• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • In a world where this fake shit didn’t take hold we could have had real wireless charging by now, if you think the “wireless” charging is good now, just think what true wireless would be like. You could walk into a room and your phone just starts charging with 0 effort. None.

    You know this is possible how exactly? Wireless power distribution has been considered since Tesla’s time. Yet it still hasn’t been done outside of laboratory environments or very short distances. It’s definitely possible, but making it practical might not even be possible within physics as we currently understand it.

    For example a very power light beam like for example a laser beam can transfer a lot of power over some distance. It would also cook you, burn you, or make you go blind. It would also require precise alignment between transmitter and receiver, as well as very expensive transmission equipment.




  • People don’t drink because it tastes good. People drink it because they like getting high and alcohol is one of the few legal drugs you can do. People who drink it because it’s the cool thing to do are being idiots.

    If alcohol isn’t your thing you should probably get out there and try other drugs. The good thing about drugs is how many different kinds there are. There really is a substance for almost everyone if you look hard enough. Now if only stuff was legalized and people didn’t abuse it to the nth degree and get themselves in trouble.

    Edit: also forgot to mention that brewing is probably the easiest and cheapest way to make a psychoactive substance known to man, and is an entire hobby people (such as myself) have. While lots of homebrewers spend money on fancy equipment and ingredients you don’t need to spend much at all to make alcohol that will get you drunk it can literally be done using a used plastic bottle and a fucking balloon. You can make pretty drinkable stuff with even fairly basic equipment like a hydrometer, couple of plastic or glass fermenters, yeast + nutrients ordered online, and supermarket ingredients.



  • I am from the UK. This idea of states having an influence over their education system seems weird to me, though I guess we might allow something similar with Scotland, Wales, or Northern Island.

    As I said we really don’t teach handwriting that well. They give kids either ball points or these triangle grip things that are actually designed to increase the force it takes to write. Why? No idea but someone thought that was a good idea to stop people who write too quickly and mess it up. Weirdly that actually helped some people. Even though it makes no sense to me.

    It’s interesting though that you say cursive is more legible for dyslexic people. I think for everyone else print handwriting beats cursive. Not that that’s the issue as it’s still perfectly readable when done right. I am talking about people with typical doctors handwriting who can’t actually write it properly. I am also talking about the difficulty of the technique needed and how that could be a problem for some students. You say teachers adapt but my experience is that they don’t. If making students use cursive improves grades though it might be worth it. I am wondering why that’s the case that it improves grades.

    Either way I think typing should be much more of a focus in modern education. People type more often than they write by hand, yet there is almost no education on how to use a keyboard. Heck lots of modern school students apparently don’t know how to use a computer. I’ve heard of people going to University and not understanding how files and folders work, because it’s just presumed that new generations actually know this stuff without being taught.


  • Feathers are the things birds have that are part of their wing and help them fly. Pens were made from feathers at sorme points in history. I think the term you are looking for is nib, if you mean the metal part of a pen that touches the paper.

    You have pens like the platinum Preppy and platinum plasir which have double seals around the nib. I left my preppy for an entire year and it still didn’t dry out. They aren’t the only brand to use tricks like this, my TWSBI Eco was also left for a year and was a-okay. It’s always good before buying a pen to check the reviews and see what their cap seals are like. Rollerballs do require less maintenance though you are correct. If you do leave a fountain pen and it gets clogged there are ways to fix it, as I had to do with two more of my pens that did clog when they were left with the others.

    I’ve used cheap mechanical pencils before but not expensive ones. How much better are more expensive mechanical pencils?


  • Maybe I haven’t explained this but with regards things like handwriting and special education my country isn’t that well put together. They hand kids ballpoint pens for the most part unless you are in private school. Some schools force kids to use pencil even.

    Cursive is fundamentally less legible and harder work for most students to learn. It should be taught yes, but not as the only way. Schools often force people to use cursive even when that person doesn’t have that skill, and the school isn’t willing to give them proper lessons on it or the lessons they give aren’t of good quality. It was a whole thing in my primary school.

    I have actual clinical issues in several different areas of development, not just coordination. You can’t remove all issues before primary school starts, I am entitled to some help even now as a 23 year old PhD student and still have issues. I wouldn’t even have been accepted into primary school if my parents hadn’t gone out of their way to get me tested by psychologists as I had issues the school weren’t willing to get me tested for that were picked up on in preschool.

    I can write pretty well now including cursive. It’s not clear to me how much of the problems I had were because I was younger and at a lesser stage of brain development or how much was bad teaching. Maybe if you know more developmental psychology than I do you could answer that question, but I suspect that answer will be different on a case by case basis.


  • I too think ball point pens are horrible. Fountain pens are not that expensive, last a lot longer as they are refillable, and just write better. There are some rather bad fountain pens out there though lol. Platinum Preppy is pretty much the gold standard for cheap pens under £10 or $10. Platinum plasir is a little more expensive but has a more durable body and cap made of metal using the same nib and feed as the preppy. You can also get disposable fountain pens now that aren’t half bad.

    Liquid ink roller balls are a good product too and are a nice middle ground between ball point and fountain pen. Although to be fair I wouldn’t be against a return to good old fashioned dip pens as these are the best for calligraphy and honestly look cool as heck in my opinion.


  • Forcing children to do cursive was not really the point I am trying to make. Yes it’s technically more efficient to write that way, but it’s also considerably more complicated. Forcing children with disabilities to do it leads to all kinds of problems, and makes their writing less legible. I am more talking about techniques that avoid issues like RSI. If we are making children do things we should be teaching them the correct way to do it, not half assing it. While I think we should still teach cursive, I don’t think it should be mandatory. In fact I actually want to see more keyboard use with proper ten finger technique, as that is useful for the real world. Typing technique is also something schools love to neglect. It’s also better to give kids that option as even with better handwriting instruction some just do not have the required motor skills through no fault of their own. People like me were forced to do handwriting practice despite having significant coordination issues, and never being taught the right technique. Eventually I had to dig through obscure corners of the Internet to find out the right way. Situations like that should never be allowed to continue for as long as it did in my case. Either by actually teaching the right technique in the first place, or in cases where that doesn’t work by switching to typing instead.


  • Key chording has always been faster than conventional single letter typing, and that tech has been around for a long time now in the form of stenography machines. Yet most people learn on a conventional keyboard because it’s simpler and more ubiquitous. This is true even now that chording has been adapted to programming and similar tasks.

    You have to remember we live in a world where most people don’t even know how to write properly, even those who do it as part of their job like doctors. If you draw letters by moving your fingers, you’re doing it wrong by the way. The actual proper technique involves using your shoulder, elbow, and wrist to do most of the work. We’ve known about this for centuries, and these techniques were designed with dip pens, quils, brush, and fountain pens in mind. The cheap ballpoint pen along with rather bad instructions from teachers has led to proper handwriting technique being forgotten, and causes problems like RSI in people who handwrite regularly.




  • The difference here is that the ISP is up charging for multiple devices, meaning this isn’t all being done for benevolent reasons.

    The way many apartments work for non-students is each has its own WiFi. Honestly compared to how bad some Hall’s WiFi is this is a better option, but it’s not without problems. A lot of ISP routers either don’t support or don’t turn on by default DFS channels, 5.8GHz channels, 6 GHz band, or have WiFi 6 for BSS colouring. This means there will be loads of interference between adjacent WiFi networks.

    It’s really frustrating especially when you have ISPs like Virgin whose kit has DFS support, but despite touting smart wifi they just never enable it, and most people don’t know to enable it either.



  • The rust guys would have gained a lot more traction by just asking the C guys to keep a bunch of comments up to date detailing the semantics and error checking procedures, and promising to edit their rust API if the C code changes, but I suspect they didn’t ask for that because they know that no guarantees come from a comment and they want to be sure that the rust code works across all the possible scenarios and in rust culture, that is always documented in the type system where it can be enforced.

    I could be being daft but I thought this is more or less what the Rust guys were asking for. Tell us the current symantics of the system, and if it changes in future let us know what the new semantics are and we will fix the Rust code accordingly.

    I do understand what you mean though about enforcing restrictions on what the C guys can do without breaking the Rust code. I think you run into situations wherever two languages meet. The way most projects handle this is the upstream releases a new version, or a release candidate of a new version with their breaking changes documented and then downstream updates their stuff accordingly when they get time. Obviously this is one project, but I imagine it’s possible for the C guys to update stuff in a pull request and then drop an email in LKML to the Rust guys so they know stuff needs fixing. None of this seems that hard to me.

    Ultimately though everything here is Linus decision. Either your in or your out. If Linus says yes to Rust doing whatever then that’s what’s going to happen. Likewise if he says no, then it’s not going to happen that way. Until he weighs in no one can really say how this will end.

    Personally though I disagree with the C guys. Safety features are important and should be used where it is practical to do so. Until now C has had the justification that it’s still the fastest language and by a significant margin. Now a somewhat safe language like Rust exists with the same speed and capabilities I don’t think we can afford to continue ignoring safety for the sake of a few bruised egos. If this was a proper industry like aviation safety would always come first, and if that means adopting new technologies and forcing people to adapt. I can understand if C devs have a hard time adapting, I don’t expect it to happen overnight. The expectation though should be they should learn some Rust eventually, even if it’s just enough to know the type signatures and what not that they might break with their changes to C code. Kernel devs are supposed to be some of the smartest computer people out there. If they can’t learn even that small amount of another language then should they really still be kernel developers?