Disqus - Latest Comments for Sigivald

Re: LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat.

Sigivald — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:24:31 -0000

"Say, it's already hard to resize a window because the corners are round and you're grabbing the background.

Let's make that worse, and make more useless space all around a window, because reasons."

Maybe they should spend some time making SMB/CIFS work better, and generally fixing the Finder?

Who am I kidding, they've needed to do that for 20 years and never have.

Re: Untitled Document

Sigivald — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 11:40:58 -0000

"I googled printer / scanners, looking for something new."

Look. Seriously.

Get a monochrome laser printer and a standalone scanner.

If you want photo printing, get a nice photo printer.

Combining the three tasks into one unit <i>always leads to heartbreak</i>. We've seen it lead to the same heartbreak every time you do it.

Re: Anarchist Drugs Again | Science | AAAS

Sigivald — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:34:32 -0000

Hell, making your own aluminum foil is a LOT easier, frankly.

Aluminum melts at temperatures easily reached in a backyard "furnace" ("some charcoal in a hole with a blower"); people regularly do hobby aluminum casting that way.

It wouldn't be trivial to work out a cooled roller to roll out molten aluminum, but it's the sort of thing one COULD manage to do with a little dedication and mechanical skills, especially for small quantities.

Unlike making bespoke custom molecules.

Re: Girls With Slingshots - GWS Hair of the Dog #269

Sigivald — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:20:48 -0000

About 99% of actual medieval maces were "stick with a big heavy thing on the end, possibly with pointy bits to smash armor".

The ball-and-chain flail thing is ... very, very rare in actual history.

Like "basically not a thing in any meaningful sense".

Re: LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat 2023 WEDNESDAY

Sigivald — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:39:55 -0000

He informs me that the website will not accept customer signups if you're using a Mac browser. Or Edge. Only Chrome.

Incompetent fools - they just don't want 48% of the market?

Re: LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat 2023 WEDNESDAY

Sigivald — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 12:20:47 -0000

In practice, people eat enough edible to get the high they want, and snack on *much more inexpensive* non-infused snacks after.

Re: How CBD Might Do Something

Sigivald — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 11:55:53 -0000

"I will also freely admit to being irritated by the hemp-for-everything cult that regards the plant as a biological miracle that’s good for anything that ails you."

I *love me some weed*, and I am right there with you on that one.

it gets you high. Lots of us find that pleasant. That's ... about it.

(Yeah, sure, some anti-nausea effects, etc., sure, but nothing amazing; no matter what they try and tell me, it ain't curing cancer or fixing Every Mental Health Issue.)

I can't tell if CBDs actually do anything that isn't psychosomatic, myself, but it's also hard to blind test yourself, and the more plausible claims for CBD effects are, well, of lower intensity and magnitude.

Re: Girls With Slingshots - GWS Hair of the Dog #68

Sigivald — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:18:54 -0000

What does Hazel think underwear IS?

Re: Bacteria And Cancer: It's Not Random

Sigivald — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:44:26 -0000

I can't wait for Wellness Hippies to start claiming those bacteria are The Sole Cause Of Cancer.

Because they will, I've seen how they work.

(For extra credit, they'll also claim that, say, a pH imbalance is also The Sole Cause Of Cancer without even realizing that's not how a sole cause can work.)

Re: Re An Accused, Tell The Truth

Sigivald — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 12:23:28 -0000

I'm not sure I've seen a screaming accusation of "dog whistling" ever be anything but an invention or projection.

("If you hear dog whistles, you're the dog".

Not always true, but ... these past 30 or 40 years? Much more often than not.)

Re: Girls With Slingshots -

Sigivald — Wed, 25 May 2022 11:25:46 -0000

Sticks are *very convenient*.

They have printed markings for tablespoons, meaning you can dirty one knife measuring your butter, rather than a knife AND a measuring device (and butter is harder to clean off things than most ingredients).

Re: Girls With Slingshots -

Sigivald — Wed, 25 May 2022 11:23:49 -0000

"If you'd taken an economics class, you'd understand the sunk cost fallacy, Erin!"

Re: You Choose Inequality

Sigivald — Tue, 24 May 2022 12:09:12 -0000

Thus, unsurprisingly, the problem is "caring about inequality".

By which I mean "inequality per se", as if "inequality" is a problem.

It is not; most of the time when people speak of it as one they have the idea that the "more" people are taking from the "less" people. This is ... very often not true.

(My thought experiment for that is "would it be better for the world to be as it is right now, or to be changed so that everyone except the .01% richest people are literally twice as well off, in material terms of access to luxuries, staples, wealth in any form, etc. ... but that .01% get *three times* as rich?

if the answer is "no", we live in different conceptual universes and I don't even know where to start with you, because "yes" is so obviously correct from my perspective that you shouldn't get to pretend you care about "the poors" if you'd rather keep the rich from being richer at the cost of keeping the poors poorer.)

TL;DR - too much of "inequality" discourse is founded in barely (or not at all) disguised ressentiment, and we should look to Nietzsche for what reseentiment does to people.)

Re: When Apple TV’s “Universal Search” is a black hole

Sigivald — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 12:43:19 -0000

"I recognize that proprietary data might be a big part of the problem
here, that Netflix/HBO/Amazon/Disney databases might be incompatible
with Apple’s, and that third parties enthusiasm to make the Apple TV
experience rich might be limited."

The latter, definitely.

The former is trivially solvable with decent API design and any effort at all, at least on the "name, stars, genre" level of search/filter.

Re: Domestic abuser busted in the act of putting an AirTag on a car

Sigivald — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 12:27:15 -0000

Well, it can't be instant, or else anyone using an AirTag on their own stuff in public would be tagged in every phone around them, just because they were, say, eating dinner.

So there has to be delay or AirTags stop being useful at all.

(As mentioned elsewhere, the "tiny tracking device" genie is out of the bag; Apple could stop making AirTags tomorrow and stalkers would buy $40 Chinese trackers that use GPS and SMS to message locations.)

Re: World Trade Center replacing office keys with Apple Wallet

Sigivald — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:33:45 -0000

Considering how pitiful most badges are, security-wise, Apple Wallet is probably a step up.

(Normal ones, for normal companies - Really Secure Facilities will be different - are just an RFID card that transmits a few digits, often the same code one can manually enter to authorize a door or elevator.

They're there to stop random junkies or idle thieves, not targeted attacks on a specific business, and they do just fine at that.)

Re: That Gucci AirPods Max case

Sigivald — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:30:01 -0000

No, that is actually ghastly, the sort of thing someone buys to parade owning some Gucci, which is admittedly the main way such allegedly-luxury brands survive.

(Gucci is capable of making beautiful, high-quality products.

This is not one of them.)

Re: The New York Times buys Wordle for low seven figures

Sigivald — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 12:15:12 -0000

Eh, Wordle Clones will eat that advantage.

The Times crossword can survive because writing a good crossword is work, and the Times has a reputation in that area (though I don't know how much of one anymore, or with really serious crossword players).

Wordle? Even if the source code wasn't available (in-browser, not in a repository), it's so trivial to clone and make a list of N-letter words that there are already dozens of app clones, and I'm sure web ones.

The Times is perhaps not really the puzzle haven it thinks it is, especially for people who aren't ... old.

Very few people who aren't already Times subscribers are going to pay for Wordle.

Re: Benchmarks confirm Intel’s latest Core i9 chip outperforms Apple’s M1 Max with several caveats

Sigivald — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:44:40 -0000

The GE76 also has an RTX3060 mobile video card - which is radically more powerful than the M1 Pro GPU, and significantly more powerful than the M1 Max (especially in in-game tests rather than in synthetic graphics benchmarks).

Which is one reason it's so big and battery-hungry too, though the i9 simply isn't a power-efficient chip.

But equally it's not trying to be a MacBook, any more than a MacBook is trying to be a gaming computer.

Re: Gruber: The App Store is (well, was) lousy with blatant Wordle rip-offs, but one of them takes the cake

Sigivald — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 11:59:40 -0000

My only guess would be "misleading app 'buyers'", because "it's not actually The Worldle Game, even if the name is not a trademark and this is legal".

Calling it "Wordlike" or "Wordlish" would make that clear, eg.

Re: Are AirTags causing stalking or making us more aware of it?

Sigivald — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:07:55 -0000

Probably a little more, just because some stalkers-to-be never had the idea before people mentioned that an AirTag makes it easy.

But Tile devices were around before, and for the car case you can get LOTS of GPS trackers that use SMS to communicate, for a low price.

Either wired in (or just plugs into the OBD2 port, if they have access to the interior) or battery powered.

So mostly easier to detect - and the "knowing it can be done cheaply" thing is simply out of the bag at this point.

Re: Intel says new Core i9 processor for laptops is faster than Apple’s M1 Max chip

Sigivald — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 12:36:07 -0000

Not sure how much power usage even matters for most people, who seem to use laptops docked more than anything else, though?

(I should note that the iMacs with Intel use Mobile processors, so my ten-core i9 iMac is the generation before that one.

And it's pretty damn fast, at least comparable to a desktop i7, as far as I can tell.

Apple's likely to do even better on the next generation of ARM chips, especially if they ever make a "not very mobile" version, of course.)

Re: iOS 15 broke Siri’s ability to star-rate songs

Sigivald — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 14:01:51 -0000

WTF does Apple not seem to think star ratings matter?

I assure Apple that they are useful and should be kept in.

Re: Untangling the rat’s nest of USB-C standards and cables

Sigivald — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 12:05:25 -0000

Interesting; I've never had a problem with USB-C doing that, and would suspect your cables.

(But I also found that FW-800 cables NEVER stayed properly in, so there's that...)

Re: Apple tells suppliers iPhone demand has slowed as holidays near

Sigivald — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 12:38:21 -0000

I checked - a gold 13 Pro 512GB (what I'd get if I was upgrading today) could be at my house no later than the 17th.

Spotchecks suggest that silver or 128GB don't affect that, either.