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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • SEO is of course a problem, but it’s been a problem for a long time, and there are ways around it for those who know how to seek information. Proper use of keywords, blacklisting sites with known spam information, searching specific sites, mandating specific words and phrases to be contained in the search etc. It’s true, however, that information has become less discoverable during the latest decade – at least reliable information has.

    While AI-written spam articles and such have been a pain sometimes, gatekeeping content is in my opinion as big of a threat to the proper use of search engines for finding information. As more and more sites require you to log in to view the discussion (social media is the worst offender here) much of the search results is unusable. Nowadays the results lead to a paywall or a login wall almost more often than to a proper result, and that makes them almost completely useless. I understand this kind of thing for platforms which pay for creating the content, e.g. news sites, but user-generated content shouldn’t be locked behind a login requirement.

    I fear the day StackOverflow and Reddit decide the users’ discussions should be visible for only logged-in users. Reddit has already taken the first steps with limiting “NSFW” content to logged-in users only (on new reddit). Medium articles going behind paywall also caused some headaches a while back.


  • Well, the example was with a tent which is a single layer of cotton between you and the environment, and by no means resembles anything even remotely insulated. That’s why it needs a relatively powerful heater to stay comfortably warm. In normal use you have quite a lot of control over the temperature of the heater, mainly with the size and amount of firewood -> effective surface area of the fire.

    For static buildings the situation is different, with enough insulation you can get by with almost no heating. Zero-energy building is a thing in Finland as well, and although it has its challenges, it’s still possible to keep your home warm with only your body heat in e.g. -40. The main difficulty you’ll encounter there is getting rid of the moisture in air, since being that energy-efficient will require having your home almost fully enclosed. You’ll also need to be careful to properly limit the moisture getting out from the house, as the dew point will be inside the insulation and any moisture getting out will condense inside, eventually leading to mold.

    I haven’t actually reached the end game in Frostpunk 1, but at a glance it would require some efficiency improvements and better insulation – and given enough insulation and heating anything is possible. If your people are sleeping under the sky hugging the generator, I’d assume you won’t get past the end game. A real-world example that somewhat resembles the Frostpunk world would be people living in Yakutsk, Russia, where they have more of a brute-force approach to the -60 °C temperatures – just burn enough gas to keep your log cabin warm. Surviving outside at those temperatures without protective equipment would be difficult though, especially since most materials won’t stay flexible at -120 °C or -140 °C. You’d find it pretty difficult to move around.

    Edit: But also, a mandatory “don’t quote me on this”, as building is my hobby, not my job. I’ve some knowledge, and some experience, but by no means am I a professional.



  • In Finland at least, and AFAIK most other European countries as well the law mandates drivers stop if they see a pedestrian about to cross the road. We have “intention to cross the road” buttons too, in some intersections with limited visibility or a lot of traffic – but by no means are you required to use them. From the looks of it crosswalks have the right of way in the US as well.

    I can’t really understand the assumption that people don’t need to pay attention to the road because of some button. In a sensible legislation the driver is responsible for the accident even when the pedestrian is jaywalking unless they literally jump in front of the car from behind a bush or something. If the police rules you had a realistic chance to avoid the collision you, as the driver with a license meaning you’ve had the necessary tutoring, should be at fault.



  • I wouldn’t call OLED a minor upgrade – considerably better battery life and color rendering. Also better blacks without background bleed, which is a major annoyance when gaming in dark (bus, plane, bedroom etc.)

    800p is for a good reason – although e.g. 1080p would be more crisp, personally I’d pick better colors and higher refresh rate over resolution in this case. When gaming with the APU, most games (especially AAA) can’t be upped to 1080p either way without considerable performance drop. I kinda understand the need for higher resolutions from a strategy gaming standpoint, but to me at least the compromise isn’t worth it.

    When PPI is considered with standard viewing distance, it’s still better than my 1080p 13" laptop. With proper anti-aliasing there’s no need to push it further, at least IMO it’s not worth it compared to the reduced performance.

    2560x1600 would make a bit more sense, as you could drop the resolution to 1280x800 without having to smear pixels due to pixels not lining up in the smaller resolution. That would also be better for strategy games. Don’t really know how good the panel availability for those is, though, since it’s probably using a tablet screen.



  • Not an expert on this, but I’d assume one thing is that in 3-2-3 two people need to stand up and give way if the person in the window seat wants to stretch their legs or go to the toilet. 2-4-2 only one person has to get out of the way in all situations. Would guess that’s actually somewhat important in widebodies since those are used on longer routes, and having to stand up twice as often in the aisle seat would be something of an inconvenience.

    There’s probably more, I’d guess that would also affect boarding times and so on, but this is the first thing that comes to mind.


  • And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

    Context will tell which one it is.