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| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-07, 21:26 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #561 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
We ragging on banks now? I don't have too much against them, except for the parts where they get more and more stores and people to go Cashless™, and of course at the same time arbitrarily denying people they don't like to create accounts, effectively shutting them off from earning a living. But this is no big deal - after all, it is important to enforce compliance. But why do their UIs always have to be so dreadful? I was trying to do some transactions. Now, in the best of worlds, it would work as such: I go to my account. On the left-hand side it shows what I own, either in dollars or percent. On the right-hand side I can type in how much I want to own, or leave blank for unchanged. It then makes sure this is possible to execute, and does it on a best-effort basis. Since we don't live in the best of worlds, this is not the case, and we have to use Excel instead. Now, my bank graciously provides atomic sell/buy orders, so you can ask them to sell A and use the proceeds to buy B. You can also tell them to sell a certain share of A and use the proceeds to buy B. You can however not tell them to sell A and buy B and C in one go. So then the question you might ask is, how bad is it possible to screw up a text box? Well, step one is to add input validation. Not just any input validation, mind you. Server-side input validation with a lag of say 0.1 seconds, that gives error messages in English, and sometimes not at all, and sometimes for valid input which still however goes through. Step two is to have it change the values randomly when you scroll, and in the process round them toward the nearest percent. Step three is to block letter input, and in the process hotkeys. Did you reflexively hit CTRL-A backspace CTRL-V to clear the field and paste the clipboard? Too bad! You'll just have to use the mouse instead. This is certainly an inane complaint. I can still access my money fine, and I don't pay out the ass in fees. But why? Why would you ever want to replace a UI that worked fine with a UI that fails at such basic tasks? Do they get off on it, or what? I don't get why you Americans would complain though. You should be proud of your banking system. * Impressive stock market * Impressive central bank * Cheap mutual funds * Cash widely accepted What more could you wish for? Posted by CaptainJistuce In the civilized West we use contactless payments with NFC, and they don't require PIN for purchases below $20. Presumably, this is what they're scared of. In theory, some madman could walk around with a payment terminal and charge random people's cards. In practice, the merchant account he's using wouldn't last for too long. But such considerations have never deterred anyone from thinking up very dangerous scenarios, in which that guy with the hoodie in the dimly lit room you see in the stock photos walks around in the supermarket with a payment terminal and makes away with an earth-shattering $20 minus fees. No, Japan has that whole issue figured out. You use cash. Fast, simple, efficient. If you want cash, you go to your ATM and withdraw it. Of course, most parts of the West can't do this due to crime and whatnot, but in an ideal world that'd be the best option. You should celebrate the time you have left with archaic technology. Soon you won't be able to use cash at all, and that's when they hit you. First with negative interest rates, and then with the more insidious stuff. How about hiking up the life insurance rates, and then offering you discounts if you 'consent' to analysis of your payment history? Gym card lowers the fee, McDonalds raises it. Cash withdrawals raise AML/KYC flags, if they're even permitted. "Consenting" to location history analysis via your cell provider could net you even further discounts - spending too much time in the ghetto lowers it, so does political protests. And of course, your ISP could get a piece of the pie too. Excessive Tor usage can't be good for the credit rating, for instance. Imagine the possibilities. The government could disincentivize undesirable behaviors without having to institute any new laws or even making any public statements. Just hold a meeting with the banks and give them an offer they can't refuse, and ta-da, people start using public transport instead of taking the car, which drastically reduces CO2 emissions, as well as crime. Or were you going to bring your duffel bag full of cash on the subway? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-08, 02:02 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #562 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by Kakashi Well, yes, but surely most stores over there at least accept cash? Already that is exceptional. Here, a lot of them (especially restaurants, maybe 70% of them) have signs at the door saying "ONLY CARDS," or more politely, "This is a cashless [establishment]". I mean, "Credit Card at the checkout", that seems to imply that there exist cash-only establishments. I can't remember visiting any such establishments in the past few years, because it's impossible to turn a profit from running them. Even the local market uses mobile payments. Perhaps drugs are sold for cash, I wouldn't know, but that more or less seems to be the only application for it. And if you ask the regulator, such behavior has no place in society anyway, why cash must be stamped out. If you'd ask most people on the street, whose face is it we have on the $50 bill, they would draw a blank, since they never handle physical currency unless they work in shops - younger people might not even know what color it is. You could probably manufacture fake currency with entirely different designs on it and nobody would notice, because they would have no mental frame of reference to compare it against. So yes, Japan is extremely cash-friendly in comparison. If you'd ask people who it is on the 5000 yen note, surely they would know? Don't most people use cash on a regular basis, and many even exclusively? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-08, 10:24 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #563 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by Kakashi No, not all cash, but it uses substantially more than the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashless_society#Amount_of_cash_in_circulation. You never know what you're talking about and it baffles me that you don't realise that no one here actually enjoys your copy-pasta rants that are later backed up with nonsense when you run out of reddit posts to raid. Rude. I don't visit reddit and any idiocy I post here is solely my own. I'll give you an out for your ridiculous argument: Japan is experiencing a population issue currently where the number of aged people are increasing and the number of births are decreasing. There, now you have something to continue your babble with. Absolutely nothing wrong with this, unless you're bad at handling your economy. If you're concerned with global warming and housing shortages and all that, then letting your population naturally level out ought to be the best for the long run. Of course, I would argue it was the effect of regrettable social policies which never should have been implemented. But their approach to it still appears far more sensible than the West's, which manages to turn it into widespread social disarray, which arguably is worse than poor GDP growth. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 10:04 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #564 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by tomman STGM Just kidding, it already did long ago. I wonder if this has something to do with that site which got shut down just now because it wasn't in on the censorship thing like everyone else was? It's still offline too, except for the Tor mirror. Actually, I would bet on a chilling effect. The timing is just too close. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 10:05 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #565 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by Kakashi Because the existing payment systems are bad? Posted by tomman Have you ever considered the possibility that it might be deliberate? If they "borrow" $1 from you and wait a few weeks, they've earned $0.5 if they invested it in dollars/food/anything. The longer the wait, the greater the returns. What are they going to do, switch banks? Posted by CaptainJistuce There are ways around this. For instance, in the long term, labor participation rates should decline due to automation. If managed perfectly, these two trends would coincide, leaving the support burden tenable. That's the only way out of it which doesn't require demographic engineering. As you note, Japan is in a bit of a double whammy since they both dropped birth rates and extended life expectancy, and now they can't do anything about it in the near term since increasing birth rates again would just further depress the support ratio. (They could of course feed them to the proverbial wolves, but that's difficult and controversial. They could do something like cutting all taxes on cigarettes and hoping people get lung cancer and die while they're still in the black, but it's not exactly polite.) If they had consistent birth rates and life expectancies, it would be manageable. If their economy weren't so bad, it would also be manageable. But with both at the same time, it's nigh-impossible. Immigration is a paper tiger, I would argue. Look at the situation in Europe, for instance. It's true that increasing immigration would improve the support ratio on paper, but since the fiscal net gain has historically tended to be negative in the near term, it wouldn't do anything to alleviate the core issue unless Japan manages to handle immigrants better than any other country. Which, for obvious reasons, it will not. That is to say, in the short term, they act effectively identically to retirees. It's true that a Qatar-like immigration policy would alleviate it at nearly zero cost, but it would be politically impossible. They are already redlining it with the existing policies, so that would be utter suicide, unless they get as sweet a deal with the Americans as their other allies. It's possible that geo-political repositioning would net them less picky overseers, but I don't know all too much about that. (Even if immigration were a tenable short-term approach, if applying such immigration policies as are popular in the West, they would like all other people eventually grow old, requiring more immigrants, and so on and so forth like a pyramid. This would not only be inefficient, it would lead to a politically impopular demographic shift, as many observers have noted. The electorate realizes all this and makes it politically impossible, to the consternation of Western observers.) The only politically acceptable long-term solution (well, until they run out of space) is to increase the birth rates, and just take the financial and political hit - it will increase their productivity in the long run. But if they wouldn't have pushed anti-natalist policies in the past with such fervour, they would never have found themselves in this regrettable situation. In the short-term, things look pretty gloomy. They can't profit from increasing the birth rates. They can't increase the productivity without hurting the economy in the near-term. They can't win on immigration unless they get the type of bulletproofness only the Americans could confer. Deliberately engineering the deaths of people just before they retire is plain rude. They might be able to deliberately engineer a recession with the long-term good of the country in mind, but no politician out to save his own skin would ever even consider it. The escape hatch is that if you start one, you can't really change your mind halfway through and cancel it. Personally, I'd say what's going to happen is a 50/50 toss-up between a slow, meandering, process of doing nothing and waiting for the demography to stabilize and sacrificing a few decades of growth, or opening the floodgates on immigration and just letting it all go down the shitter. Short of some Hail Mary play, that is. Say self-driving cars exceed expectations, then they'll be celebrating. Unlike every other country, curiously, which will be suffering from mass unemployment. Are they going to argue about how the West should start doing reverse immigration? No, they're much too polite for that. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 10:12 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #566 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Sic transit gloria mundi, [as] such passes the glory of the world There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 12:12 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #567 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce By my understanding they have a labour shortage, and this is the main gripe - purely fiscally, it's not that bad yet. So for instance, if all the taxi drivers were to get replaced by robots, they would work with something else instead, thus increasing the productivity. For the extreme case, consider the idealistic scenario in which automation replaces all human jobs and pushes the support ratio to 0. They could've also fixed their work culture so the younger generation had the time and energy to knock their wives/girlfriends/mistresses up before they moved into middle age, thereby avoiding a precipitous crash in birth rate. But they didn't do that either. Well, that sounds much like the same thing as increasing productivity. Companies don't tend to do things right unless they're forced to. As things are right now, they haven't really had any incentive to make things more efficient. By my understanding, they are restricting overtime already, and it doesn't seem to help. (Only time will tell, but I wouldn't hold my horses.) Whereas, if the economy would contract, companies would be forced to do things more efficiently or go bankrupt. Consider that Japan hasn't really had any recessions in the last thirty years, while the USA/Europe in the same period have had three big ones and a fourth looming. In the absence of this, a more realistic solution would have been to had undertaken the inverse of the measures that are employed to decrease birth rates in the third world. It is presumably these measures which caused their decline in the West too once upon a time, so it only seems reasonable that their reversal should increase them again. The only country I know of which actually did do this did see an increase, but it also coincided with a war and sharp economic growth, so the evidence doesn't seem conclusive either way. It would also be completely useless now, since higher birth rates at the cost of a lower support ratio would be a lose-lose trade in the short run. And when they run out of space, they can move to take over Korea! It worked so well last time! Well, if we should be fair here, that's how things will end up no matter what country you are. If you have a growing population, which all modern pension systems and economies presuppose, but constant land area the population density will go up over time, until it's too high. You can solve this problem by either decreasing the population or increasing the land area. Historically, countries have dealt with both problems at once by going to war, a solution notably advocated for by the Austrian politician Adolf Hitler in his 1925 debut work, Mein Kampf. But other than that, there isn't really any way around it short of starving to death or killing off old people, none of which are very popular. Which is to say, all countries (or at least the democracies) will eventually end up like Japan. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 16:40 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #568 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
...&S? You'd have to wait a few years, but sure. Give it enough time, and eventually it will reach some kind of limit. At present, it goes up by about 1.3% a year. Assuming this trend continues, you'd reach the population density of present-day Singapore by 2621. Give it about 600 more years, and you'd reach a population density of 20M/km2, or an area of about 22x22 cm (8.8x8.8") per person. Obviously, this won't happen - populations tend to level off far before that point, as they are already starting to do in the West. And this is my point: sooner or later, Australia too will find herself in the same situation as Japan: zero population growth, There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-11, 16:50 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #569 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by Kakashi What are you then, tsundere? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-12, 15:48 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #570 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Posted by KakashiOK, so serious question, honestly. Is this why you're upset with me, or is it just the uneducated and allegedly inane rants? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-12, 19:20 in Retroarch's (controller) interface is an bad abstraction
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #571 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
But then the question is, do you really have six buttons? On a modern Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube controller, you can press all the buttons (save for the joysticks and start/select/home) at the same time without much effort, or any combination thereof. Whereas with a 2x3 grid, it's as you said - some combinations aren't possible. Then you might as well go the Goldeneye (gamecube remake) route and require chording with the Z button (bottom trigger) for, I think, melee and quicktime actions. I think there's a good reason why Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube controllers have emerged as evolutionarily superior: each finger can give the maximum amount of input, save for the fourth and fifth digits. You could put at most six additional buttons on the handles, but odds are they would just be too uncomfortable to press. Likewise, you could probably squeeze in an additional "diamond" of buttons where start/select/home is right now, but there isn't much of a point for most non-niche games, and it would look ugly as sin. As a curious counterpoint, Ocarina of Time would need it though, since you have joystick, c-buttons, A+B, and d-pad. Unless you want to map second joystick to c-buttons (AAAAAAAAAAHHHH), you'd need extra buttons. But even there, you could just map the second joystick to the d-pad and the d-pad to the c-buttons. This is still uncomfortable, because the D-pad on X360 controllers is atrocious, but works OK. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-12, 20:13 in Retroarch's (controller) interface is an bad abstraction
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #572 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
What about branding? If they didn't, they'd look nigh-identical, except uglier and with a worse D-pad. If they did, you'd think they must have some very good reason for this butt-ugly and unorthodox choice, and must thus be very smart people who did a lot of thinking. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-12, 23:33 in Retroarch's (controller) interface is an bad abstraction (revision 1)
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #573 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Well, if you think of it like this: the N64 had just A and B, and on the Gamecube X and Y are gray. They're usually used for auxiliary stuff, like reloading or whatever. So that just leaves A and B. And of them, B is used less. Like in racing games, A is accelerate and B is brake. In platformers, A is jump and B is run. In FPS games, neither are used much - GoldenEye used A for switching weapons and B for door/reload, if I recall correctly. So it kind of follows that B should be smaller, by exclusion. A is OK, B is cancel, you hit OK more often than cancel. Consider the color-scheme: A is green, B is red. Whereas on the N64, A was blue and B was green. So, I'd think it's the egg that follows the chicken: A is the main action, so it makes more sense for it to be bigger, as per the lessons learned from the last console. That's my guess, anyway. EDIT: Or it could be branding, to look different from the other consoles. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-13, 14:26 in Something about cheese!
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #574 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
https://twitter.com/AlexandreKrausz/status/1160947525442056193 With the British preoccupied with Brexit, it doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out how they will react (i.e. not at all) So do you think they will pull a Tiananmen? Is there anywhere you can bet money? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-14, 16:18 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #575 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Works fine on my machine - it shows a red un-clickable exclamation mark, which I think is intended behavior. Here's a funny edge case though: If you go to page 9, log in in another tab, then go to the previous page, you'll be on page 2 but have page 2 marked as clickable. Only works if you have items per page set to higher than the default, though. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-15, 17:24 in N64 emulators vs. "PJ64 v1.x" emulators (revision 1)
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #576 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Polygon limits feel like kind of a different animal. They're not doing anything wrong, are they? They're just writing games which are too slow to play on console, but they're perfectly standards-compliant. By that measure, Perfect Dark is broken too. So what they could do is do a hack: allow people to enable the standards-violating features. Or perhaps you should just draw a line in the sand and say that you're making a N64 emulator and not a N64 emulator emulator, and tell people to go run PJ64 1.6 if they want to run ROMhacks. EDIT: oh boy am I bad at reading There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-17, 14:10 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #577 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
Isn't this just the MySQL issue though? On the topic of SSL: I often get SSL warnings when browsing here, since the certificate is sometimes signed by an unknown authority. I get them all the time, so I've been conditioned to just click through them. I only ever get them with Tor Browser, so it might just be that they have an outdated certificate store. (no, I am not getting MITM'd, it only happens on some sites and it persists even if I do CTRL-SHIFT-L, and furthermore any exit node that did this would get blacklisted real fast) There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-17, 14:38 in Typesetter.css, make semantic HTML readable
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #578 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
that background color real nice. I like the touch of using complementary colors for the text. However, it might be worth keeping in mind that pure black on white performs best in A/B testing. Likewise, ~100ch is evolutionarily superior, and line height doesn't matter. Isn't the point of indenting paragraphs that you don't need the space between them? The books I have generally tend to do one or the other. Otherwise, I think it looks a bit wonky when some of the one-line paragraphs are indented, and some aren't: If you want 60 chars of width, you can specify width as 60ch. I don't know what the precise benefits are, though. What's the point of the horizontal lines? It makes it look like one of those pages which try to look 'handwritten'. It looks horrible, to be honest. It also makes it impossible to do (compact) footnotes with small text, because the line width is forced to be the same everywhere. Compare these two, for instance: Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain. pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in. which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial. example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to. obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a. man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or. one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-17, 14:49 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #580 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
He who pays calls the shots. What will be really interesting is when China uses the final bit of leverage they've been sitting on and tells Google/Facebook/Yahoo, okay, you get access to our market, but you have to abide by Chinese rules. Everywhere, not just for Chinese users. It would be super efficient for e.g. the HK protests and for improving the image of China abroad. And as we all know, private companies have the free speech rights to censor anyone for any reason whatsoever - a well established fact by now. In fact, they could even be sued by their shareholders for not doing so if the bribe was big enough. Obviously, they're a few years out from doing this - the Americans would just force them to not go along with it. But with the coming financial crisis, all bets are off. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
| sureanem |
Posted on 19-08-18, 07:55 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Stirrer of Shit
Post: #581 of 717 Since: 01-26-19 Last post: 1763 days Last view: 1761 days |
It is up-to-date, at least as much as TBB can be. It's the equivalent of ESR 60.8. But extremely odd still. Wouldn't a security-critical software want to maintain a really fresh cert store? There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this. |
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