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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should.

    My mother in law says things like “Wow, your son is just so good with computers.” She was impressed at how “tech savvy” he was because he was able to change the brightness on her phone for her so she could show him a picture better.

    A lot of our UIs are built for absolute no-thinking usability. How would you propose changing the brightness on a phone that would make it more “old people friendly”. It’s not a matter of difficulty. She just doesnt remember these things, and a different flow may not necessarily be remembered either.

    And I’m not saying its her fault or that she’s bad because of it. She was raised learning how to do and remember things a certain way and that has necessarily changed over the years.

    A phone can do a lot of things, so unless you want to have 100 apps on your home screen, you’ll have to group some together. For instance, putting WiFi into a Settings app. Having every individual setting just available on the home screen potentially complicates things even worse by being overwhelming.

    Genuinely curious how you think things like this could be redesigned to be more old people friendly.




  • In theory, if you are following a company’s public financials very closely and keeping track of things, not all of the stock market is completely unpredictable.

    Some companies do certain things on predictable cadences. Every year at WWDC, apple announces a new iphone, and every year the stock price goes up a bit as a result. You’re not going to triple your money in a week, but if you can get 5% in a week, you’re already doing as good as most banks offer for a whole year.

    Knowing too much information is illegal. That’s “insider trading”, at which point it is completely not gambling because you already know if the stock is going to go up or down, and that’s just cheating.


  • I know you didn’t ask but an opportunity to info dump is always fun.

    Shorting is basically borrowing stock from someone, selling it. and then buying it back later before the person wants their stock back. Since (mostly) all shares are equal, as long as I return to the same stock, there’s no reason to hold onto a specific share.

    If a stock is going down, if I borrow a share for a week, sell it for $100, then in 6 days buy it for $50 and return it to you, then I’ve just made $50.

    It’s a way to make money when the stock market is going down, but is often riskier because with buying stock, you can just hold indefinitely. If I buy a $100 share, and the price goes to $0. I just lost $100. The most I can possibly lose is $100. (edit: and I sell at any point in the future when I decide. Could be 1 week, could be 30 years.)

    But when shorting, you have to return the shares to the actual owner at some point, and since you sold the shares, you MUST get them back. But if I sold your $100 share, and in 6 days it is now $10,000 (this wouldn’t happen, but for example), and I don’t have $10,000, now I can’t return your share to you, and I’m in REAL big trouble. The amount of money I can lose is technically infinite, and since I don’t have infinite money to lose, it probably just devolves into legal issues.






  • Counter point… Both are generating perfectly valid JSON, so who cares?

    Python 3.13.2 (main, Feb  5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 9.0.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    Tip: IPython 9.0+ have hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.
    
    In [1]: import json
    
    In [2]: json.loads('{"x": 1e-05}')
    Out[2]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    In [3]: json.loads('{"x":0.00001}')
    Out[3]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    Welcome to Node.js v20.3.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > JSON.parse('{"x":0.00001}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    > JSON.parse('{"x": 1e-05}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    

    Javascript and Python both happily accept either format from the string and convert it into a float they are happy with.



  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

    even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it’s not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

    It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn’t be able to follow along.

    Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on… but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

    You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

    Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as “undecipherable” and move on.





  • bisby@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzJust a little guy
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    9 months ago

    Correct.

    For the hemotoxin, you aren’t going to “just wait for the effects to wear off.” The toxin will kill you.

    For the neurotoxin, you can just wait out the effects by countering the symptoms. Can’t breathe? Respirator can save your life.

    The hemotoxin itself is doing terrible damage, but the neurotoxin itself doesn’t do any “damage” other than disabling systems.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzJust a little guy
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    9 months ago

    Getting bit by a venomous snake in Australia and you’re blood starts to disassemble itself. The only counter is antivenom or die. Your blood breaking down is what kills you. And there is no way to separate the bite from that.

    Being able to counter the venom in such a simple way is what makes it different. You can logically break it down into steps that are separable.