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SkeuomorphicBee

2,231 karma · joined June 18, 2021

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SkeuomorphicBee··on iPhone Duo
Naming it like that would subjectively tie them to the release schedule of the main Iphone line, while I imagine such a niche device will have a much slower schedule between new versions. If that is the case, they would want to continue selling this device alongside the Iphone 19 (and maybe 20, or even 21) without the name implying it is an old model.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Why Addresses Have Numbers
When discussing systems like the sequential vs the grid, the article misses one other important type of addressing: the metric system (used in most cities of Brazil for example). In this system the number are roughly the distance (in meters) from the beginning of the street (of course following the even/odd sides rule). This results in "messier" numbers than the grid system, numbers that don't match the hundreds to the block number, but it perfectly codify distances even in the presence of blocks of different sizes on different cities or neighborhoods. Also it works perfectly without blocks at all, a long road without any crossings can follow the same pattern, and when a city grows onto new lands and new blocks are carved by the side of those roads, the same old numbers continue working unchanged (this pattern can be seen clearly when old radial roads slowly turn into radial avenues as the city grows).
SkeuomorphicBee··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
> When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works?

Just after the turn of the century, that was when there was a big shift in the industry to move all user interface design work to artists, and away from original user interface specialists. The whole profession of user interface designer (one who understood "form follows function") ceased to exist in the early 2000s, as all work was assigned to graphic designers (who only understand aesthetics).

This movement can be seen clearly in the evolution of widget toolkits for desktop applications, which peaked in usability in the late-90s/early-2000s, and have been losing usability while getting prettier with every iteration since.

SkeuomorphicBee··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
(I was editing when you repplied so I'll add it here for you:)

And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

SkeuomorphicBee··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
That is by design. It separates the payment processor so it does just that, just payments. It is like money, once you give it to someone else there is no automatic way to fish it back from their pocket to yours. The correct avenue to deal with fraud, bankruptcy and other malicious actor is the small claims court (or civil court, or criminal court).

The moment you start burdening the payment processor with the roles of judge/referee over all goods and services you end up with the mess we have with CCs where Visa/Mastercard are morality czars that dictate what goods and services are valid or invalid, nuking people and companies out of modern society for their own arbitrary reasons.

Edit: And just to add, you can have "chargeback" for PIX as a separate service, most banks offer PIX insurance that is basically CC chargeback by a different name. But the key is that it is separate from the payment infrastructure itself, it is an insurance service that you contract separately. And that separation ins very important, the insurance company can't roll back transactions arbitrarily, or deny people access to the financial system, they have to pay the victim and then claw back their money in court, which is the appropriate venue to decide who is right or wrong in a transaction.

SkeuomorphicBee··on AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
What makes Portugal's situation unique is that it is a small population that is eclipsed in models by the bigger weights of the much bigger population of Brazil.

Yes, there are much smaller European countries, but those are generally the only source of truth for their specific language, so the context of a LLM query in that language steers the LLM towards facts from that country, for example, if I ask a big generic LLM something in Latvian then it most likely will answer something relevant to the context of Latvia. But Portugal, being the much smaller user of its language, have the somewhat unique problem that if I ask a generic model something in Portuguese it will probably answer something related to Brazil instead of Portugal.

Maybe the UK and Spain have somewhat similar struggles, but I suspect that none has it as bad as Portugal in that regard.

SkeuomorphicBee··on Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds from tax changes
> Ethanol is not a good fuel source for something like a personal vehicle.

It is about as good as gasoline (or better), Brazil has been running a good chunk of its personal car fleet on sugarcane alcohol for decades. Yes, EVs are better than ICVs, but there is nothing uniquely bad about ethanol that makes it worse as a fuel source for a personal vehicle than any other combustive fuel.

SkeuomorphicBee··on Two millionth electric car registered as market rebounds from tax changes
You are wrong and right.

Wrong because Brazil DOES fuel cars on sugarcane alcohol. Most petrol stations in the country have pumps for sugarcane alcohol, nearly all the ICE cars sold in the last two decades have a flex engine (in the past you had to chose when buying the car if you wanted a alcohol engine or a gasoline engine, now the engines just takes whichever you trow at it and adjusts the injection accordingly), and roughly half the personal vehicles in the country run daily on alcohol. That fact has softened this oil crisis a tiny tiny bit in the country (when oil is expensive many people just pump alcohol instead of gasoline).

And right that electricity is much cheaper than gasoline or alcohol, so people are changing to EVs because of the cost savings in fuel. In fact electricity was already much cheaper even when the price of oil was down, what was holding back EV adoption in the country was never the price of oil, but the relatively high purchase prices of EV vehicles (the average upper-middle-class Brazilian can't afford a Tesla like an American or European can), but the latest batch of basic EVs (like the BYD Dolphin-mini/Seagul) started to break that barrier about one or two years ago, and are now on the top sales charts.

SkeuomorphicBee··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
My last phone was all glued and the entry point was the screen. The repair guy said there was a 50% chance the screen would break in trying to unglue it so it was not worth the try. It was a shame, it was a decent phone killed prematurely by a faulty battery.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version
On my Debian system I use the flatpack version of Steam, it comes with the 32bit stuff inside the container, so you don't need any 32bit packages in the OS.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Most ints are not floats
Not in C. In C signed integer overflow is underined behaviour that may or may not be compiled to the equivalent of mod arithmetic dependingonthe whims of the compiler.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Luck Be a Landlord Might Be Banned from Google Play
It is like chocolate cigarettes, they are not real cigarettes, they don't have nicotine nor smoke, and yet they serve to present and normalize real cigarettes to kids, so there is an argument for banning them. Where you draw the line is a difficult ask (a chocolate with packaging and wrapping copying exactly a cigarette pack seems like a clear case, but what about cylindrical chocolates that vaguely resemble? Probably not).

I think it is fair to argue where to draw the line, but I think some "looks like gambling but without gambling" do in fact deserve more scrutiny just because of the resemblance.

(On the other end of the spectrum we as a society should really crack down on the "doesn't look like gambling but is gambling" epidemic.)

SkeuomorphicBee··on Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
He was fined a billion dollars, but it will never be collected, he never lost a billion dollars. With this decision all his debts are pardoned and he gets to keep his megaphone, that is very "no consequences".
SkeuomorphicBee··on Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on the infamous Pokémon episode
I cant speak for epileptics, but I do suffer from photosensitive migraines (which the author briefly mentioned in the article), and in my case failing flashing LED lights are indeed an issue. Luckily for me it is not as instantaneous as a seisure, I feel it building up over many seconds, so in many situations I can just look away or close my eyes and it doesn't turn into a full blown migraine (just a kind of "hangover" in my head).
SkeuomorphicBee··on Steam Families Is Here
That is great. Now they just need to add a easy way to alternate between different profiles on the same computer, because having to log-out and log-in every time you want to hand the controller to someone else in the family is a big hassle.

I understand the now a days most people have their own computer, so the log-out/log-in is not a problem for most people; but some of us have a gaming desktop connected to the living-room TV that is shared by the whole family, and in this case a way to change profiles without having to do all the hassle of logout/login is really needed.

SkeuomorphicBee··on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon5
> "For the time and the media their CGI is pretty good. And yes, it's not perfect, but completely adequate to the time I think."

I watched it then, and i can tell you that NO, it wasn't pretty good for the time nor the media, it was terrible even for that time. Not because their CGI was particulary worse, but because all CGI was terrible at the time. The technology wasn't ready yet to do much, so everyone else at the time relied on practical effects, miniatures, and built full set; but for practicality and cost reasons they decided to use the crude CGI of the time for many things that were not good enouth at the time, and it shown terribly.

In subsequent seasons they walked back that decision slightly, mostly abandoning CGI for indoor scenes in favour of building sets for their actors like everyone else. And the last few seasons had fairly good CGI for external shots of the station and ships, because by that time the tech evolved to be good enouth (that is when you start seeing such CGI being used in all other shows as well).

SkeuomorphicBee··on Let's stop counting centuries
For me the best feature of Celsius, the one that makes it much better for weather, is the zero on the freezing point of water. Everything changes in life when water start to freeze, roads get slippery, pipes burst, crops die. So it is important that such a crucial threshold is represented numerically in the scale. In other words, going from 5 to -5 in Fahrenheit is just getting 10° colder, nothing special, while going from 2 to -2 in Celsius is a huge change in your daily life.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Static arrays are the best vectors
This is also fine for any long-running processes and servers where the "vector" in question is not expected to shrink its allocation, which I would guess is the main use of vectors. Shrinking a vector's allocation is a niche use, with some finicky APIs, that most programmers never needed or touched.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Julian Assange granted permission to appeal against extradition to US
What an utterly absurd judgment, that should have no place on a free society. They have a literal kidnapping/assassination plot, and yet the Judge considers it all above board and that it doesn't show any prejudice.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Show HN: ECSS – Simple rules for efficient CSS
>Use attribute selectors to convey unicity.

> /* Do */

> [id="main"] { max-width: 80ch; }

> /* Don't */

> #main { Max-width: 80ch; }

I strongly disagree with this kind of guideline. The id attribute has very good uses, and in those cases the hash syntax should be the preferred way.

The use of id in an attribute selector is such a bad choice that makes me question the whole document.

SkeuomorphicBee··on On Migraine Scintillating Scotomas
Interesting how it can be different from person to person, mine looks nothing like that. For me it is not colourful, the border feels more like gray TV static than the rainbow in the video. Or sometimes it feels like a black and white stripe pattern, or sort of zigzag stripes that flash between black and white.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
> Seems like it’d be more productive to reduce attrition of this sort by releasing a Switch with less-anemic hardware.

That is difficult for Nintendo, the GPU architecture used on the switch is long dead, so Nintendo has no easy way of releasing a better switch. Because of that they will probably wait as much as possible and then release a completely new console with only limited backwards compatibility.

SkeuomorphicBee··on All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train
Exactly, Chinas biggest secret is to lean on economies of scale. In case of transit they standardised early-on on only five types of train/rail-corridor and then whenever a city needed a metro, lightrail or any other type of rail transit they would just pick one of the five that fits best and build it using all the knowhow and economies of scale from previous builds. RMTransit has a good video about it [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehTy-qQVZhM&t=0

SkeuomorphicBee··on The Ukraine war is ultimately about Poland
> Putin is not some crazy drugged up megalomaniac. Morality aside, his moves are clearly rational and shows a high level of sophistication.

Nothing rational or sophisticated about trying to build a 19th century style land empire in the 21st century. The mindless quest for a sphere of influence is madness in our modern word, something that can only come from the mind of a crazy megalomaniac who thinks of sovereignty not in regards to modern borders, but in regards to a historic empire of his dreams. He believes Ukraine (and Belorussia, and Georgia, ...) are part of Russia, so anytime one of those stops playing the part (stop being a puppet/satellite) he invades (Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014 and 2022).

SkeuomorphicBee··on The Problem with Civil Asset Forfeiture (2016)
That upplays the financial incentives and downplays the psychological incentives. Cops seize stuff not only to have the money or shiny stuff, but also for the rare trill of punishing "bad people". In their job it is extremely rare to get the "job accomplished" endorphins, they see too many "bad people" (either real criminals or perceived as so by the cop) go free. So they create scenarios in their head about how the person is a criminal and then get the immediate endorphins for punishing the "criminal", restoring cosmic balance to their world. It is the old "do action -> get endorphins" mechanism, and if allowed cops will continue doing it even if you remove the direct monetary incentive.
SkeuomorphicBee··on Turkey's inflation sees biggest jump since August, nears 65% year-on-year
I lived thought the Brazilian hi inflation periods of the late 80s and early 90s, and I remember some interesting workarounds that people adopted:

- People kept a mental model of prices in dollar, especially for expensive not day to day items (e.g. electronics, appliances, car, real state), and used those dollar values in informal conversation.

- Monthly supermarket run on payday. As money's value would decrease noticeable throughout the month, people would rush to supermarkets on their payday to get the most value. Every month the 1st of the month rush on supermarkets was like you would expect on a pre holiday.

- People held some savings in dollar paper notes, you would lose a bit with the US inflation, but the safety and flexibility was worth it.

- People relied a bit more on barter for big items (e.g. exchange a house for two flats, or a flat for a car plus the difference, ...). Newspaper classified adds listing what you are selling and what kind of item would be acceptable in barter.

- Financing was a problem, new car purchase often used the "consortium" scheme (rotating savings and credit association, or Savings Clubs, Christmas clubs, sousou or even money circles) where a group of people paid installments into a pool and one member would get a car each month.

SkeuomorphicBee··on Retired teacher's pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead
That is throwing the baby out with the bath water. The amount of fraud doesn't justify creating such burden on users. The problem is there is a market failure in the form of misaligned interests (the provider's best interest is to make the process as difficult as possible, not only to curb fraud, but also to avoid paying actual customers). This can only be fixed with government oversight and steep fines (so steep that they are more expensive than doing right by their customers).
SkeuomorphicBee··on The case for single-stair multifamily
Looking from the outside I would guess this is one of the big reasons for the "missing middle" [1] (lack of medium-density housing) in most North American cities. It is simply not economically feasible to build a small to medium size multi-unit building if you need to include two stairwells, so all buildings are either single family houses or huge mega projects.

In my country the simple and cheap four-story walk-up condo building (with a single stair and no elevator) is the bread and butter medium density housing for the working class. You either have two or four units per floor, all opening to the stairwell with almost no space lost in corridors, it is simple and efficient. Alternatively for higher density there are higher versions with typically up to 12 floors with one or two elevators but still only one stairwell, so keeping the same efficiency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

SkeuomorphicBee··on The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Your mundane explanation misses the main point that perfect security can't exist while maintainint function. It is not just a matter of cost cutting, it is a (sort of) fundamental law that security and usability are opposite ends of a spectrum, at the limit any gains in security can only be achieved by a loss of usability. So any system that is perfectly secure will be perfectly unusable, or in the business angle, any system with 0% fraud will have 0% sales.
SkeuomorphicBee··on High Performance Voxel Engine (2021)
Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.
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