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function_seven

Re:The designer lamps in my house on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:41PM (#49969586)
How does it fare with modern LED bulbs? I imagine the placement of the reflectors assumes an almost-point source of light like a filament would provide, but most LED bulbs now have a plane of LEDs inside a frosted shell.

I guess would it make a noticeable difference to put an LED faux filament bulb in here? Or is it just not as fussy as I'm imagining?

1) For the vast majority of Californians, the nearest state border is 3-5 hours away. 2) those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.

Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.

I’m waiting for .Net Copilot with integration to Passport.
Re:The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not on Thursday March 26, 2026 @05:52PM (#47536285)
If you’re one to omit the Oxford comma in your writing, then how do I resolve the ambiguity in your first example?
The fire station was located on the opposite side of runway 4 from the United plane. To avoid crossing the runway would mean having to travel a few extra miles around the thresholds (I assume).

I guess they could have found a route that wouldn't conflict with landing aircraft, but I doubt that's a practical option most of the time.

Beating the index by 40% after 2 decades as a company? Yeah, still good.
The parent was talking about people choosing to wear these. Today there might be reluctance to wear them because they're creepy or uncool. But that mirrors the reluctance for cool kids to wear bluetooth earpieces back when they were those chunky Borg-looking things. Then they got shrunk down. They got "high quality, convenient, [and] light".

When these types of glasses are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, and a critical mass of cool people wear them all the time, the reluctance from the rest of us will melt away.

I hope I'm wrong. Really.

Remember those dorky Bluetooth earpieces? The ones only MBA nerds wore? They were uncool until the AirPods came along.

The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.

Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.
Re:Tether says it bought 27 tons of gold in fourth quarter on Monday January 26, 2026 @04:39PM (#46771936)
It's collateral for their XAUt token, not the dollar one.
That only strengthens the parent point. Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play if you're worried about any governments having a backdoor into your own machine.
Yes. Like with Tuya devices (tasmota) or the WRT-54G two decades ago.

Only takes one person to create the new firmware. Everyone else can follow whatever steps are needed to use it.

"Lemon" was never mentioned. That's extreme. I don't care what make and model of car you choose, I'll show you a list of TSBs associated with that model. There's never been a car produced that was perfectly engineered and had no after-sale issues common to that model and year. There's always something.

Yes, I would be thrilled to find a car that gave cheap and available replacement parts so I could remedy those issues later. That used to be the standard! The trend now is for automakers to keep juicing the proprietary software tools and one-off components, making repairability harder for the owner.

So, to rephrase your analogy: "[That's like] buying a new car then bragging to your friends ... that you're thrilled because you can repair it yourself (at cost)."

Re:The history of Casio watches on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @02:48PM (#45891904)
I was really surprised to find out that the F-91W was first released in 1989. I had assumed it was even older than that!

I wasn't too surprised to see their blurb leave out it's other (alleged!) known use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism

Re:Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? on Sunday October 05, 2025 @02:26AM (#45479270)
Exactly. Degradation can occur for many reasons.

Enshittification is a deliberate kind of degradation to juice a metric.

That metric is never “customer satisfaction”

I get a notification when the doors lock. I can also check the status of the lock in Home Assistant.

If for some reason the deadbolt jams, or the door was not actually locked, then I risk it for those few hours. It hasn't happened yet.

I have probably "manually" forgotten to lock my door more times than that. (e.g. Carrying items out to the car, I think I will go back for more, then I get distracted and leave instead.)

I love walking up to my front door and having it automatically unlock when I’m carrying groceries.

It’s also really nice to just leave the house and have it lock automatically behind me.

But I didn’t fall for cloud bullshit. It’s purely local and z-wave.

All of those sound more reasonable than my Model M keyboard.
Re:What Went Wrong for Yahoo on Saturday July 26, 2025 @08:25PM (#44697968)
Ha! I don’t listen to the All In podcast, but I did see this:

https://youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY

Oh duh. I was so focused on optical qualities I didn’t even think about material ones.
Diamonds sparkle a lot more brilliantly due to their high refractive index.

(Moissanite is even better, so it should be preferred over diamonds unless I’m overlooking some other difference in their attributes?)

But plain glass gems look comparatively bland when used as jewelry.

Re:Gwern's Perfume Reviews on Friday July 18, 2025 @12:27AM (#44601203)
I have no idea why, but I interpreted your original comment completely differently

Yeah, the only way I can describe scent to another person is to compare it to other scents that I hope we both have a common experience with.

Thanks.

Re:Gwern's Perfume Reviews on Thursday July 17, 2025 @04:54PM (#44598092)
While (human) vision is 3 colors, reviews of visual arts obviously can't just describe the colors of the thing. It also has shape, depth, style, etc.

Food reviewers don't note the levels of salt, sour, etc. They describe flavors and textures and parings.

But also, I don't buy that taste is just the composition of 5 components. This sounds like a reference to that diagram of the tongue we've all seen. It's as complex as scent is. There's no way you can define the taste of cinnamon by specifying some sort of 5-tuple.

This isn't a food storage thing, but I think I see where you got that idea from the photos in the link. He's showing the types of paperboard that work with his system. Old cereal boxes, coffee filter boxes, etc.
Re:Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @09:05PM (#44243227)
Nope. Too easy to accidentally strip out. Each and every glyph must carry the taint.

We don’t want to send innocent people to jail! (Use UCS-18 for maximum benefit.)

Re:Experiencing Partial Outage on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @01:24PM (#44183180)
Ha. The search page is working again. So only the status page seems to be down.
Re:The IoT device "I'm in a meeting." on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @11:15PM (#43980386)
And requires me to remember to get up and hang it before a scheduled meeting. Or not hang it when someone calls me and a meeting erupts. And I need to remember to take it down after each call. (If I don’t, then it’s just up all the time and might be taken as seriously as a Prop 65 Warning.)

Automations are really nice for certain things!

I dreamed of having one of these when I was in high school drafting class!

They definitely were worth it over “acoustic” erasers, but cost something like $70. The few times I got to use one spoiled me.

Re:Attention K-Mart Shoppers on Wednesday April 16, 2025 @12:01PM (#43707037)
My brother and I bought the same album back in 1994. Stone Temple Pilots—Purple.

I had it on CD, he bought the tape.

The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-bought copy.

Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II cassettes for the released album.

A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-forward, though.

(Also, Dolby NR was terrible. I'd rather have the hiss than have the muted highs)

All the best things in this world aren't covered by insurance :)

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