EscargotCult (u/EscargotCult)

EscargotCult commented on Shaving is too expensive johnwhiles.com/posts/shav... · Posted by u/fanf2

Bevel makes disposable safety razors for travel. Yes disposable double edged safety razors. They are quite nice nice. It's a plastic handle with standard double edged blade in there but it's non removable.

EscargotCult · a year ago

I stand corrected! I do suppose I could also get a travel safety razor that comes apart into 3 parts (as opposed to a single piece with a butterfly opening) and pack them separately. Of course that could mean some blade wastage: I'm rarely in one location long enough to use up all 5 in a pack.

EscargotCult commented on Shaving is too expensive johnwhiles.com/posts/shav... · Posted by u/fanf2

harimau777 · a year ago

I think that it's also important to consider that it's much easier to cut oneself when using a double edge razor. The multiple blades locked to a specific angle that makes a modern razor safer likely also contributes to its greater cost and plastic waste.

I suspect that it's more also difficult to travel with exposed blades than with modern cartridges; both due to the ease of packing and due to security hassles.

Personally I started shaving using an electric razor, switched to a double edged razor, and then eventually switched to a modern razor.

EscargotCult · a year ago

> I think that it's also important to consider that it's much easier to cut oneself when using a double edge razor.

I've actually found it to be the opposite in my case, after having used a double-edge safety razor for almost 7 years. When I use the DE razor, I know exactly where the blade is and it gives me greater control if I need to go over a spot again that I missed. With the disposable razor, I've always found it difficult to tell where the blades are on my skin, which makes me prone to errors. The multiple blades in sequence also make it much more nick-prone when going against the grain for a closer shave, or as in the missed-spot scenario I just mentioned.

But yes, you're right - it's basically impossible to travel with a DE razor without a checked bag. Even just carrying the handle without the blade in your carry-on is a risk. I have an acquaintance who lost his DE handle to a TSA agent that wasn't interested in understanding that the handle by itself poses no more risk than a toothbrush. So, if I'm flying, I'll suffer with the disposable razor and never shave against the grain.

EscargotCult commented on How often is the wife taller than the husband? statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/luu

thih9 · a year ago

The statement about shorter men earning less ("shorter men don’t marry as often, in part because they earn less") was surprising to me and I decided to investigate.

I saw similar statements elsewhere[1]:

> A 2020 study in the scientific journal PLOS One analyzed economic data from over 3,500 Chinese adults and found that every additional centimeter of height was correlated with a 1.3% increase in a person's annual income.

And in another place[2], a 1984–2005 study:

> Results at mean values for males indicate that being 10 cm taller is associated with (...) a $1874–2306 income premium

Fingers crossed for remote work bringing some sort of equalizer effect here.

[1]: https://www.salon.com/2023/01/19/shorter-height-lower-salari...

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15706...

EscargotCult · a year ago

> Fingers crossed for remote work bringing some sort of equalizer effect here.

I work at a fully-remote company, and my org had a meetup soon after I first started working here. I was surprised to see how many of the people I work with seemed to be below average height. I've never really done anything to verify it, but I have a hunch based on that anecdata that the median height at my fully-remote company might be lower than the median height of the US population and/or lower than the median height at similarly-sized enterprises that have in-person hiring and work.

EscargotCult commented on Meta outage metastatus.com/... · Posted by u/geocrasher

jon-wood · 2 years ago

Or people are using Facebook Auth for them. I don't really trust Down Detector, which despite the claims is really People Winging on Twitter Detector.

EscargotCult · 2 years ago

Their outage heatmap is also basically a population density map too. https://xkcd.com/1138/

EscargotCult commented on I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind joshcollinsworth.com/blog... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

simonw · 2 years ago

Copilot is bad at accessibility because web engineers are bad at accessibility. All of the bad habits in this post were learned from its training data.

That's not to say this can't be fixed: a recurring lesson of LLMs is that the quality of the training data is /everything/. OpenAI made their models better at chess by feeding in higher quality chess data - they could absolutely make it better at accessible frontend code by curating and boosting better code examples.

I doubt they'll do that any time soon, purely because there are so many other training data projects they could take on.

Thankfully we aren't nearly as dependent on a few closed research labs as we used to be.

It would be very exciting to see fine-tuned openly licensed models that target exactly this kind of improvement.

EscargotCult · 2 years ago

> Copilot is bad at accessibility because web engineers are bad at accessibility. All of the bad habits in this post were learned from its training data.

100%, and this is why Copilot is damn-near unusable for Bash scripting (yeah, the real problem is Bash scripting, use a better scripting language etc etc, but I do it, you've probably done it, and we've all definitely worked with codebases with Bash script linchpins) - there's a lot of bad Bash out there.

EscargotCult commented on I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind joshcollinsworth.com/blog... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

bluefirebrand · 2 years ago

The problem is that often it will give answers that are only subtly wrong, and those will get shipped too.

I think my puzzlement is with the focus on accessibility as though it was a high priority item. In my experience it's usually an afterthought, if it's a thought at all. Personally I've never worked on a codebase where accessibility was in the top 5 priorities. No one would ever block a prod release for an accessibility mistake.

But like I said, you could take this whole argument, find+replace "accessibility" with "security" and you would have a much more compelling argument imo. Given time constraints, code should prioritize security over accessibility basically always.

EscargotCult · 2 years ago

I'll just quote from Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

> Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

I'm fully aware that I'm commenting with a drive-by facetious block quote, but it is a reality that "insecure but accessible" has more users than "secure but inaccessible".

EscargotCult commented on Reddit Strike Has Started reddark.untone.uk/... · Posted by u/Freddie111

Kiro · 2 years ago

What makes Apollo better than the official app and why is there such a discrepancy? (I haven't used either.) I know the classic take is that the app is made for advertisers and not users, but I'm interested in what the actual difference is.

EscargotCult · 2 years ago

It uses the native iOS video player APIs, which (to my knowledge, it's been a while since I tried) the official app doesn't. Also overall, it follows a lot of the "recommended" iOS design guidelines and has the look and feel of an Apple-made app (fonts, long-press behaviour, slide elements to perform actions, haptic feedback, etc).

EscargotCult commented on An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries smithsonianmag.com/histor... · Posted by u/drdee

amusingimpala75 · 3 years ago

“Having done that (and lacking cash to buy Photoshop), he downloaded an open-source knockoff.” Anyone wanna bet it’s GIMP?

EscargotCult · 3 years ago

I can't imagine it being anything else in that year. That must have been a struggle-bus of a UI to work with for something this laborious, though.

EscargotCult commented on MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot futurism.com/msn-is-publi... · Posted by u/cpeterso

duxup · 3 years ago

I always assumed this was happening to an extent already, particularly with sports. In the sports news world you get all sorts of "season previews" and various articles with "each team's strength's and weaknesses".

If you weren't a fan of big name teams you'd inevitably find with your team: coaches mentioned who weren't there anymore, players who weren't there anymore, and various outdated factoids / concerns thrown in. Some "concerns" almost felt like an AI trained on fan forums where issues fans had, but had no place in reality were raised, with even local fan forum lingo tossed in ...

If it was a person, or a script that generated content that got doctored by a person I don't know, but the patter was very clear.

EscargotCult · 3 years ago

This is already happening with stock "analysis" that you see on Yahoo Finance for any given symbol. For example, take a look at https://stocks.apple.com/AbKUdK1ZvSFK4NdaMwMd27w

EscargotCult commented on Go 1.19 Released go.dev/doc/go1.19... · Posted by u/petercooper

62951413 · 3 years ago

At first glance I don't see anything done about migrating the standard library to use generics. Is there any roadmap? I remember a cascade of related improvements when Java introduced generics.

EscargotCult · 3 years ago

I think they've mentioned that they expect that their generics spec will evolve, plus they're waiting to see what idioms emerge before refactoring the standard library.