Random thought of the day
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@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@accalia So rather than "I live in New York" you'd say "I live in 40.723688° N, 73.9987042° W"? Doesn't really roll off the tongue.
And being dyslexic,
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@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
artificially inflate shipping
?
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@Zecc Not my fault there's no zeppelin emoji...
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@dkf :blimp: isn’t a thing either. Nor :led: for that matter (though then the image text would be wrong)
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@Arantor "It's an AIRSHIP!" (Count Zeppelin in a fourth-series episode of Monty Python)
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@da-Doctah how many unladen European swallows are strapped underneath it to give it flight? Using creepers, of course, as the string to tie them to the undercarriage.
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@accalia said in Random thought of the day:
@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
@accalia contention: Google broke Google chasing ad revenue by modifying searches to artificially inflate shipping related searches (= more brand keywords), everything else was a consequence of the manipulations one way or another.
i argue that's just SEO, because google realized they could make money by having people pay for a version of SEO that actually worked and it was all downhill from there.
but i admit that argument is not the most compelling.
I tend to disagree because it’s not SEO, that’s the point.
SEO by definition is “making your content more accessible/attractive to search engines”, anything else where Google artificially distorts this isn’t.
Displaying ads on the result pages isn’t a distortion of this, while altering the searches themselves hurts everyone because it directly encourages people to alter their behaviours around optimising content in unusual ways - and it promotes a spending arms race.
You might think this is a “hurts everyone except Google’s bottom line” situation but actually this isn’t doing them favours except in the short term. People have noticed Google is getting worse. Another “Google vs Bing challenge” marketing campaign might do some real damage this time.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@accalia So rather than "I live in New York" you'd say "I live in 40.723688° N, 73.9987042° W"? Doesn't really roll off the tongue.
But even then you need to establish what the zero-point reference is.
What do you mean aliens don't know about London? Uncultured swine.
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@accalia So rather than "I live in New York" you'd say "I live in 40.723688° N, 73.9987042° W"? Doesn't really roll off the tongue.
But even then you need to establish what the zero-point reference is.
What do you mean aliens don't know about London? Uncultured swine.
They absolutely do know about London, we have multiple documented entries demonstrating this.
Space Yetis in London in the 1960s
The Slitheen in the early 2000s, this one here is visiting Downing Street
The Sycorax, later in the 2000s
Other examples exist, but finding them is a bit right now.
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A wild Xenomorph in front of London Bridge
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@accalia So rather than "I live in New York" you'd say "I live in 40.723688° N, 73.9987042° W"? Doesn't really roll off the tongue.
But even then you need to establish what the zero-point reference is.
As the zero-point reference, just use where the Big Bang happened.
Then you can confidently say "I live in 00.000000° N, 00.0000000° W", wherever you live!
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@nerd4sale said in Random thought of the day:
where the Big Bang happened.
Everything everywhere all at once.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
But even then you need to establish what the zero-point reference is.
I'd make a joke on top of that, about using decimal degrees instead; but the truth is sexagesimal degrees are far superior so I can't bring myself to say it.
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@Zecc inb4 someone makes a SEXagesimal joke.
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@loopback0 said in Random thought of the day:
A wild Xenomorph in front of London Bridge
Proof @loopback0 is not british.
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@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
But even then you need to establish what the zero-point reference is.
I'd make a joke on top of that, about using decimal degrees instead; but the truth is sexagesimal degrees are far superior so I can't bring myself to say it.
The only reason I used decimal degrees was that I couldn't find a sexagesimal one offhand and I was to convert it myself.
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@PleegWat To be clear I meant decimal as in a full circle being 100° or some other power of 10, not just the fractional part being decimal parts of a degree.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
Another “Google vs
BingDuckDuckGo challenge” marketing campaign might do some real damage this time.Yes, I know it uses Bing under the hood, but muh privacy!
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
Other examples exist, but finding them is a bit right now.
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Playing Scrabble on my ZX Spectrum Next, and it occurs to me how well thought out the keyboard controls were (even on the piece of shit keyboard the Spectrum had)
I feel like more software could do with thinking about being actually usable just from a keyboard. And not with “oooo all these arcane shortcuts that are buried in the menu” but like how some software used to work back in the day.
I’m not sure I miss WordPerfect of old exactly but I would rather that nonsense than some of the UI fuckwittery today.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
Playing Scrabble on my ZX Spectrum Next, and it occurs to me how well thought out the keyboard controls were (even on the piece of shit keyboard the Spectrum had)
I feel like more software could do with thinking about being actually usable just from a keyboard. And not with “oooo all these arcane shortcuts that are buried in the menu” but like how some software used to work back in the day.
I’m not sure I miss WordPerfect of old exactly but I would rather that nonsense than some of the UI fuckwittery today.
So you do not want arcane shortcuts but somehow this is OK?
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QAOP
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@PleegWat like I said, I don’t exactly miss WordPerfect but somewhere in the middle might be a usability improvement.
For example, I’ve been noodling about playing Scrabble - perfectly playable with a keyboard, even to the point that it beats the usability of some of the later ports with a mouse-first interface.
I’ve also been noodling about with Tasword - WordPerfect it ain’t, but the most useful keyboard commands are on screen all the time.
Mind you, the Spectrum is hardly the bastion of good keyboard ergonomics given that in its BASIC you didn’t type words out in full but used the keyboard shortcuts which were printed on the keys.
And there were up to 5 uses per key (bare key, bare key with caps, bare key with Symbol Shift, bare key in Extended, bare key in Extended with Symbol Shift) which are helpfully indicated on the keys themselves by placement and colour (white, green or red…)
I dunno. I just think it should be possible for more apps to have sensible keyboard controls that aren’t just buried away in deep dark pits of menus. But I’m also in favour of having more, smaller, discrete apps (as a user) so I can focus on what I’m trying to do.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
sensible keyboard controls that aren’t just buried away in deep dark pits of menus.
All hail ViM.
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@PleegWat I said sensible. That also rules out emacs for similar reasons.
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Apps should have an omni-shortcut, which brings up a popup where you can search for the command you want to run, also displaying any dedicated keyboard shortcut it has. A minority of applications do.
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In fact, GUI frameworks should help provide this by default.
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@Zecc I suggest pressing and releasing Alt, which already highlights the menu bar, followed by / or Ctrl+F to trigger the search function.
For the mouse-addicted, add a looking glass icon on the right-hand side of the menu bar. This could be where the search box pops up from.
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@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
Playing Scrabble on my ZX Spectrum Next, and it occurs to me how well thought out the keyboard controls were (even on the piece of shit keyboard the Spectrum had)
I feel like more software could do with thinking about being actually usable just from a keyboard. And not with “oooo all these arcane shortcuts that are buried in the menu” but like how some software used to work back in the day.
I’m not sure I miss WordPerfect of old exactly but I would rather that nonsense than some of the UI fuckwittery today.
So you do not want arcane shortcuts but somehow this is OK?
Ever work with an APL keyboard? Every character in the letter/number part of the keyboard had a symbol you could shift to, many could overstrike to create additional symbols, and every one of those funky symbols had one meaning as a monadic function and another somewhat related dyadic function.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
Playing Scrabble on my ZX Spectrum Next, and it occurs to me how well thought out the keyboard controls were (even on the piece of shit keyboard the Spectrum had)
I feel like more software could do with thinking about being actually usable just from a keyboard. And not with “oooo all these arcane shortcuts that are buried in the menu” but like how some software used to work back in the day.
I’m not sure I miss WordPerfect of old exactly but I would rather that nonsense than some of the UI fuckwittery today.
So you do not want arcane shortcuts but somehow this is OK?
Ever work with an APL keyboard? Every character in the letter/number part of the keyboard had a symbol you could shift to, many could overstrike to create additional symbols, and every one of those funky symbols had one meaning as a monadic function and another somewhat related dyadic function.
Oh gawd. It must have been 35 years ago, and I still have nightmares about using APL.
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@da-Doctah sounds like the nightmare version of the ZX Soectrum keyboard.
The BASIC didn’t require you to type things in full, you had a keyword mode (different cursor and everything) that essentially handed you the BASIC keywords pre-tokenised in the same format it would use internally.
By because the Speccie keyboard only had 40 keys for budget reasons, it multi-purposed every key on the keyboard.
For example, the L key.
- In letter mode the letter L (upper/lower depending on if Caps Shift was pressed)
- In keyword mode the keyword LET
- If you pressed Symbol Shift (different to Caps Shift), you get the = symbol
- In extended mode (Caps Shift + Symbol Shift to trigger), the keyword USR
- In extended mode + Symbol Shift, the keyword ATTR
The number keys also had extra/different meanings, e.g. Caps Shift + 9 put you in graphics mode where instead of the number or a symbol or a keywords you got a graphic glyph. The cursor keys were also based on shifting with 5-8 on the keyboard.
The two shift keys plus Enter were the only “single purpose” keys, even Space doubled up as Break.
Oh, and all of this was written on the keyboard. This box is roughly the size of an iPad for scale.
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And if you think that's bad, at least the Spectrum had a keyboard with rubber keys. The ZX80 had this instead:
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@Zerosquare I’ve only ever seen one of those in a box (stepdad has one, as well as a ZX81 and at least one Spectrum), so I can’t vouch for the awfulness of the ‘80 keyboard. But I have used a ZX81 and the keyboard on that is fucking horror.
The rubber keys are positively joyful by comparison, as are the keys on the QL, the toast rack Spectrum (128K with the side heat sink) or the Amstrad models joyful compared to the rubber.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
Am I right in thinking that the Star Wars universe pulls the vaguely alien-sounding names for both planets and people from the same well that used to be used in DC's Silver Age Legion of Superheroes?
Surely "Mace Windu" and "Brin Londo" (Timber Wolf) share a common linguistic influence, as do "Darth Vader" and "Rond Vidar" (the son of villain Universo who becomes a good guy in the end), or "Alderaan" and "Braal".
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Agar Agar.
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@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
Agar Agar.
The next to be announced Disney+ SW series, clearly.
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If two people are having a conversation and a joke is exchanged and both sides acknowledge the joke (and are amused), if a third person that was observing the conversation needs to have the joke explanied to them, was it even funny to begin with?
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@boomzilla said in Random thought of the day:
Pung Kao
Vimp Shrindaloo
Thad PaiYeah, that sort of works. But I'm still not going to be able to stifle a laugh when introduced to Dotted Spick.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
If two people are having a conversation and a joke is exchanged and both sides acknowledge the joke (and are amused), if a third person that was observing the conversation needs to have the joke explanied to them, was it even funny to begin with?
I make it a rule to hold off (at least for time) explaining a joke that someone fails to get. If a third person steps in to explain it for me, I take that as a sign that the joke made sense to someone other than me and that the fault lies in the confused person.
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@da-Doctah the person the joke was aimed at got the joke just fine. It was a third party who came along around the time the conversation was happening and was confused at the secondary punchline.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
the fault lies in the confused person.
I'll admit I have many faults. The interrupt table does a fuckton of work, I'll tell you that much!
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
@da-Doctah the person the joke was aimed at got the joke just fine. It was a third party who came along around the time the conversation was happening and was confused at the secondary punchline.
So they may have missed the setup? That wouldn't be the joke's fault.
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@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
Doesn't look anything like any bear I've ever seen, and what does a bear have to do with wheel alignment in the first place?
This looks like a picture you might use to troll Xi Jinping
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
If two people are having a conversation and a joke is exchanged and both sides acknowledge the joke (and are amused), if a third person that was observing the conversation needs to have the joke explanied to them, was it even funny to begin with?
If a sophisticated joke is told in a forest of idiots, was it even funny?
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@MrL said in Random thought of the day:
@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
If two people are having a conversation and a joke is exchanged and both sides acknowledge the joke (and are amused), if a third person that was observing the conversation needs to have the joke explanied to them, was it even funny to begin with?
If a sophisticated joke is told in a forest of idiots, was it even funny?
I would ask why I’d hearing about such a joke, but then I remembered where I was, looking for a better forest.
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Is it time for the Lumberjack Song yet?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Random thought of the day:
Is it time for the Lumberjack Song yet?
Razor razor razor murder death blood spurt.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
but then I remembered where I was, looking for a better forest.
Realizing that there is no better forest is an important part of human experience.
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@Arantor said in Random thought of the day:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Random thought of the day:
Is it time for the Lumberjack Song yet?
Razor razor razor murder death blood spurt.
I don't remember that Prodigy track.