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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • The broccoli thing depends on the kid. I loved broccoli as a kid.

    Whether-or-not it and some other vegetables have a really unpleasant taste is a genetic thing.

    https://distance.physiology.med.ufl.edu/the-science-of-supertasters/

    It’s a tale as old as time. Growing up, your family tried to instill a love of broccoli and other leafy greens in you, but it never quite took. Now, you might be an adult who still doesn’t appreciate certain veggies, coffee or spicy foods. Perhaps you’d even go so far as to call yourself a picky eater. If so, have you ever considered whether you might be a supertaster?

    Picky Eating

    Many supertasters have a laundry list of foods they wouldn’t dare touch unless they were stranded on a deserted island — and even then, it would be a challenge. To their credit, there is a scientific reason behind their finicky food preferences. Scientists believe that many supertasters have the gene TAS2R38.

    This particular gene increases a person’s perception of the bitterness in various foods and drinks. Many supertasters that have taken part in scientific studies often find that they’re extremely sensitive to a chemical called propylthiouracil (PROP). This chemical is often used in research to measure a person’s sensitivity to notes of tartness. Because PROP has an easily detectable bitter taste, supertasters often note an extremely bitter taste when given the chemical, more so than average or non-tasters.

    Camouflaging Bitter Flavors by Overcompensating With Other Flavors

    Broccoli and spinach may leave an overwhelmingly bitter taste in the mouths of supertasters, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand the nutritional value veggies offer. To mask the bitterness, some supertasters add sweet, salty or fatty flavors to foods they wouldn’t eat otherwise. This makes certain bitter-tasting foods more palatable so supertasters can have their vegetables — and their nutrients too.





  • On timing, I’d say that unless you plan to live in wilderness somewhere and limit connectivity options, that it’s going to happen pretty quickly regardless of your position. Even if you don’t provide access to the Internet, once kids start going to school, I expect that they’ll make friends, and at least some of those friends are going to have Internet access, probably in a mobile form.

    And phone-based WiFi hotspots and Bluetooth tethering means that if someone’s friends have some sort of cell service with unlimited data, as long as they’re around them, they can share an Internet access link, so can use their own WiFi-capable device, don’t need to share devices. I expect that used WiFi-capable devices are not going to be hard to come by, though I guess that a parent could try to forbid their kids to have one.

    And once a kid’s location isn’t restricted to being around their parents all the time, for anyone in an urban setting, there are going to be foot-accessible places that provide WiFi access — like, everyone at school knows the local Starbucks password or whatever.

    EDIT: On consideration, I don’t think that Starbucks actually passwords their WiFi service, but even for restaurants or shops or whatever that do and have guest WiFi, not a super high bar.


  • I can type 160wpm on a good day.

    That’d be very fast. I mean, even without doing real-time composition.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Blackburn_(typist)

    The Guinness Book of World Records included her speed records amongst others in the “Typing, Fastest” category of the 1976[5]–1986[6] editions, where she was listed as able to “attain a speed of 170 wpm” and “maintain 145 wpm for 55 minutes”

    Blackburn was popularly recognized as the “world’s fastest typist”[9][10] and made media appearances to exhibit her typing speed and the Dvorak layout, notably appearing in a 1985 episode of Late Night with David Letterman[9] and in a television commercial for the Apple IIc.[10]



  • If an instance isn’t defederated with another instance, it can talk to it.

    You can see which instances an instance defederates with yourself. For lemmy instances, it’s at /instances. Just check each end.

    So, for example, I’m on lemmy.today. http://lemmy.today/instances doesn’t have lemmygrad.ml in its Blocked Instances list (it doesn’t defederate from anything, as a matter of policy, in fact).

    https://lemmygrad.ml/instances doesn’t have lemmy.today in its Blocked Instance, so it isn’t defederated on their end either.

    Ergo, they can communicate.

    Pretty easy to check a pair of Lemmy instances for that.

    All that being said, though, if you want to create a series of throwaway accounts to argue with them without them banning you, I think that both you and they are going to be happier if you two stay away from each other. It’s just not worth your time, and I think that the chances of there being a productive outcome for you or them isn’t very high.


  • I mean, it’s the hiring company’s job to vet you, not yours. The requirements are to provide you with some guidelines to avoid having you waste time. If you think you can do the job, I’d go ahead and apply. They’re gonna try and get the best fit candidate from those that apply, regardless. If they had more-specific requirements, like knowledge of some specific software package, they could have included it in the job requirements. I wouldn’t over-analyze it.

    If you’re concerned about it, every place I’ve ever interviewed at has had someone who is supposed to take questions from the candidate at the end of the interview. You can probably ask them there if there’s a specific set of things on Linux that it’d be useful to know.

    EDIT: And as someone who has done plenty of software development work, if someone just put down “Linux proficiency” and expected it to be interpreted without additional context as having some specific background in software development, I’d be surprised. But my larger point is that I don’t think that I’d fret about it.



  • But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.

    “All” can include anything. I mean, you can include a home parallel compute render farm that will cost millions of dollars.

    You’re going to have to narrow it a bit down. You can have people maybe suggest some of the things that they use their systems for. Maybe it’s hosting services for a cell phone that some people use cloud-based services for. Maybe it’s home automation. Maybe it’s a webserver. Maybe it’s AI image generation.

    EDIT: To put it another way, a self-hosted server is just a computer, often without a monitor and keyboard directly attached, that you have in your physical possession. The range of things that that might be used for and capabilities it might have is really broad. It’s like saying “I want a vehicle. What is a vehicle that can do everything?” I mean, that might be a bicycle or a three-trailer road train, depending upon what you’re going for.


  • FreeCAD exposes a Python console as an end-user feature. It has a macro recording system for automating repetitive tasks, much like MS Office does, it uses Python as a scripting language. Can you show me an API reference for this feature?

    kagis

    https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/modules.html

    I want to write a macro that will insert some text into the cell of a spreadsheet I have selected. Click a cell, click the macro button, and it puts some text into that cell. It can do this. There are macros published that do this kind of thing. Show me where in their published documentation the functions necessary to do that are described.

    I don’t use FreeCAD, don’t have any familiarity with this spreadsheet functionality, but let’s look.

    kagis

    They appear to have a Doxygen API reference for their spreadsheets here:

    https://freecad.github.io/SourceDoc/d0/da8/classSpreadsheet_1_1Sheet.html

    setCell() looks like it sets a cell value to me.

    That appears to take a CellAddress, which it looks like is obtained via getCellAddress(). As I said, I haven’t used FreeCAD’s spreadsheets, but I expect that it has some cell-addressing syntax akin to spreadsheets that I’ve used, and that one passes the name in to that, same as one would if referencing the cell in a formula to compute another cell’s value. I’ve no idea if FreeCAD’s syntax is the same as Excel’s, or if it differs, though, and I’m not going to look that up; that shouldn’t be an API-specific issue.

    It also looks like it has a macro-recording feature. It looks like, to my quick skim, that natively generates Python:

    https://wiki.freecad.org/Macros

    You can also directly copy/paste python code into a macro, without recording GUI action.

    And looking at the source of an arbitrarily-chosen macro, it appears to be in Python, rather than some app-specific macro language:

    https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_Rotate_View

    So I expect that you can most-likely just record yourself performing the operation and the macro-recording functionality will give you the code without you needing to write something.

    EDIT: It sounds like you want to get the selected cells rather than specifying the to-be-modified cell by name, which it looks like SheetTableView::selectedRanges() provides you with; Range objects appear to provide for a selection including many cells, but if you only want, say, the starting cell (which would presumably be the case for a single cell selection), then it looks like Range::from() provides that, since the starting cell would be the same cell as the only cell in a selection if there’s a single-cell selection. That returns a CellAddress as well.





  • At least in a business context, the vast majority of emails that I see sent out are mostly useless fluff. Many of them don’t need to be sent, and the ones that do are rarely concise or structured to summarize what they are saying up top, then later go into detail for people who might need more detail.

    Time is a finite resource consumed by this, and there’s no penalty for using someone else’s. Businesses don’t, say, try to assess the business cost imposed by an employee’s sent emails when reviewing that employee’s performance.

    I think that users attempt to compensate by committing less time to reading them. Doing ever-more-perfunctory skims in an attempt to limit how much of their time gets consumed by email that isn’t worthwhile.

    And that tends to encourage not fully reading emails.


  • I mean, that’s really a software design issue. Like, the system should be set up to have a system log of those.

    Most visual novel video game systems provide a history to review messages, if one accidentally skipped through something important.

    Many traditional roguelikes have a message log to review for the same reason.

    Many systems have a “show a modal alert dialog” API call, but don’t send it to a log, which frankly is a little bit bonkers; instead, they have separate alert and logging systems. I guess maybe you could make a privacy argument for that, not spreading state all over even the local system, but I’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to make it more-obvious to the user how to clear the log.


  • gemma3:27b suggests “Abschreckungsbeispiel”.

    ** User: What does “Abschreckungsbeispiel” mean in English?

    ** Ellama: “Abschreckungsbeispiel” translates to deterrent example or cautionary example in English.

    It refers to someone or something that serves as a warning to others, discouraging them from following the same path or making the same mistakes. The idea is that seeing the negative consequences experienced by this person will deter (discourage) others from doing the same thing.

    Think of it like a “look what happens if…” example.

    For instance:

    • “Er ist ein abschreckendes Beispiel für Workaholismus.” - “He is a deterrent example of workaholism.” (Seeing his burnout and ruined relationships discourages others from working too much.)

    • “Die hohe Kriminalitätsrate in dieser Gegend ist ein abschreckendes Beispiel für soziale Ungleichheit.” - “The high crime rate in this area is a cautionary example of social inequality.”

    It’s a strong term, implying a clear and negative consequence that should be avoided.

    I don’t see any references online to Vonnegut referencing it, though. Online, it appears to normally be hyphenated as “Abschreckungs-Beispiel” or written with a space between the two components, but I don’t know enough German to know the significance of the hyphen or space or single word. I imagine that a fluent German speaker would know, though. It seems to be translated as “cautionary example”, “warning example”, or “deterrence example” online.



  • but I also like the 108 keyboards and not the small ones (daddy needs his numpad).

    Man, I was glad to drop my numpad. That forces my mouse further off to the right and causes my keyboard not to be centered with my monitor.

    I do have a very few prices of software that use it, and I didn’t want to give those up.

    What I wound up doing was to get a separate, dedicated numpad for the very few pieces of software that I use that require it. Basically, I care about a handful of older roguelike games. I can put it in front of myself just for those rare occasions.

    The numpad was a standby for people who did serious numeric data entry work and spent time to train themselves on the thing. Like, plonking data from paper into a computer. But that isn’t a field that most people need to deal with these days — most data can already be gotten in computer-readable form.

    I do type numbers on some occasions — I write software and do use some statistical software — but it’s invariably mixed with other data, and the time cost of switching between the home row and the numpad is the dominant cost there.

    The fact that a high proportion of PC users today use a laptop, and many of those have no numpad, creates a lot of pressure on software not to rely on it as well.

    I could maybe see a left-handed person who uses a mouse with their left hand not caring as much, since the mouse isn’t a factor.