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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The curved edges were the precursor tech to having a foldable screen. No matter what is said about the Apple vs. Samsung debate, Samsung is still the one responsible for the praises on Apple’s screens. They have tried with other manufacturers and providers but can’t escape the fact that Samsung is still the major leader on displays as they dump a shit ton of money on R&D on all LED screen technologies, specially manufacturing at scale. If you want high end screens, you just go with Samsung, period. The alternatives are constantly playing catch up with them and they are actually experimenting and trying to come up with new and original stuff. LG and Sharp are also really good, but their screens aren’t as premium as Apple wants them to be, though they are more affordable.



  • As someone with the opposite problem, too formal and not very good at casual writing. Truth is, formal writing is robotic and in today’s context it is regarded as awkward except in a few places. Most of the samples online that the bots are trained with are overly formal examples. 99% of cover letters are never published online, so that’s an area they’re lacking. What they have access to is the awfully generic slop that’s impersonal and meant to sell online workshops about writing cover letters.

    There’s a very difficult task in making formal writing feel natural and warm. I would advice instead to aim for transparency. A cover letter is supposed to highlight a match between your skills and personality, with the company role’s needs and work culture. It’s not a cold sales pitch, you must show that you did your due diligence about getting to know the place before applying for the job. As long as it sounds like the genuine you talking, not a façade, it doesn’t has to be too formal, just keep the content and vocabulary professional. How you would talk in the workspace with a coworker that you don’t know too well yet. A cover letter is more like corporate flirting than lawyer speak.

    As for material, read the basic common sense guides online, but, and it is a big but. Also read a lot in general, specially in English as it isn’t your first language. Unlike LLMs humans are actually intelligent and we can use experiences from other contexts, and good writing in general shares common principles across all genres. Even if every genre has specificities, they’re usually an addendum or exception of general good writing. Variety is the spice of life.








  • Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?

    I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.

    If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s


  • We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It’s the flipside of Wiki’s problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There’s currently nothing popular that fills the bill.



  • Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.



  • Light rail and buses? Even the most remote rural towns in Japan have small shuttle buses that serve even the sparsest areas. The great thing about public transit is that it is actually scalable if there’s political will to make it happen. A shuttle bus can connect a rural neighborhood to a big train station within 60 minutes. The cool factor of transit is mix and matching several types of transport to cover the most area with the highest mobility for the widest array of people.



  • Recently I had to replace my mouse, bought a G502. The mouse itself is a solid quality mouse. But then, three months in, the USB cord split the covering plastic and exposed the wires, right at the connector. I chose it wired specifically to use with a desktop computer that doesn’t move anywhere. It was meant to be a stationary mouse, I plugged it once, then never unplugged it again. Then one day while dusting the case I noticed the damage. Nobody touches this computer but me. The only explanation is that it came faulty from the factory and just a little heat from the case made the plastic open. I honestly didn’t want to bother with having it replaced, just sealed it with shrink wrap and moved on. But I won’t ever be buying another Logitech product.