• 2 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • 13 words per minute isn’t impressive

    Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)

    On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.

    That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.






  • Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.

    You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.


  • Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.

    I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.

    To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.




  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlYoutube is harassing us!
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    18 days ago

    FYI, SponsorBlock isn’t just for skipping sponsored segments. SB gives you granular control over the sorts of sections you can skip, and it only auto-skips sponsors by default. However:

    • There are several categories of section, including intro animation/intermission (“an interval without actual content”), preview (i.e. where the information already exists later in the video), sponsor (a segment made in return for payment from a third party), unpaid/self-promotion (e.g. “buy my merch”), interaction reminder (e.g. “remember to like and subscribe”), and endcards/credits. (There’s also “filler tangent/jokes”, but I haven’t tried this one.)
    • For each of these categories, you can choose to disable altogether, show in the seek bar, prompt to manually skip, or auto skip.

    So even if you would never want to skip a sponsored segment in your life, the extension still saves a ton of time if you have no/limited interest in watching even just one of the above-listed categories.



  • Yeah, I’m siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that’s not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a “necessary evil” toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you’re complicit in its distribution.

    I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.


  • Moreover, they note that it’s a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.

    If we’re sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.

    On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting ‘All’ by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there’s a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlwin9x be like:
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    28 days ago

    Oh, no, given an actual choice (even if it were exactly the same computer at exactly the same price), Linux would likely win out eventually if MS didn’t massively step up their game. Windows has way too much stupid bullshit that its userbase is noseblind to: driver fuckery, installing applications by finding files on an Internet scavenger hunt, no built-in, centralized updating of applications, having to restart your PC for your OS to update, being consistently slower and more resource-hungry, needing a dedicated antivirus, bare minimum customization, not being able to uninstall completely useless shitware (e.g. Internet Explorer in goddamn 2024) and having the bloatware you can uninstall come back after updates (e.g. Candy Crush), the amount of dark patterns during installation, licensure bullshit, this new scheme of pressuring users into OneDrive by making it the default, ads in your “premium” OS, and I could just keep going.

    MS could definitely still gatekeep their Office suite and their Copilot AI (for the few people who actually use the latter), but every other software vendor would start supporting Linux if the userbase moved there, and LibreOffice etc. (already fine for the basic office stuff most people do) would get the funding and contributors to implement more advanced functionalities.