce the difficulty of reading sans-serif fonts through careful design, IMO, there's no good reason to believe that a version of Calibri with serifs would not still be more readable.

Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 188

To be fair, some serif fonts sometimes need 600 DPI to prevent lines from disappearing entirely because of poor font scaling software.

But the flip side is that assuming the serifs don't disappear because of scaling deficiencies, they are way more readable at small font sizes, particularly for people whose vision is not perfect. It is dramatically more legible to me than Calibri.

Comment Re:Isn't this what we wanted? (Score 1) 49

It's been 10-15 years, and people still don't really understand streaming. "There are too many services" - too many compared to what? I'd rather pay $30 a month to three of five providers for an ad-free service, each of which providing way more content than HBO or Cinemax ever did, than $100 a month to one monopoly.

I'd rather pay $9.99 per month for what Netflix used to be before all the companies said, "I can milk these properties for more money if I create my own streaming service and cut out the middleman."

There may or may not be too many streaming services, but there are WAY too many streaming services owned by content distributors. You can't have any sort of meaningful free market among streaming providers if they're all just providing their own content. You still have competition among content providers at that point, but zero competition on the streaming itself.

Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 2) 117

This is what the article recommends:

The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

I wouldn't call plant-based meat alternatives "healthy" unless your idea of healthy is dying of salt poisoning.

Comment Re: We'll see (Score 1) 59

Without Apple, there probably wouldn't be ARM.

I was using ARM-powered computers daily when the state of the art Apple still had a Motorola 68k.

Apple was one of the cofounders of ARM (the company) in 1990. It did not create the architecture, though it likely had an impact on ARM6 (ARMv3 architecture) and later. Either way, the ARM architecture probably would not still exist if ARM (the company) hadn't been founded. The ability for multiple companies to design and manufacture chips turned out to be critical for its long-term survival and viability in the cell phone market and others.

Comment Re: We'll see (Score 1) 59

Arm (it's not capitalized) chips with power comparable (not to mention better) than any PC mobile-class chip were absolutely new when they made the switch.

ARM (short for Acorn RISC Machine or Advanced RISC Machine) is an acronym, and all letters are capitalized. Arm is something attached to your torso.

Oh, totally. Your shitty Raspberry Pi is completely comparable to a device that performs 14x better than it.

I'm not saying Apple Silicon isn't better than the competition — it is — but that's not a fair comparison. Raspberry Pi's performance is largely because they use Broadcom chips, which stay several generations behind the state of the art. For example, the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in 2023) was designed around the Cortex A76 CPU (released in 2018).

Apple Silicon CPUs in a laptop put the power of a workstation-class laptop in the power envelope of a netbook.

Disagree. They put blazingly fast single-core performance and roughly half the speed of a workstation-class laptop in the power envelope of a netbook.

  • M5 PassMark CPU Mark: (28561 multi / 6001 single)
  • Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX top-end laptop chip (56007 multi / 4745 single)
  • i9-14900KS top-end desktop chip (60511 multi / 4828 single)

They're nowhere near the top overall, but their single-core performance (which affects perceived speed more than multi-core performance, typically) is at the top.

To this day, you cannot find a comparison of a PC and a MacBook that doesn't sacrifice every shred of intellectual honesty the person has,.

You really can make the comparison. Which one is best depends on the workload.

You can have better performance, if you don't mind 2 hours of battery life, and you can have half as much battery life as the MacBook, if you don't mind the performance of a Nintendo Switch.

Yeah, that's about right. But Apple also uses those chips in desktop, where the comparison is not nearly as rosy.

Don't get me wrong, I love my M1 MacBook Pro. The battery life is spectacular, and performance is good enough. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't workflows for which Intel would be better. :-)

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 145

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule.

Not quite- that's how you get the proximate cause felony murder rule, of which only a couple of jurisdictions in the US, and none outside of the US in the Western world recognize due to its obvious injustice.

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.

Comment Re:Typical company approach to accounting (Score 1) 61

Using the numbers above, if Meta had the same pre-tax profit of $60B now but was using the 3 year depreciation schedule they used in 2020 vs the current 5.5 year, then instead of depreciation being $13B it'd be $23.8B, meanding they'd lose nearly almost $11B in recorded profits, just from a calculation. So in essence this boosts their stock price by making them look more profitable than they are.

True, but only momentarily. At the end of the first depreciation cycle, assuming purchasing of hardware is not accelerating, you're depreciating 5x as much hardware over 5x the time, and your momentary bubble in the stock price is gone.

And even if hardware purchasing is growing right now, eventually, that will flatten out, and the above will be true.

The only real question should be whether the depreciation rate is reasonable. If you're still getting substantial use out of the hardware after five years, then depreciating it over 3 years is questionable.

Also, the more slowly you depreciate it, the less you save on taxes each year. Faster depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go down and you will lose the benefit of that depreciation. Slower depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go up and you will benefit more from depreciating it later. So this may also mean that these companies are expecting corporate income taxes to go up. Make of that what you will.

Comment Re:Limit to Seven People (Score 1) 67

I recall reading that if you have a meeting with more than seven people, you are probably having an ineffective meeting. I am regularly forced to attend meetings with 20-30 people. It's always the same 3-4 people who speak, everyone else remains silent.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 145

Negligent homicide and involuntary manslaughter suffer the same problem- no mens rea for the person accused of the crime.

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule. Extending that to involuntary manslaughter when the person didn't actually pull the trigger but directly created a situation where the police did seems like not that much of a stretch to me.

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 145

I.e., if during a robbery, some random person in the store shoots someone else trying to shoot you- you are not in legal jeopardy for murder.

To my knowledge, you are pedantically correct, but that doesn't mean you aren't in legal jeopardy for the death; you just won't face murder charges. You could still very easily be hit with civil wrongful death claims, and maybe negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter charges for creating the situation that led to that death.

Comment Re:History repeating itself: Google Glass (Score 2) 154

That's the thing, someone who believes their day-to-day life is so fascinating that they need to be able to record video at any given moment, probably has a severe case of main character syndrome.

So yeah, "asshole glasses" definitely fits.

Maybe, but only if you assume that the intent is to share that video with others or whatever.

On the flip side, I can think of a lot of useful reasons to do so, mostly involving use of large amounts of AI to go back and process the data. Imagine losing something and being able to ask, "Where is this," and getting an answer about where you left it. Imagine being able to say, "Was [insert person] part of the conversation where I said [insert subject]" and getting an answer. The potential impact of always-on recording for assisting with memory recall is enormous, assuming adequate storage and processing power.

Also, it completely solves the "You look familiar" problem, both in the "Did I meet this person?" sense and in the "What is his/her name?" sense.

Comment Re: Good for her! (Score 2) 154

I think it's the same in the US. You can't publish someone's photo (unless they are just part of the background) without getting a signed release.

Nope. Not true. You can't use it commercially, but the definition of commercial use excludes a lot of things that you might think are commercial, e.g. any form of artwork, book covers, Facebook posting, etc.

This doesn't give you the right to record someone who has asked you not to record them, though, especially if there is audio and it is a two-party consent state. And if you are deliberately confronting someone in public who asks you not to record them, it could also run afoul of harassment laws.

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