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Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 1) 118

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) 192

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) 192

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) 192

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) 118

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:enshitification existed long before the word (Score 1) 66

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

But that was before mailmen had to earn $300k in salary and benefits.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Comment Re:It's intentional mispricing. (Score 1) 108

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

Comment Re:It's intentional mispricing. (Score 1) 108

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

Comment Re:It's intentional mispricing. (Score 1) 108

If they cared, they could force price compliance automatically using e-paper tags. The fact they don't deploy modern solutions to a known issue, means they don't want to solve it.

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Comment enshitification existed long before the word (Score 1) 66

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

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