Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
Some people can taste certain chemicals in some vegetables much more strongly than other people and really don't like them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster
Supertasters are individuals whose sense of taste for certain flavors and foods is far more sensitive than the average person.[1] The term originated with experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk and is not the result of response bias or a scaling artifact but appears to have an anatomical or biological basis.
Reports of variations in human taste perception date back to 1888.[5] The major advance in understanding human taste variation came in 1931 with the discovery of "taste-blindness" specifically for thiourea compounds, when Arthur L. Fox, a chemist at DuPont, discovered that some people found phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) bitter, while others found it tasteless.[6][7]
Fox describes the event:
Some time ago the author [Arthur L. Fox] had occasion to prepare a quantity of phenyl-thio-carbamide, and while placing it in a bottle the dust flew around in the air. Another occupant of the laboratory, Dr. C. R. Noller, complained of the bitter taste of the dust, but the author, who was much closer, observed no taste and so stated. He even tasted some of the crystals and assured Dr. Noller they were tasteless but Dr. Noller was equally certain it was the dust he tasted. He tried some of the crystals and found them extremely bitter.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylthiocarbamide
Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), also known as phenylthiourea (PTU), is an organosulfur thiourea containing a phenyl ring.
It has the unusual property that it either tastes very bitter or is virtually tasteless, depending on the genetic makeup of the taster. The ability to taste PTC is often treated as a dominant genetic trait, although inheritance and expression of this trait are somewhat more complex.[2][3]
https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/12/04/brusselssprouts/
At this point, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with brussels sprouts. Whilst the compounds PTC and PROP aren’t found in the vegetables, they both contain within their molecular structure a thiocyanate group (nitrogen, carbon and sulfur bonded in series) which is thought to be related to their bitter taste. This same group is also present in compounds called glucosinolates, which occur naturally in brussels sprouts, as well as broccoli, cabbage and kale (collectively known as cruciferous vegetables). The glucosinolates are thought to form part of the plant’s defence systems , for example against diseases and creatures that feed on the plant. Additionally, the breakdown products of glucosinolates, the isothiocyanates, also contain the thiocyanate group within their molecules.
So why is this structural similarity significant? Well, there seems to be a strong association between the ability to detect the bitter taste of PTC and PROP and a sensitivity to the bitterness of these vegetables. Of course, it’s not the case that sensitivity to PTC and PROP automatically implies a dislike of cruciferous vegetables; other factors may also have an effect, such as a person’s particular flavour preferences. However, if you’re a brussels sprout hater, you can now suggest a potential chemical reason for your dislike if you’re ever berated for your perceived vegetable prejudice.
I think that configuration management software is important for many people who admin a large number of computer systems, because being able to modify and spin up identical systems is important to them.
But if you don't fall into that category, it may not buy one that much.
Cursive is faster (and more comfortable) than printing.
But that assumes that you're handwriting in the first place.
Typing is faster than cursive, and many people who work a lot with text can just type any substantial amounts of text that they want to write.
I think that the mathematical concepts that I learned were mostly generally useful.
But what was useless was the emphasis on doing work by hand. My particular pet peeve is all the time I spent in calculus classes being taught techniques to do symbolic integration by hand.
I was doing a math project once, working with the husband of one of my calculus professors. He himself was a mathematics professor. I dropped by his office. He had to work something out that involved a symbolic integration and fired up Mathematica. I said "You can probably do all this by hand". He laughed and said something like, "Nobody who has to do actual work with this is going to waste time doing this by hand". He was right.
Today, I use
maximato do symbolic integration. It's in my Linux distro and on my Android phone.My limited experience listening to ham radio operators with my scanner (listening to voice, not Morse code) is that when hams do get in contact with each other, they mostly talk about ham radios. Which, I mean, I guess is understandable, since it's a common interest to all of them, but a lot of it is people who like building and tinkering with radios talking about building and tinkering with radios.
Well, I'm here rather than on Usenet. Overall, I think that the Threadiverse is preferable --- Usenet had real spam problems for a long time.
But if you want some benefits:
- Wide range of powerful, mature clients with extensive filtering functionality, offline reading support.
- Better client-side accessibility. I mean, you can be blind and use a screenreader or something on Usenet. Going to be a lot less ideal on the Threadiverse.
- Comment editors are probably better than the in-browser textarea editors or clients with limited text-editors that I've seen (though the Threadiverse has Markdown as a standard, which I think is generally preferable). Though I haven't been browsing Usenet in some time, and maybe they have MIME-encoded Markdown or HTML or something as a common thing now.
- More-standardized support for posting embedded binaries.
- Commercial service is available. It's great that people donate their time and funds to make Threadiverse servers run, but there's something to be said for the resources available from commercial service. There's nothing stopping someone from running a commercial Threadiverse instance, but AFAIK, nobody presently is doing so.
- Newsgroups are more discoverable than are communities on the Threadiverse --- you really need to use the https://lemmyverse.net/ index to find any communities out there, as otherwise you'll only see it once the exact name "!community@instancename" has been searched for on your local instance. Usenet (mostly) propagated newsgroups everywhere.
- Probably a larger userbase, though I haven't dug up current numbers. Certainly a different group and set of interests.
- Some PGP use and client support.
- I would bet that Usenet servers can scale up to more load than can Threadiverse servers.
I was actually thinking that screensavers might make a comeback if OLEDs become the norm. CRTs could suffer from burn-in, even if the problem was minor enough that most screensavers were really for fun, and in the 1990s, screensavers were pretty common. LCDs don't see burn-in, so screensaver use seems to have kinda disappeared. Plasma displays can get burn-in, but never really hit very widespread use. But...OLEDs can.
Today, I think that most systems have some form of automatic power-down of the display if someone isn't using it, so maybe that competes with screensavers.
I've used a Kobo that has a limited browser, but if she wants to browse the Web, I'd just get an Android tablet rather than a dedicated hardware e-reader. She can run the Kobo or Amazon or whatever apps on an Android device, as well as run reader apps for PDF or whatever.
IMHO, the major reason to get a hardware e-reader is to have an eInk screen. If she's going to be doing anything other than the most minimal of web browsing, she's most likely not going to want an eInk screen.
I just overheard a coworker saying “Oh, I would never try that in my life!”, in a discussion of food. (This was about consuming a steak cooked less than medium well). It made me wonder what life is like for those who refuse to try new food, especially those who refuse to try mundane things like fried shrimp.
I mean, they might be concerned about health risks. Cooking is part of our process for making a lot of food safe to eat.
I mean, I wouldn't worry about a medium steak, but I wouldn't eat steak tartare. It isn't because I'm worried about the taste or texture, but because I don't want to pick up parasites or similar.
This is why I’m QWERTY on mobile but Colemak on desktop.
One of the things that really amazes me is that mobile --- which is a widely-used platform --- hasn't seen a major, widespread, substantial adoption of some new text-entry method optimized for that platform. I mean, I am pretty confident that there are better things you can do with phone hardware for text input than an onscreen QWERTY keyboard. People have tried a lot of variants, but nothing has really become mainstream. I think that something would need to be bundled into iOS and Android as a standard input mechanism for it to reach the necessary threshold.
And yeah, sure, there's inertia behind the status quo, but for (a) a device where most people will only ever use their own device to a significant degree and (b) where anything that's software can be swapped out with just software changes, I'm surprised that more fundamental changes haven't happened.
Like, I'm sure that many people would like the ability to input text without looking at the screen. Or an input mechanism that's less error-prone --- onscreen keyboards on phone screens have pretty small keys.
And while I get "just use QWERTY" made sense when phones were starting out, because a lot of people knew how to touch-type but didn't know how to input text on a phone, today, a lot of people are using phones before they know how to touch-type. Like, that same level of inertia shouldn't exist for new users.
There are also other ATC simulation games, but it looks like that particular developer also sells professional ATC training software, so I'd kinda imagine that that "I'm really good at TRACON" might be a better standard than most ATC games in terms of someone being able to be an actual ATC.
One problem with using a nonstandard layout is that it makes you depend on using a keyboard that you control.
I don't use Dvorak or another non-QWERTY layout, but I do swap Caps Lock and Left Control. I'd say that that's a preferable layout in general, since I think that virtually all users use Control more than Caps Lock, but if you're a serious emacs user, you really need the traditional Unix-style layout, because you use Control heavily.
But it also means that if I'm on another system that I haven't configured, I'm prone to making mistakes, and I'm slower.
I spent a lot longer than I should have doing hunt-and-peck. I mean, I live on computers, and it made sense to learn, but it was a temporary speed hit, and it was always seductively faster to go back to hunt-and-peck. Did various typing programs in school, but it didn't stick. Years of computer use, and still did it using hunt-and-peck.
IIRC it wasn't until I was about thirteen and taking a computer science course (which was worse to touch-type in, because it heavily used symbols) that I finally said, "Okay, that does it. I'm investing the time to learn to do this right, because I'm definitely going to come out ahead in the long run touch typing" and hit the point of forcing myself not to hunt-and-peck.
It really is a damned useful skill, and I'm kinda bummed out by the fact that I think that a lot of kids these days are only using Android or iOS devices and often don't have a physical keyboard. I'd bet that touch typing skills are a lot less prevalent today than they were.
I'd be okay with touch typing going away if we had some successor technology for inputting data into computers that was generally-superior. But even if we had flawless speech recognition, the noise pollution in generates (not to mention the lack of security) means that it probably isn't going to be what one uses for general text input.
Maybe with some sort of fancy subvocalization pickup gear or something.
I think that at some point, we will ultimately get some kind of brain-computer link. But as of yet, we don't have anything like that in general use---it's still a research area.
I wouldn't particularly care.
Mind, the only time I ever got a ticket from an automated system, it was in error because it misread my license plate. But, I mean, sure, as long as it works at a reasonable rate.
My concern with Flock isn't "I might get ticketed for actually breaking the law", but "that much data, tracking everywhere people go, is way, way too prone to abuse by people who get access to it and would like to misuse it". That is, it's the harvesting of data that I have an issue with.
It sounds like it's other countries in Europe as well.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1vkgf1k/valve_notifying_hardware_customers_about_a/
They do use same partner. As I got the email and based in UK.
This was why MMO experience was sought out.
---The Far Side, October 15, 1990
Hmm.
A lot of these are going to be just request-driven. That is, they aren't really doing anything while idling. Thus, they don't really need to be actually running.
If the idle memory usage is an actual concern --- and honestly, the OS is probably just gonna page things out if the software is truly idle and it needs the memory for something else and it has paging space...I kind of assume that someone has built some sort of system that works like inetd, which avoided leaving non-containerized servers running. You register a port, and then inetd listens on it. When someone connects, it starts up the daemon in question (say, Apache or whatever). Just need to start a container on demand here. Maybe close it down after a long-enough period of inactivity.
EDIT:
https://old.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/72sdyf/startrun_a_container_when_incoming_traffic/
Start/run a container when incoming traffic detected
Sounds like you're looking for inetd.
A more modern version of this is systemd socket activation.
Podman supports socket activation since version 3.4.0 (released Sep 2021).
how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
Rotational hard drive prices are up, but not that far, not like RAM, especially if you're not getting the largest drives possible.
That's maybe a doubling on 12TB drives from the trough. I mean, sure, it's significant, but if you were already talking about getting several, you can certainly get one.
Yeah, the user experience of "just wipe cookies on browser exit" is a lot better than "have a million prompts all over zillions of sites".
However, regarding "every single damn time"...some sites can have their "do you want cookies" popup just blocked by the Firefox I still don't care about cookies addon. It's not a solution for every site out there, but it'll get a lot of them.
It's also possible to use another extension, Behind the Overlay on some sites. This does require a click, so manual action, but it tries to identify "pop-over" content that covers up the browser window and remove it with that click. It's really intended as a more-general solution to "pop-over" stuff, but cookie pop-ups often take this form and can be dismissed.