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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I remember when I learned that jeep Windshields fold down not because it’s a cool lifestyle thing, but because it allows you to stack them on top of each other in the holds of liberty ships… didn’t have to worry about roll bars in ww2 I suppose.




  • I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

    1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
    2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
    3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

    Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

    I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.




  • It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.

    I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”

    And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.



  • hotspur@lemmy.mltoMemes@sopuli.xyzApple Vision Pro
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    9 months ago

    Yeah I went after commenting and read up on it, sounds like super hype, first release was meh, now they’ve retooled and are enterprise oriented. The 2.0 headset sounds sorta neat, but still pretty niche.

    Sigh, I was excited for the seamless whales flying across the sky… but I should have guessed it was too good to be true.



  • hotspur@lemmy.mltoMemes@sopuli.xyzApple Vision Pro
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    9 months ago

    Some of it is just Apple fandom, but this headset does make more of a leap into AR/productivity than others have as a main feature. From reviews it sounds like it still ain’t thaaat great at it, and I’ve heard the meta quest pro or whatever can do some similar stuff, but this is another step towards it I guess.

    I realize google glass and the Microsoft ar glasses attempted this a bit, but both were such immature tech that they seemed like Proof of concept instead of a potentially mass market product.

    I want to know what happened to magic leap… all that super hype about light fields and AR, and then some super expensive goggle things and silence for a while, maybe I just haven’t been saying attention enough or something.


  • I feel like originally it was a semi-safe taboo to break that made a standard porn setup seem more forbidden/risqué. It always seemed weird, like how many people have step siblings that also fantasize about them sexually, how big could this be? But it just kept on coming, so to speak.

    Now I think it’s just a meme/SEO thing, where you have to include it even if the video is not even pretending to be about that. Also it happened around the same time that websites were pushing/pivoting into more content creator type things, and so it’s probably related to that as well. Like the annoying face+exaggerated reaction thing on YouTube…

    Either way, always seemed whacky that everything the sites serve is almost completely step-porn on the front page.





  • It’s about lift generation and gravity. Planes stay aloft because of the lift generated. So plane takes off near horizontal, with engines creating thrust in a near horizontal vector. The shape of the wing, combined with the near horizontal thrust vector creates lift, which is perpendicular to the thrust vector, and is what exceeds the pull of gravity, so you climb, while also moving forward. Depending on how you angle the wing, you change that lift force/vector so you can climb, fly level or decend.

    If you angle a conventional plane vertically, it will still generate “lift” but that lift will be angled perpendicular to to gravity force. In reality, the plane “stalls” before vertical—this stalling means the wind angle has gone beyond where it can generate enough lift to keep the plane level or climbing. Simply put, most aircraft engines are completely insufficient to escape gravity on their own, they’re using a mechanical advantage via wing generated lift to stay up.

    Space rockets use an immense amount of force to escape the atmosphere, they’re basically using a direct vector force to cancel out and exceed gravity, as well as friction. This requires fairly mind boggling amounts of fuel (energy) to do, which is why pounds of cargo capacity are extremely limited.

    A VTOL aircraft that has thrust vectoring, can aim thrust down vertically to rise off the ground vertically for a period of time, and then rotate the thrust to the rear to enter into standard lift based flight. I don’t know this exactly, but I suspect the vertical portion of the VTOL sequence is much more energy intensive than the horizontal portion.

    Helicopters are neat because they generate vertical lift, but that rotor plane is also capable of behaving like a wing, allowing them to mimic some aspects of fixed wing flight. For instance, if your engine does, you can use autorotation (basically as you fall, it spins the rotors, and you get wing lift so you can “glide” in to land safely).That said, helicopters are less efficient than a fixed wing, which is why if you fly across the country you’re in a large plane, not a helicopter.

    I’m sure there are scientific details I’m missing here, but that’s my layman’s understanding of why you can’t point a standard aircraft vertically and fly straight up.