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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Hillary was hardly alone in that. Can’t find the exact video, but the point of the video that Jimmy Kimmel platformed Trump, with the guise that the show was “apoliticial”. The video argued that that was not the case. The broader argument: “If you’re atheistic, you denounce the existence of gods. If you’re polytheistic, you acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. Now, if you acknowledge the views of all political candidates going your way, you are not apolitical. You’re polypolitical.”


  • The whole “The_Donald was a FBI honeypot” is a pretty strongly persistent urban legend. And obviously false. Surprises me how many people thought that was legitimate.

    Ask yourself: Shouldn’t there have been results sooner? Would FBI (or whoever) have left an obviously dangerous forum open for honeypot purposes for years and years? If this really was a honeypot operation, wouldn’t they have made arrests as soon as they could? And if this really was the case, shouldn’t we have the details by now (FOIA requests or whatever)?

    Of course not. US law enforcement would have immediately involved themselves if there were any credible threats posted there. But they don’t really do much about festering pits of far-right radicalisation. It was left open with the full approval of Reddit admins. Can’t really claim ignorance on their part either.





  • It wasn’t really Microsoft that killed Nokia’s cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

    Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. “Oh, trust us, we’re the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what’s best for the market”. They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

    Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

    I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they’ll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)


  • I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

    Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.




  • umbraroze@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzturtles
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    2 months ago

    One of the most tragicomical science notes I’ve ever read comes from Gilbert White:

    We put Timothy into a tub of water, & found that he sunk gradually, & walked on the bottom of the tub: he seemed quite out of his element, & was much dismayed. This species seems not at all amphibious.

    Timothy was luckily fine afterwards! This watery misadventure got retaliated in the most turtle-rific manner imaginable: Timothy was determined to, and succeeded in, outliving White. In fact, memory and legacy of Timothy is even more alive now - everyone can go look at the 3D scan of Timothy’s shell on the internet. Did Gilbert White’s works get 3D scanned? No, only 2D scanned. So old-fashioned.

    (Also kind of tragic that Timothy was only found to be female after she died. And some time later, another tortoise was named Timothy after her, and it later turned out she was female too. Something tells me humanity is never going to completely figure out this whole sex/gender thing.)



  • Well the latter half of the levels is pretty tough as I recall. Had problems getting there. (Though as I recall, the biggest problem with Game Boy games was the battery consumption. Kids these days have no idea.)

    The final level, however? Easy easy. Epic airplane fun.

    Hope she handed the Game Boy to the kids once she got there! Because who doesn’t like blasting shit up with a plane!


  • Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

    So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

    It’s probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it’s gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)


  • In the 1980s, 8-bit home computers were sold with slogans like “Kids can use these to play games! And use educational software! And the ladies can use them to keep track of the freezer contents!”

    …One of three ain’t bad.

    Decades later, we still open the fucking fridge to check what’s in the fridge. Such is the nature of technological progress.

    (Random old person memory: when I was a kid I actually had some “home economy” software for Spectravideo SV-318, found in some random pile of tapes. I only used it once because it was boring, obviously. My father used the recipe book and added “Poop Cake”. That was enough recipes thank you very much.)