here we go again

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • Cops are well aware standing in front of a car gives them a free pass killing someone

    This “technique” has been demonstrated enough that frankly, I think that any rational person would conclude that in any situation where a cop walks in front of your car, you’re better off just gunning it before the cop has a chance to extrajudicially execute you first. If they walk in front of your car, it’s clear they’re just itching to murder you. The threat has been made, you should fear for your life. It’s you or them.





  • I have been tempted by GNOME several times, but I disagree with some of their design choices and find them a bit frustrating. I feel that it’s fairly strongly-opinionated software. The benefits, of course, are obvious: internal consistency that leads to a higher quality experience. But, only if you buy-in to some overarching design philosophy. That’s one of the reasons I left Windows! I also have a suite of Kwin scripts that make my life a lot easier, so it’s pretty hard to leave Plasma at this point.

    Still, that keyboard has tempted me a lot nonetheless…




  • If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

    100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I’m “gettin’ stuff done”, I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows’ input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch…

    Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I’m not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop’s touch and pen interface worked right out of the box… technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.

    The sole (seriously, I’ve looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any ‘functional’ keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it’s totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.

    Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.

    In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it’s a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it’s barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend’s extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.




  • Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw

    This would mean a straw has a hole, yes. It would be like a donut indeed - donuts are first whole, then have the hole punched out of them. This meets a dictionary definition of a hole (a perforation). A subtractive process has removed an area, leaving a hole.

    But straws aren’t manufactured this way, their solid bits are additively formed around the empty area. I personally don’t think this meets the definition.

    Your topological argument is strong though - both a donut and straw share the same topological feature, but when we use these math abstractions, things can be a bit weird. For instance, a hollow torus (imagine a creme-filled donut that has not yet had its shell penetrated to fill it) has two holes. One might not expect this since it looks like it still only obviously has one, but the “inner torus” consisting of negative space (that represents the hollow) is itself a valid topological hole as well.


  • None. Colloquially, we use “hole” in all kinds of weird ways. As others have pointed out, topologically a straw is no different to a torus (donut) that clearly has one “hole”… but I’d like to focus instead on the linguistic definition of “hole”, not the colloquial or mathematic definitions.

    A hole can either mean:

    1. a perforation (“a hole in my shirt”, “a bullet hole”, etc) - which is, specifically, “a hole or pattern made by or as if by piercing or boring”
    2. a gap (“a hole in your reasoning”, “a hole in my heart”, etc)
    3. a hollowed out or burrowed place (“a hole in the road”, “a fox hole”, etc)

    i think we’re not talking about 2. It seems to require some larger uniform structure or set of items in which an item is missing. 1 and 3 seem really similar to me: both seem to require some active removal of matter to qualify. All of these definitions point towards a subtractive process, where something of a larger whole (heh) is removed or absent.

    Most straws, I’ll venture a guess, are not manufactured solid and then bored out… so I don’t think it applies here. So I don’t think a straw matches a fitting definition of “hole”. A straw is created additively by assembling the “shell” by some means, not subtractively. Donuts, by comparison, had holes punched in them. A subtractive operation. Rubber bands have not had holes punched in them… they’re additive. Not holes.

    Similarly (because I see a lot of talk about buttholes and mouths here too), your esophagus and digestive tract (and veins and all kinds of other things) were formed in a similar additive manner, not by forming a mass of meat and boring through the passage, and thus would similarly not qualify as “holes” (in my opinion).



  • I’ve been playing through Control, which has been pretty fun, but… I just came out of TotK and every other game so far feels a bit… shallower. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve also been taking breaks into Infinifactory again to finally finish it. Been a while since I’ve felt the itch for Zachtronics, and it feels good. The mechanical intricacy overshadows that hollow feeling.

    What should I play next if TotK has set my bar so high? Will it just fade in time?