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Jrockwar @feddit.uk
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Comments 213
for all those tall girlies
  • It's not exactly this but have you considered barefoot shoes? They have a super-thin sole so they naturally take some height off you, compared to "normal" shoes. I wear them for completely different reasons (as a cis man who has found these to help with feet pain and posture after being a kid with flat feet), but I thought you'd appreciate the tip.

    Groundies make them with "normal" looking soles, but it's all an optical illusion - they have a strip around them so the sole looks "thick", "normal" and "fashionable". Essentially a less exaggerated version of that drawing:

    Caveat: they're more niche and therefore expensive. Also not everyone enjoys the idea of walking without cushioning and feeling the texture of the ground.

  • India’s electric cab companies can’t find enough cars to put on the road.
  • That's not efficient enough, why don't we make them larger and carry over 400 people instead? And we can do special low friction routes where people want to go, so that there's even better efficiency!

    Or, why don't we accept maybe that there's the need for different modes of transport and I'm happy commuting to work 8 miles in a bicycle but my 78-year-old mum sometimes physically can't walk half a mile to a bus stop to take her to the doctor's and she needs taxis to exist?

  • 'Garbage in, garbage out': AI fails to debunk disinformation, study finds.
  • That's because it doesn't learn, it's a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

    I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It's like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

    It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it's rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

    As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. "I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee") this is an absolute godsend.

    I'm not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I'll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.

  • Boeing union workers Win tentative contract with 35 percent wage increase.
  • The US government wouldn't let Boeing fall. As much as I'd love seeing that happen, the strategic importance of having a US-based manufacturer for large commercial airplanes is too large to let them go bust. The US as a country would buy themselves a lot of dependency on other countries through potential tariffs, etc.

  • when and how did you know you were gay?
  • It's an interesting one for me, because I'm 34 and I still don't know how to define my sexuality well.

    The first time I accidentally stumbled upon porn it was lesbian porn, and it made me as horny as an 11-year old can get. I was, I think, genuinely attracted to women.

    But over time I started also thinking about men, and coming to terms with the idea that I am bisexual at about 14 or 15.

    Up to my early 20s, I had casual hookups with girls and guys, but making more progress (sexually speaking) with the guys because we're a horny bunch.

    What ended up happening is that a combination of fear of rejection, and inexperience, put me off women for good. I knew that most women in the 2010s Spain wouldn't want to be with a bisexual guy, so being in a relationship with one would mean I'd have to hide a big part of myself.

    So instead I shut that door down and just dated men from that point onwards and I've lived as gay since my 20s. I think that label is not a strictly accurate representation of my sexuality but nowadays, I don't even get attracted to women. I think I'm not "used to" thinking of them that way and they don't trigger that response in me anymore. I'm not sure if that could happen again though, but it doesn't seem possible.

    And anyway, I'm very happily partnered now so I don't care about the details. Attraction-wise my boyfriend is all that matters now :)

  • US to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed in low visibility conditions
  • You can't measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three "pedestrian-killing" mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.

    But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can't predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.

    The only way to do this IMO is by

    • measuring every driver intervention
    • only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
    • in the meantime, market it as "driver assist" and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the "somewhat advanced" cruise control that it is.
  • 12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
  • I don't think so, SpaceX claimed (and NASA apparently verified) that the development costs for the Falcon 9 were $300 million. It's in the Wikipedia article, also here: https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2022/10/23/how-much-would-falcon-9-have-cost-if-it-was-developed-by-nasa/?amp=1

    I was under the impression that the Falcon Heavy was a ground-up development. But in any case the Falcon 9 was cheaper, so go figure...

  • 12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
  • $700 million is the estimated development cost of the Falcon Heavy.

    Not a game, not a space simulation, but the actual Falcon Heavy rocket. A rocket that can actually go into space.

    I know they're different things but I thought I'd leave this here to put things in perspective.

  • Meta fires staffers for using $25 meal credits on household goods
  • There's a lot of context we're missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided "free money" that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas "free meals" are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

    What I won't defend is firing people for this reason. I don't see how that can be ethically acceptable...

  • The irony of powering AI on atomic energy.
  • Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

    The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a "visible" level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn't been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It's in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

    The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is "visibly" good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.

  • How to make an Amazon-free Kindle
  • Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it's still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

    It's entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon's data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.

  • The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise
  • Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.

    The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it's "easy", and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.

    Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.

    For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.

  • Life-Saving Pneumatic Inflatable Helmet declared the 2024 Red Dot Award: Design Concept Luminary Winner
  • I have a closca loop helmet, which is also collapsible (not inflatable) and fits nicely in a backpack.

    I presume it's not as light as an inflatable helmet, but it feels like a normal helmet, costs like a normal helmet, and I don't need a pump to use it.

    I don't know if there are any other brands that make this but I'm super pleased with the concept. It lets me have a helmet in my backpack in situations where I wouldn't be carrying a helmet otherwise, for using with scooters and the like.