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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • LED joysticks that can select from over 16 million color options. This might not be practical, considering only about 25 different color settings would have been sufficient.

    So the RGB leds come with 256 levels of brightness for each color. Don’t worry, article-writer, the company wasted zero extra effort on this “feature.”

    I consider getting one of these things every once in a while, but then I remember that I’ve pulled my hacked PSP out of the drawer like three times in the last ten years, and I shrug and move on. It’s generally more fun for me to plug a USB controller into my computer for retrogaming.



  • Fair; I guess I should have run some data. I just used gasbuddy.com to run a similar track for what would have been my rather lengthy commute if my employer had asked us to return to office (and kept the lease on that building). Apart from a couple of outliers just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I’m only getting an 8% variance (about USD 0.23/gallon, versus your 25% and AUD 0.55/litre – is that right?).

    That said, Iwill admit that $0.10/gallon suboptimal average price is probably more likely than I thought, though with a less intense driving situation one would still be well under the $260/year “convenience premium.” Outside the US and other oil-subsidizing countries, the numbers clearly work out very differently.




  • People are weird about gasoline. They’ll drive around looking for the cheapest option, to save 2 cents/gallon. Even with a huge tank, that’s less than 50 cents of total savings.

    Bless 'em for keeping the price pressure on, but this is so very true. Once I ran a couple of mental hypotheticals, I stopped giving a shit, beyond avoiding places right by airports that jack it up a dollar or more (Las Vegas and especially Orlando, with lots of tourists in rentals, are the worst offenders I’ve seen).

    For a pretty extreme example consider, as you say, a large 25-gal tank, and filling up from dry twice a week, at an average of $0.10/gal non-optimal price: you pay an annual premium of $260 bucks not to drive yourself batty hunting for pennies, and burning at least a tiny bit more fuel to do it. Most people will pay far less. It’s just this weird thing that stuck in people’s brains long past the point where a cent increase was any significant percentage of the fuel purchase.







  • You could also probably use Inkscape to get DXF files for both sides of the coin, making sure the size is right and that the path accommodates the width of your letters/strokes. Then, hypothetically, you should be able to import the files as drafts and then convert them to sketches with the press of a button (in reality, this crashes FreeCAD for me lately, but it could be a quirk of my setup). If you’ve already modeled the coin itself and use the new sketches to pocket into the existing solid, IIRC it should work okay. FreeCAD would not extrude a non-contiguous sketch into multiple solids, but I think it’s fine as long as the end result is still a single body.



  • Headline is probably not wrong, but it’s definitely overdramatic compared to the actual story. Everything awful MS is actually doing is there barely a millimeter under the surface, but the story is more directly about how they’re jerking AMD and Intel around.

    Still, it’s an impressively clear showcase of how much power Microsoft really has. It’s taken two companies that usually have their product cycles planned years in advance and kicked them into panic mode. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat once Microsoft finds it fit to bring Copilot+ to desktops.




  • It’s common, but it’s still not anywhere near the majority. The majority would be uncomfortable with religion being lumped in with the rest, and would be deeply uncomfortable with sports being there. The majority view is generally pretty chill, if (and it’s a big god-damned ‘if’) you toe the line on a few doctrinal issues and supply-side economics: get baptized in a protestant denomination, donate and/or go to church, don’t be queer, don’t be atheist, don’t be a single pregnant woman (and certainly don’t stop being one before the baby is born), be appropriately shamed of your vices, and understand that taxes prevent good Christians from having more to donate to charity. Check all the boxes, and you can go to college to get a business or even engineering degree and consume the milquetoast remnants of the monoculture. It’s more about conformity than religious ardor or theological purity.