tiramichu @ tiramichu @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

They don't "work" at all, in the sense that most of us understand that word.

Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.

Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC's hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.

DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.

Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.

VCRs.

Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.

But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.

This can sometimes be because the lyrics of a song have different licencing considerations to the song itself, and they are legally not entitled to put the lyrics as subtitles.

No such problems for fansub groups! :)

A quick search suggests this appears to be a revised version of Tanita's MC-980 scale, which is intended for professional use and costs $13,000 USD anyway - even without King of Fighters.

So not really any difference, just a very unusual collab and bit of fun for marketing! :)

https://tanita.com/products/mc-980uplus

Of course they do, but let's unpack that.

When people buy a new car who already have one, they generally do it because either 1. they think it will bring some material benefit over their old car, or 2. they want a new car simply for vanity reasons.

Looking at the PS5 Pro, there will absolutely be people who think "I want to upgrade to the Pro just for bragging rights" but I'm pretty sure the majority of consumers wil simply think "This doesn't play any games my PS5 can't already" and pass on it.

Not if they already have a PS5, though.

There's also the option of electronic scales which are rechargeable via USB

Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that 'smith.technology' just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.

You're thinking like "smith dot technology dot what?"

Another reason is brand identity.

Using '.tech' or '.flights' or .sports' for your site feels too "on the nose" and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn't from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can't expand and grow out of it into other things.

I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over 'meaningless' two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.

I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.

I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it's kinda bready.

In English too, the colloquial name for tardigrades is "water bears" :D

There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.

For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.

If that was in TNG, they'd have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that's how people with jobs get their jobs done.

TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.

Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.

And it's not like they didn't have plenty of problems to solve.

Here's an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4

I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.

In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader's mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There's a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.

In an engineering context, remembering exactly "12 eggs, 6 toast" is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn't matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.

Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don't want them to jump out and steal attention. We don't want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.

Hell on earth, perfect

Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all.

I feel like it's also an outlook/mentality thing.

I personally am happy to take a few extra seconds parking, because I see it as spending time to make life easier, faster and safer for my future self when I come to leave.

Zooming in forwards is like "I care about now more than I care about later"

Context is everything, IMO.

In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.

Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.

Compared to

Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.

To me it's pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really 'jump out' on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.