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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah the locker/towel thing would be a habit especially if you don’t actively think about it.

    You may not have a strong daily routine but all humans have habits and it’s precisely because you don’t actively think about them a lot that it’s can be hard to become cognizant of them.

    They also include behavioral preferences such as scratching your chin with your right hand when lost in thought 🤔, calling your girlfriend ‘honey’ frequently, consuming certain foods/beverages more than others, separating the trash, opening up social Media on your smart phone when bored, or taking your jacket with you when you go outside.

    Those are not the same for everyone but everyone has them useless maybe some severe medical condition is present.








  • Do you just sweep with a broom? A good vacuum cleaner is a lot more thorough. And if you mopp right after there’s a better chance to get most of the dust.

    The other question is where the dirt is ultimately coming from. Most notably rom outside via air movement and shoes, but also consider shedded hair and skin from humans & pets, dropped food crumbs, lints from textiles and any hobbies/activities.

    I like to avoid any “dust catcher” objects like carpets or rugs. In the end it’s a tradeoff between how clean you want it to be and how much time you’re willing to invest.


  • Went to a open cast lignite mining operation once. The scales are quite impressive. Once standing at the bottom of the pit vision of the surrounding landscape just fades and you feel a bit like in a wasteland of sorts.

    open cast mine

    I assume many people are familiar with hydrocarbon gas for cooking or heating. Coal can also be converted to liquid or gas fuel form chemically but the process is quite complex and usually not economical.

    Then there’s crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.

    EDIT: the coal typically used for barbecue (charcoal) is made from wood and is different from the stuff mined from the earth. Many people seem to not know this.


  • Layman’s suspicion: adoption is hard when nearly everyone and their uncle knows and supports gif/jpg/png. At least for most end consumers there’s no major advantage to adopting early. And in such a scenario most people adopt when they are forced to because everyone else adopted. So it’s a hen-egg problem.

    Ideally when you introduce a new format you support both the old and new format concurrently over a long time to allow for a gradual transition. The major advantage of webp/avif is that they need less storage space for the same quality. However if you have to store everything in an extra format whilst also keeping the old ones you are completely reversing that storage advantage and now need even more storage volume than before.

    As far as I can tell AVIF has much better prospects of being the future image format anyways. In the long run that is. Plus it’s open source and not just a single tech giant behind it. Suffers from the same slow adoption rates though.



  • My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don’t know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.


  • Yeah, rabbits as a species are not only tolerant to eating their own poop pellets but also gain calory extraction benefits from it. Usually mammals don’t completely break down food they eat, ie there is still energy to be gained from it. Microorganisms have the necessary biochemical pathways to do it but for mammals it’s not efficient.

    Basically any animal has only a few ways to into crease its energy budget. First it can simply eat more or more rapidly. Second it can find ways to make use of resources that are less contested (think of a giraffe reaching for the top of a tree or a koala being able to digest eucalyptus leaves). Third it can simply be more efficient: that’s the slow metabolism of a sloth, but also a rabbit eating it’s own feces alongside fresh food. It’s basically an evolutionary strategy to extract more energy from the environment.






  • When I was extracting sounds from the sound banks from the Nintendo 64 game F-Zero X I simply couldn’t find certain sound effects. It turns out that some effects are created during runtime by taking a sound sample and applying certain effects or filters, for instance pitch shifting the sample and looping it in rapid succession.

    It’s a clever way to save on memory and the player doesn’t notice if it’s well done. The original Pokémon Red/Blue on the gameboy is an example where it’s not so well done in some places. If you pay attention you’ll notice that some Pokémon’s battle cries are simple pitch shifts of other ones and they didn’t apply any other effects to obfuscate this.