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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Torx > Hex > Robertson > Pozidriv > Phillips > Slot.

    This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.

    In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.



  • I was there Gandalf…

    Before that date their algorithm was soft-locked to around 5k upvotes. If a post was extremely, massively popular it would climb to maybe a bit over 10k but that was insane. There was clearly a logarithmic scaling effect that kicked in after a few thousand upvotes. Not entirely sure why, perhaps to prevent the super-popular stuff from ballooning in some kind of horrible feedback loop.

    The change was to uncap the vote counts. One day posts just kept climbing well beyond the 5k mark. Now what they also did was recalculate old posts in order not to fuck up the /top rankings. Kinda. Took a while and I’m not sure they got to every post.

    I don’t know or care if reddit does vote manipulation, but this ain’t proof and I don’t see how it is unbelievable that a website with tens of millions MOA would occasionally have a post with 100k+ upvotes.


  • I’m not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

    “The system must be destroyed” implies, assuming we’re talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

    This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

    Of course everything in the world isn’t so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn’t diminish the difference between black and white. “The system must be destroyed”, by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to “the system must be fixed”.



  • Cop-out answer. Ending capitalism and ending ST are not the same fight. I’m not confident I’ll see the former happen in my lifetime, but the latter is a distinct possibility (though the pro-ST “I hate to see the sun in my free time” people have a slight edge where I live). Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

    Also I’m not even sure how ending capitalism is actually relevant. My skillset is office stuff, and until further notice humans still need to collaborate to get things done and therefore have a concept of “business hours” (though those don’t have to be 8-6).

    I see the “8 hours of work is too many” angle, but that problem is mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalist societies can (and have) changed the standard number of working hours. Communist societies are not exempt from the concept of mandatory labor either (quite the contrary for all historical examples!). If you’re looking for an economic model where everyone is free to work whenever they damn well please, I’m afraid you’ll have to bring the replicator thingies from Star Trek into existence first.


  • Oh I’ve got a window alright. It is set up perfectly right so that on the day after ST takes over I can see the sun set 6 minutes before I get off work. Sun’s down, guess I can go outside now!

    That is absolutely devilish. I have to get to work so I’ll wake up whenever to get there. But all outdoors evening activities are, at best, a complete joke 5 months of the year because of fucking ST. Wanna take a quick jog around the neighborhood? Bad news bitch, it’s pitch black outside. Here’s to hoping I don’t get run over by a fucking bus.

    “Sun rises after work starts” is a setup for caffeine addiction, but “sun sets before work ends” is a setup for crippling alcoholism. Literally nothing to look forward to all day long, five months a year. I will not take any shit from so-called morning people about this, there is one objective truth here and it’s that standard business hours being the worldwide standard that they are, ST the absolute fucking worst for office workers.






  • Kids finish school around 3 pm where I live. They have time to do their extracurricular activities (partially) during daytime even in the dead of winter. So of course it’s the mornings they find dreadful. If school finished around 5-6 pm I think they’d be miserable then as well.

    Speaking of which, I’m about to end my work day and the sun is setting right now. FML.


  • Yes it would. I, like most 21st century humans, wake up for work and have free time after work.

    In practice for my relatively northern latitude this means I get a little bit of daylight before work (except perhaps around december/january), but winter time is very specifically designed so that today the sun will set exactly 6 minutes before I end my work day.

    Were we to keep permanent DST I would get an hour of free time in the daylight today, and at least a little bit of light outside for all winter except perhaps for a month around December. As it stands, I do not get any free time in sunlight for 5 days a week for the entire duration of ST. The switch to ST means “bye-bye sun” and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I FUCKING HATE IT.

    The 24 hour clock is a made up construct. So are business hours. But if we already agreed to change one of these twice a year, can we make it so that it is not optimized to trap me inside for the entire duration of daytime???



  • Generally French speakers don’t consider English to be phonetically messy. Because when you pronounce every word with the thickest French accent known to man without any regard for correctness, suddenly the phonology becomes quite regular! (Side-effect being that native English speakers may not understand what the fuck a French speaker is saying, but that’s never stopped French speakers who famously disregard the English’s opinion on… well everything)

    What’s really annoying about French besides the needlessly complicated tenses is that it had a bunch of already archaic orthographic and grammatical rules 300 years ago or so, and at that point the aristocracy decided to freeze it in place. I won’t get on another rant about the Académie française but if a French word has an overly complicated spelling given its pronunciation, it’s these guys’ fault who have refused to enact any real reform since the early 1800s despite calls for it since at least the 1700s. Despite it supposedly being their jobs.


  • At least these all have the same radical. Here’s the different radicals you can use in French for the verb “be”:

    • Être
    • Je suis
    • Tu es
    • Nous sommes
    • Nous étions
    • Je fus
    • Tu seras
    • Soyons

    The only common point between some of those is the letter “S”, which is not even part of the infinitive.

    (Not all tenses are represented because at least they share the radical with that list, but like Polish we have a bunch of tenses and the verb changes with plurality and pronoun).

    Anyway I don’t fucking know why everyone glamorizes French because as a native speaker please do not attempt to learn it, you will just hurt yourself.


  • That’s simultaneously a shit-ton of money and not that much money.

    $100k, which would be successful lifetime sales numbers for a smallish indie game (an industry where the upfront capital requirements are as low as they get, you only need skills and time) is just an IT consultant’s gross yearly revenue, a couple “medium-high effort” B2B contracts for an SME, or around a month of OpEx for a decent McDonald’s franchisee.

    Not to say big corps don’t severely exploit creatives for profit. But I also do not believe that solving that particular issue would solve artists’ precarity. The entertainment industry just isn’t profitable enough to sustain everyone’s wish to work in a creative field.