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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 We made jobs a limited resource (Score 1) 61

And one that you need to live. So it's no surprise people are trying to constrain competition for that limited resource.

Stopping immigration especially in countries where birth rates are below sustainability will create a permanent recession like Japan has. I don't think that's really up for debate we've seen it play out in Japan to the extreme and in South Korea to a lesser extent.

But the problem is if you do not have enough places in society for the people who are already here and can vote they are going to do terrible terrible things when they are not just left out in the cold but facing homelessness and starvation.

We could of course try to spread the wealth around but after a hundred years of Cold war era propaganda that's just not on the table and I refuse to pretend that it is anymore.

Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't on the table but we do not have a third option. The best you can do is buy time and if you're going to do that you need to constrain immigration. Even if your economy takes a hit even if people are doing worse off they at least have a place in society. They are at least needed enough that we can justify giving them food and enough shelter that they are informing roving bands of bandits

Submission + - My Oracle Support update has angered many customers

bobthesungeek76036 writes: If you are an Oracle customer and use their support portal you probably know by now they released a major update on Sunday 12/7. Many customers have complained on Oracle's customer forum that major features no longer work like KB article search, document bookmarks, patch downloads, etc. Many are appalled that a company like Oracle would release such a bad package; calling it "Oracle POS" and calling for the old portal to be rolled back.

So far no word from Oracle on the rollback...

Comment Re:Real problem is criminal motivations (Score 1) 17

I'm not disagreeing, but I would still prefer to seek solutions.

Most of the time the paths to legitimate profitability are well known. Those paths can be presented as options from a list. In those cases where the google is involved in handling the money, then the google is also in a position to say more about what is going on. I specified that there should be room for "other", but pushing the developers to clarify their plans will at least make it easier for potential downloaders of the app to have a more informed judgement of the risks.

Comment Re:Real problem is criminal motivations (Score 1) 17

Seems to be a fairly typical response these days. No, your interpretation is not what I wrote or intended and you didn't ask for any clarification or help in understanding my poor writing. I also think your writing is not of the best, but my sadly too typical response is to discount your opinion. Or perhaps I should react defensively and try to explain what I was trying to say?

However I suspect you have some axe to grind (as do I) and therefore there is no reason for me to make so much effort--and the discussion will time out and die in a day or two anyway.

Comment It's just another grift (Score 4, Interesting) 159

There is a government contract to go with this and it'll go to somebody well connected, probably Elon Musk. That was what Doge was all about. They caught a bunch of things and turned them into a juicy government contracts. The 250 million Elon spent on electing Trump was money well spent.

Everything is a grift now. Capitalism is collapsing and the only thing left is crooks trying to get the last bit of what you have out of you before the collapse.

We really need a third way. I get that nobody in this country is going to get behind socialism. Not after almost 100 years of propaganda.

But it's pretty obvious capitalism is collapsing too.

So we can't have capitalism and we can't have socialism so what's it going to be?

And we better figure out something fast because the clock's ticking and right now the third option is a total economic collapse. They're already talking about using AI to deny people Medicare and let the AI companies keep the savings. So even if you are retired you better start thinking about it

Submission + - Texas makes clean power breakthrough as solar output overtakes coal (reuters.com)

AmiMoJo writes: For the first time, Texas' main power system looks set to generate more power from solar farms than coal plants during a calendar year in 2025, marking a key new energy transition milestone for the largest power network in the U.S.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) generated 2.64 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power from solar assets, compared with 2.44 million MWh of power from coal plants for the January-to-November period, according to data compiled by LSEG.

Comment Before Musk (Score -1, Flamebait) 72

Twitter did a much better job with the bots. It did have a tough time because you can't algorithmically police right wing extremism without having it go after American Republican politicians. So right we extremism had to be manually policed. In other words racism and Nazis and whatnot. Musk solution to that problem was to just let the racists and the Nazis take over.

Now ordinarily that would be the company would rapidly go out of business because of lost users. But musk has been pumping money into it, largely with the help of the Saudi royal family. Essentially turning it into a propaganda arm of American billionaires and the Saudi elites. At least if you are consuming content on the platform besides a handful very specific people posting to it.

The real problem is that computers are just too good at figuring out relationships. That's why you can't kick Nazis off your platform using algorithms. A computer will very quickly figure out that the dog whistles the Republicans or whatever your local equivalent is are saying are dog whistles referring to racist or Nazi stuff and it'll go after those dog whistles because the computer knows that when a republican talks about welfare Queens it's no different than a Nazi talking about rounding up black people and gays. The computer knows the dog whistle and you can't program an effective algorithm that doesn't figure it out right quick.

Comment Poor choice. (Score 4, Informative) 72

“Many users continue to refer to X as ‘Twitter’ and posts on X as ‘tweets,’ which demonstrates continued association and strengthens the case for residual goodwill,” [Alexandra Roberts, a professor of law and media at Northeastern University School of Law] says. She points to a 2020 case where a party attempted to register “Aunt Jemima” for breakfast foods, but was rejected “based on a likelihood of confusion” with Quaker Oats’ Aunt Jemima marks, even though the company had announced earlier that year that it was discontinuing the name and logo.

Beyond this, X has the resources to keep Operation Bluebird in court longer than Operation Bluebird can afford legal representation.

Comment Real problem is criminal motivations (Score 1) 17

Fairness is a weak sauce problem. Much larger problem is incentives in favor of criminals. How many Android apps are really trustworthy? "Fairness" for crooks doesn't help.

I'm increasingly convinced it's a waste of time to speculate about solutions, but I still think a "business model" tab could help a little bit. Most of the time the developer would just select from the main options, and in most of those cases the google could say yay or nay without revealing too many details. Of course there also needs to be room for new ideas and innovations, but saying what is going on would let you decide what to watch out for and also help predict how long the app will be around...

Comment What happened to his brain? (Score 1) 191

I was going to quote it, but looking at the continuation of the FP branch it apparently deserves negative moderation. (Notwithstanding the lack of clarity.) I was also going to ask for clarification about the stupid typo, but now I don't care.

One appropriate question might be "What part of the Constitution can't you understand?" Apparently all of it. Or "When did you lose your marbles?" Or even "What have you done with the real person who created that identity?"

I'd guess that it's the senility thing, but I might be projecting from my age. I was already getting up there when I registered on Slashdot, but you might have been a mere child in those years.

Comment So the billionaires are dismantling capitalism (Score 0, Flamebait) 33

And y'all won't allow socialism. So what's the actual alternative?

Can't have capitalism anymore because the billionaires won't allow it and they have more than enough power and money to do away with it.

And we can't have socialism because well, that's socialism!

So what exactly is the plan?

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