Viewing profile — jonathanlydall

For one of the supermarket chains I frequent, from me handing over the single item I'm purchasing I can be walking away within 20s. They scan the item, then a loyalty barcode on my…

In South Africa I notice this difference all the time where the big supermarket chains seem to be near instantaneous while small stores are 10+ seconds. I'm certain it's because th…

This does not seem to be a good write up at all, see nullc’s explanation in this discussion of (what seems to me) the actual root cause whereas this article spent a lot of words ma…

Sometimes pleasure is in the activity, not just the outcome. A good movie or novel is a generally pleasurable experience from start to finish, where the conclusion on its own might…

I used reading mode on Safari and it was perfect for reading.

Well, they do have a point on the “unmanly” aspect as there is a reason that men are statistically more likely to die before old age than women. Also, I’ve found that when asked ab…

Talking about road safety. In South Africa we have 12,000+ road fatalities a year, by comparison Australia (renowned for strong law enforcement) with about half of our population s…

Where I am from, organised political movements are not a factor of teen pregnancy and were not the least bit in my mind when I made my statement. And my two examples are completely…

You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consi…

You seem to be in the ICE enthusiast category, which is likely a minority of car owners. For most people though, if they are buying a car it's because they can't practically get by…

We ultimately switched to this approach with great success for our own product. We stumbled on its success a little by chance. We have a visual designer and for LLMs to interact wi…

Do many people use Firefox on 50" 8K TVs as opposed to regular monitors? I wouldn't want such a large display on a computer unless the computer is being used as media server. And m…

It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite. They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it …

They were likely saying that 8K displays are way out of budget for most consumers.

I too find "looks written by AI" comments tedious. I feel that the following guideline [0] actually covers this, perhaps it should be updated to also specifically mention "AI writt…

> Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thoughts, opinions, taste will still come out sharper and faster aft…

Remembering back, I certainly lacked a lot of critical reasoning which could have led me to do possibly equally stupid stuff like this had I the skill in my early teens. As I remem…

Appreciated and fixed. I'm a native English speaker, but I think not a word I often write.

I think it's a somewhat South African cultural thing, but when I get calls from businesses or spammers, the first thing the caller tends to say is "Hello, how are you?", which is c…

In practice this often doesn't work. Article said the imposter in this case claimed her phone had been confiscated. Fraudsters tend to also plan things such that the impersonated p…

Well, if this and other problems are ever solved towards self-replicating probes, we must just make sure not to over-prioritize replication like the Slylandro: https://wiki.starcon…

Websites like Reddit love to say “it’s better in the app”, except it should have this added to that sentence: “for us, not so much for you”.

I've been doing regular significant re-writes to my local Git commit history with relative ease for over a decade even without this new Git command. I'm convinced that a big part o…