pi == 3

That’s what happens if you only have access to a handful of brain cells.

That’s about as smart as claiming the rat on your burger might be a 1000kg animal, but it has four legs and a tail, so it must be a rat.

Depends. If you have a 32bit CPU, app support is surprisingly much worse on Linux than on Windows. While the kernel and core systems still support 32bit, there are a ton of apps that are only offered for 64bit Linux while 32bit Windows support is still available.

One example: Anything running on Electron.

And Elan touchpads if you are unlucky enough to own one.

At least when I tried it 2 years ago, Meta Quest 2 PCVR wasn’t really great on Linux either.

Sure, but the main issue here is that JS doesn’t only auto cast to more generic but in both directions.

Maybe a better example is this:

"a" + 1 -> "a1"
"a" - 1 -> NaN

With + it casts to the more generic string type and then executes the overloaded + as a string concatenation.

But with - it doesn’t throw an exception (e.g. something like “Method not implemented”), but instead casts to the more specific number type, and “a” becomes a NaN, and NaN - 1 becomes NaN as well.

There’s no situation where "a" - "b" makes any sense or could be regarded as intentional, so it should just throw an error. String minus number also only makes sense in very specific cases (specifically, the string being a number), so also here I’d expect an error.

If the programmer really wants to subtract one number from another and one or both of them are of type string, then the programmer should convert to number manually, e.g. using parseInt("1") - parseInt("2").

"a"+"b" -> "ab"
"a"-"b" -> NaN

Yeah, that’s my source, thanks for googleing that.

I’m not educated enough in the field to come up with a critique like that on my own ;)

Is it vegan if you eat carnivorous plants?

Traditional worm-type malware doesn’t really exist on windows anymore either.

I can’t remember when I last saw fireflies. They used to be quite common 25 years ago when I was a kid. Damn, time flies and I’m getting old. And fire apparently doesn’t fly any more.

Two things can be true at the same time:

• GNOME devs can pour hundreds of hours of free labour specifically into accessibility
• GNOME accessibility still sucks

And GNOME is not alone with that problem, it’s prevalent in the large majority of apps and platforms, because accessibility is really hard especially if you don’t have a tester with the specifically accessibility need on staff.

OOP says they have a legally blind and a semi-blind person on staff, but that’s by far not the only accessibility issue. Accessibility is much more than just screen reader support.

A big one is learning difficulties, and for that, having an UI that can be used the way the user wants/expects/knows how to is very important. And here, the very concept of an opinionated DE contradicts accessibility.

Not surprised that OOP knows better what users need than the users. That’s pretty much the whole concept of “opinionated” GNOME.

GNOME isn’t even accessible to non-disabled users.

Roughly 30% of published, peer-reviewed scientific studies are estimated to be not reproducible. Because nobody takes peer reviews seriously and everyone is just rewarded for publishing, no matter how much of it is garbage.

Remember the “chocolate helps you lose weight” study that went through every stupid newspaper? It was obvious garbage, employing p-hacking, using a fake researcher’s name, using a made-up university institute. And yet it went through peer review without issue, was published in a journal and was picked up by every newspaper under the sun.

Then the author stepped forward and said he only created this fake study to show how easy it is to publish a garbage paper. The thing he didn’t expect was that nobody cared. Nobody printed anything about him retracting his own obviously fake study. No consequences at all were taken to his finding.

Because everyone is incentivized to publish every piece of toilet paper they can find, and nobody cares about the quality.

Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won’t print a “We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur”, but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it’s truthful or just purely made up.

Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.

That’s why the fake “chocolate helps you loose weight” study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn’t expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)

Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there’s a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.

There’s a website (can’t be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It’s ridiculous.

That’s why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.

Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.

At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.

Is there any decent way to run Plasma Mobile in Termux by now?

It’s a broadband bang that can be heard across the whole spectrum. It becomes audible when listening to radio broadcasts.

Regular radio transmissions are comparatively narrow band, allowing lots of simultaneous transmissions in the same airspace, each on its own frequency. The spark gap transistor is very wide band, so it basically sounds as if you are sending a bang sound across all radio frequencies at the same time.

It wouldn’t destroy radio equipment, but the radio transmissions. It’s basically as if you’d use a radio jammer as a morse code transmitter.

Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).

They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.