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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones

    This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.

    IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.

    The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was. OTOH, someone who used macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.


  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldActual theft
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    5 hours ago

    Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.


  • OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)

    Or, as it was known in non-military circles back in the day: “Look before you leap”.

    how a conflict was to be prosecuted until you were victorious

    Or dead.

    if you could get through your OODA loop faster and more correctly than the opposing side you would outmaneuver and outfight them.

    Suuuuure…

    Which is why I tend to advise “an okay plan applied immediately and vigorously is far better than a perfect plan ten minutes too late”.

    Which obviously depends on what you’re planning. If you’re planning D-Day, another 10 minutes to get a perfect plan is worth the wait. If you’re planning how you’re going to attack a machine gun nest that’s currently shooting at you, 10 minutes of being shot at might be too long.

    I get that you need to find a balance between completely winging it when planning or fighting a war, vs being caught in analysis paralysis. And, that the more experienced you are, the more you can figure out the optimal balance between the two, and that allows you to be more predictable, which allows higher-ups to have more consistent plans. IMO, this just makes the idea of using AI in your “battle rhythm” even more stupid. Take something where decades of institutional experience allows you to predict a certain “rhythm”, now throw AI into the mix and its ability to quickly spit out a plausible looking output that’s answer-shaped and you either have to explicitly trust the magic 8-ball’s output, or you have to spend an unpredictable amount of time going over the output to see if it is flawed. Either way, you disrupt this rhythm that’s apparently so important.








  • What if a bad supreme court can come in and take away rights? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t matter if it’s explicitly listed in some kind of constitutional document because the bad court can choose to interpret that document in such a way that the right disappears. By this definition, there’s no such thing as a right, because there’s always someone who can come in and take it away. There aren’t, and can not be, any actual rights, just conditional privileges.

    But, that isn’t a very useful definition. In some sense, it’s obviously true. If a warlord takes over a country they might suddenly forbid something everybody assumed was a right. That’s why we have the saying “might makes right”. Fundamentally the only rights you really have are the ones that you’re strong enough to prevent someone from taking away. It certainly helps to have them written down in some kind of founding document, but it’s no guarantee of anything.








  • people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common

    And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.

    then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically

    At least you turned up to the fight.

    But language is a shared medium

    Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.




  • there is a very strong extent to which the notion of “nonsense lawsuits” being an epidemic in America is pro-corporate propaganda

    Really, it’s not. Every other country looks at the absolute chaos of lawsuit nonsense in America and recoils in horror.

    Take the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, for example. The woman in question received third-degree burns.

    Sure, and in most countries that would be solved by good regulations not lawsuits. As you said, they’d received multiple reports of it being a problem, but the US laissez-faire system means that corporations are free to do whatever they want until someone gets severely injured. In a properly run country this woman would never have been injured, and if she was injured she wouldn’t have to rely on lawsuits to get her medical bills paid.