• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • Interesting! Sorry, I don’t know why I thought you were using swipe keyboards, it must have been stuck in my memory from reading other comments. I definitely agree that pressing the buttons was a little annoying, but manufacturers could probably make softer buttons if they were willing to put the money into developing them.

    Anyway, I really miss the phone I had from about 2008-2010. It had two sliders that moved in orthogonal directions. One of the slide directions revealed a standard 12-button phone pad, while the other had a 4-row keyboard. And yet, I’m pretty sure it was under 1.5cm, so not too large. It was definitely easier to keep in my pocket than current phones!

    If it weren’t for reading Lemmy/RSS feeds and a camera, I’d probably be going back to dumb phones for my next one…


  • But what’s the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn’t care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you’re writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like “type”, and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it’s right. And autocorrect systems can’t really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.

    Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn’t even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don’t get me started on how many calls I’ve missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn’t find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!

    Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!

    There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they’re far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it’s just all about aesthetics and nothing else…








  • Software engineer here. There are so many projects that I’d love to contribute to, but can’t because my regular job gets me so mentally exhausted and I can only switch context so much. My job is fulfilling, don’t get me wrong, but there are so many other projects that are desperately in need of help but can’t get any because it’s not profitable.

    I’m looking forward to the day that I switch to a more relaxing job so I can do some more side projects. I know exactly what my retirement is going to look like. Fuck the economists for telling us what’s important and what isn’t. They only think about one thing: money. And as long as it makes money, it has purpose in the world. They can’t possibly fathom that there are important things in the world that don’t fit into their one dimensional economic view of the world. Fuck them so hard!



  • I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it’s unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.


  • Agreed. I’ve never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.

    I don’t think that’s purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven’t figured out a good way to do that yet.





  • Also, if you watch a video you like, do yourself a favor and download it. Save it. Archive it. It’s only a matter of time before they either take it down or derank it because they want to push you to some other more profitable video stream. Bonus points because it doesn’t give them analytics information on it when you go back to watch it again, or watch a specific part again.

    I’ve started doing this for all kinds of content - technical videos, music, funny clips, games, etc.


  • It’s not your responsibility to make up for Google’s shortcomings. They’re a ~5 trillion dollar company now. They could easily change their payment structure if they wanted to, but they don’t because their shareholders are more important. If a company with >10^8 times more net worth than you isn’t going to bother, then don’t make it your responsibility.

    It’s sad, but unfortunately, the creators made a deal with the devil, and it’s not regular people’s responsibility to get them out.

    And don’t forget, there was a time when nobody made any money for posting things on youtube - it was just a site for sharing things people found novel and interesting, with no expectation of remuneration whatsoever. I would even argue that it was a much better time to be there than it is now - back before they had recommendation algorithms pushing people to all kinds of deplorable content and pushing the biddings of far-right dictators. Rewarding Google for this kind of behavior only makes it worse.


  • I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It’s especially infuriating when they format their dates. “I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5” and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.

    The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It’s not even like they don’t care that nobody does things their stupid way - it’s the fact that they’re so insulated that they can’t even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.

    It drives me mad. At this point, it’s just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.

    Apologies… /rant



  • First thing is to not mount it at all. Any writes to the overwritten partition will corrupt your data.

    Second thing: install system rescue cd to a live usb and boot it. Look into testdisk and photorec. It’s been a while since I’ve had to use these tools, but I believe testdisk can restore the partition and photorec can find files in a file system that has been deleted. I would try running photorec first to save the recovered files to an external hard disk, and then testdisk to try restoring them. But disclaimer: it’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, so my memory is foggy here.

    Good luck!