dendodge (u/dendodge)

dendodge commented on Accountability Sinks 250bpm.substack.com/p/acc... · Posted by u/msustrik

hliyan · 4 months ago

If a person does not (and does not want to) drive, how do they identify themselves? Where I live, everyone gets a government issue ID card, and the ID number is the citizen's primary key. Our government is still largely paper-driven, but there's little you can't get done if you show up in person with your national ID.

dendodge · 4 months ago

Driving licences are also the primary form of ID in the UK (alongside passports, which are more expensive). People who can't (or don't) drive can still get a provisional licence, which only allows driving under the supervision of an appropriate adult but works exactly the same for ID purposes.

dendodge commented on Accountability Sinks 250bpm.substack.com/p/acc... · Posted by u/msustrik

lmz · 4 months ago

The incentives are very different - private garages would be very incentivized to find nothing wrong with your car and business would gravitate to those with the least checks. The government stations would not have that incentive (actually maybe incentivized the other way - to make up problems that can be waved away with money, depending on how corrupt things are there)

dendodge · 4 months ago

I'd have thought the private garages would also be incentivised to find problems - that they can then offer to fix for an additional fee.

As it is, I think most garages that offer MOTs in the UK are fair and honest, as the test is relatively strictly regulated, but I'm sure people do get ripped off.

dendodge commented on Accountability Sinks 250bpm.substack.com/p/acc... · Posted by u/msustrik

cheschire · 4 months ago

I always remind myself when I have to go to the DMV[0] that I should plan on leaving with nothing more than another action or set of actions to take. I never enter the DMV expecting to complete a process, and the workers behind the counter always have this visible, visceral response when I DONT lose my fucking mind at their response to something. When I continue to be pleasant and understanding it’s like they suddenly come alive. It’s a depressing state of affairs because I understand exactly what they expect and why.

0: for non-Americans and for Americans from other states that may use different terms, the DMV is the department of motor vehicles in many US states and is the central place to get your drivers license, take the drivers test, register your car, get vehicle license plates, etc. Many processes that have many requirements that often are unfulfilled when people show up asking for things.

dendodge · 4 months ago

Off-topic, but since you mention it, I've always been confused about what Americans always seem to be doing at the DMV. It seems to be a staple of pop culture that people are always there and the queue is always very long, but I've never known what anyone is actually trying to achieve.

The DVLA in the UK doesn't have a high-street presence. I took my driving test once, then received my driving licence in the post. When it needs renewing, I can do it online. I tax my car online. MOTs (annual vehicle safety tests) happen at any local garage. I've never needed a new numberplate, but I think you can buy those online too.

So what is it you all have to go to the DMV for? Because it sounds horrible.

dendodge commented on How I got 100% off my train travel readbunce.com/p/how-i-got... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

thebruce87m · 6 months ago

Note that when an English person says the north, they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about the north of England, not the north of the UK even if everyone else is talking about the UK.

dendodge · 6 months ago

Similarly, Americans expect people to be aware that California is not "the South", despite being on the southern border, and that the Midwest is actually in the eastern half of the country.

Basically the names of geographical regions don't always make sense.

dendodge commented on How did Stripe come up with its name? (2015) quora.com/How-did-Stripe-... · Posted by u/mellosouls

userbinator · 2 years ago

Excellent example of how AI is often confident and wrong, but you wouldn't know if it weren't for an authoritative source providing the truth.

(Stripe in context evokes the magstripe of a payment card for me too.)

dendodge · 2 years ago

Quora's ChatGPT answers are, as far as I can tell, more often confidently wrong than they are right. For example, for the question "Which monarch in history had the highest regnal number?" it generates

> The monarch with the highest regnal number in history is Sobhuza II of Swaziland, who reigned for 82 years and 254 days

which is clearly incorrect (2 is not a very big number), and yet gets its own nice answer highlight at the top of Google (where the AI generated nature of the answer is not noted at all).

dendodge commented on War Music: Homer and His Iliad literaryreview.co.uk/war-... · Posted by u/diodorus

zwieback · 2 years ago

One of my coworkers went to Reed where they insisted on students reading the Lattimore translation of the Iliad, so I gave it a try as well. Once I got over the weirdness of the pseudo-Greek language I really liked it. Now it sounds like I should maybe give Logue a try, even though I've been declaring that Lattimore is the only true translation (never having read any other ones).

dendodge · 2 years ago

Wait for Emily Wilson (due at the end of September). Her Odyssey is easily among the great classical translations.

dendodge commented on War Music: Homer and His Iliad literaryreview.co.uk/war-... · Posted by u/diodorus

jstanley · 2 years ago

Thankfully the original work is now out of copyright, and there is an English translation here: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.php

dendodge · 2 years ago

> Thankfully the original work is now out of copyright

Seeing someone explicitly assert the copyright status of a text pushing 3 millennia old is somehow very amusing to me

dendodge commented on Writing prettier Haskell with Unicode syntax and Vim alt-romes.github.io/posts... · Posted by u/romes

dendodge · 2 years ago

Possibly a better way to achieve a similar level of prettiness would be (ab)use of vim's conceal feature. Through its judicious use, the author can have "forall" appear to them as ∀, "alpha" as α, etc., without imposing these symbols on their colleagues.

dendodge commented on Translating the Bible is a vexed task economist.com/culture/202... · Posted by u/MoSattler

wizofaus · 3 years ago

I'm more curious about the first word in that article - is "dodgy" becoming accepted as part of the US English vernacular now? It's particularly common in Aus English but I usually have to find alternatives when conversing with Usonians.

dendodge · 3 years ago

The Economist is a UK publication

dendodge commented on Kindle, ePub, and Amazon’s love of reinventing wheels hackaday.com/2022/05/17/k... · Posted by u/lxm

sgtnoodle · 3 years ago

A friend sold me an original kindle for maybe $20 one time. I used it to read about 75% of Orson Scott Card's novels within the Ender's Game series. After about a year, it stopped turning on. It was probably 7 years old by then, so I just got rid of it.

I bought a 2" thick sci-fi book a few years ago, "Pandora's Star". It seemed pretty interesting, but way too much book to carry around. I got a kobo and put what I vaguely recall was named "koreader" on it. It was pretty nice. It stopped working after 6 months, though. I took it apart, and at least one power management IC is shorted out. Its e-ink display permanently says, "Sleeping..." It's been a paperweight on my nightstand for about 2 years, and a minor source of anxiety for me. I don't plan on buying another kobo device any time soon because I hate e-waste.

My wife got me a kindle paperwhite to replace it, and it didn't take much work to get the same book onto it. I think I'm maybe 25% of the way through the book, but I can't really say because I don't understand what the numbers in the lower corner mean. I also printed the Rust programming language manual to PDF and managed to copy it onto the kindle without much fuss.

dendodge · 3 years ago

> I don't understand what the numbers in the lower corner mean

If you tap on the numbers in the lower corner, you can cycle through various options including % read. My personal preference is for time left in chapter.