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rottencupcakes commented on East Germany balloon escape   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eas... · Posted by u/robertvc
rottencupcakes · 25 days ago
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
rottencupcakes commented on Show HN: Website that plays the lottery every second   lotteryeverysecond.lffl.m... · Posted by u/Loeffelmann
mikepurvis · a month ago
I don’t understand how this lotto would make any money.
rottencupcakes · a month ago
A limited availability loss leader product meant to normalize lottery tickets to young customers.
rottencupcakes commented on Contrails Map   map.contrails.org/... · Posted by u/schaum
extropy · 2 months ago
I'm not following the logic why contrails cause net warming.

Why nuclear blasts - that also introduce lots of particles in atmosphere cause a cooling effect - "nuclear winter"?

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
They don’t cause net warming, it’s transient. If we stopped flying tomorrow it would go away quickly. But we keep flying.

But even with that the amount of warming this continuous effect creates is quite small and negligible compared to greenhouse gas warming and isn’t really worth talking about.

rottencupcakes commented on Canada's Carney called out for 'utilizing' British spelling   bbc.com/news/articles/cj6... · Posted by u/haunter
wrs · 2 months ago
Small correction: In UK English, practice is a noun and practise is a verb. In America, practice is both and we don't have practise.
rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
Thanks for clarifying. I'm American and I had never heard of practise in my life.
rottencupcakes commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure   liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc
jcims · 2 months ago
> Lufthansa

I had to walk away from a $600 ticket that I booked at the last minute b/c in the 30 seconds between the time I paid for the ticket and the time the booking returned, the connecting flight filled up and I had to wait a day I didn't have for the next one. Couldn't get a single consideration from anyone, they said they couldn't cancel the ticket b/c the first leg was still available. Just had to walk away from the money and find another airline.

I'm sure it happens on every airline but man I was pissed. They go to the bottom of the list until the next tomfoolery occurs.

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
I had paid $150 or so for a extra legroom seat (on lufthansa). They did some last minute tomfoolery and my seat changed on my phone as I boarded the plane.

I was now not even in a premium economy row, but just a normal seat. I tried telling the flight attendant, who gave no shits - she just said "the plane isn't full, sit anywhere when we are in the air."

Fine, I found a premium economy aisle (still no extra legroom exit row seat, but whatever), and then filed for a refund when I landed.

They responded to my request for a refund with a form letter apologizing, but no refund. Then ignored any follow up. I had to do a charge back (no joke).

Them:

> I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to sincerely apologize for the seating issue you experienced during your recent flight. I understand that you requested an exit row seat and were not able to be accommodated, which is understandably frustrating.

> We strive to honor all seating preferences, and I regret that we were unable to meet your expectations in this instance. Please know that your feedback is important to us, and we will review our seating allocation processes to prevent similar situations in the future.

> Thank you for your understanding and patience. If there is anything further we can assist you with or if you have any other concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

> We hope that you put your trust in Lufthansa and partners also in the future and continue to fly with us.

Me: This wasn't a seating preference, I paid $130 to reserve this seat. This is something I purchased. I'd expect you'd at least issue a refund and extend me some sort of credit to make up for this.

Them: crickets

rottencupcakes commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure   liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc
pdabbadabba · 2 months ago
> Try flying Lufthansa (or one of their half dozen subsidiaries created almost entirely to give worse service) anywhere inside of europe. Everything is a money grab and the service and boarding are terrible.

FWIW, I just took such a flight and didn't notice anything that compares unfavorably to a domestic U.S. airline. (To be clear, it certainly wasn't better either.) Is there anything specific you can point to?

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
Every drink is for sale, even coffee. They aggressively use the bag sizer and try to take bags away at the gate, under the ruse that their tiny Airbus overhead bins cannot fit them (they can).
rottencupcakes commented on United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure   liveandletsfly.com/united... · Posted by u/makaimc
miki123211 · 2 months ago
To a European like me, United was such a weird airline to fly.

There were actual commercials played before the safety video, the cabin crew warned passengers to make sure children cannot see the adult content they're watching (can you get more American than that?), and their credit card was offered multiple times during the flight. At least the WiFi was reasonably cheap.

Over here, that stuff would never fly (no pun intended), except maybe on Ryanair or other extremely low-cost carriers. On e.g. a Lufthansa longhaul flight, which are priced similarly and cover the same route I flew (fra-ord), it would be unthinkable.

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
What has become much more degraded in Europe than America is the domestic flights.

Try flying Lufthansa (or one of their half dozen subsidiaries created almost entirely to give worse service) anywhere inside of europe. Everything is a money grab and the service and boarding are terrible.

United maintains a relatively consistent experience between domestic and international, minus the free alcohol.

rottencupcakes commented on Coffee linked to slower biological ageing among those with severe mental illness   kcl.ac.uk/news/coffee-lin... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
stinkbeetle · 2 months ago
Coffee is not really hand picked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOMM84jhZg

The cost of raw coffee has nearly tripled in 18 months, that's what's driven the price increases. That has not been due to the cost of processing and shipping so much as poor coffee growing seasons in major growing areas reducing primary production. Though growing, processing, and transport inputs have all suffered a lot of inflation in the past 5 years too, to be sure.

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
FYI I researched this a bit. Most coffee is hand-picked, with Brazil (featured in the video), being the exception.

Brazil is generally known for mass production low quality coffee grown at a lower altitude, which might be what you find in a can like grandparent said, but is less popular in the more premium scenes.

rottencupcakes commented on Coffee linked to slower biological ageing among those with severe mental illness   kcl.ac.uk/news/coffee-lin... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
zafka · 2 months ago
I wonder if what seems like much higher margins in coffee allow for more articles like this. While I want what they are saying to be true, I wish I did not have to pay $15.00 for a 26 ounce can of coffee.
rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
$10/lb sounds very reasonable for a grown, hand picked, fermented, washed, dried, shipped, roasted, packaged, and delivered seed.
rottencupcakes commented on Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI   blog.google/technology/de... · Posted by u/xnx
Workaccount2 · 2 months ago
Well

It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs.

In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 then said it was a bug, and adjusted the script sensitivity so it only located 4, lol.

Anyway, Gemini 3, while still being unable to count the legs first try, did identify "male anatomy" (it's own words) also visible in the picture. The 5th leg was approximately where you could expect a well endowed dog to have a "5th leg".

That aside though, I still wouldn't call it particularly impressive.

As a note, Meta's image slicer correctly highlighted all 5 legs without a hitch. Maybe not quite a transformer, but interesting that it could properly interpret "dog leg" and ID them. Also the dog with many legs (I have a few of them) all had there extra legs added by nano-banana.

rottencupcakes · 2 months ago
Super interesting. I replicated this.

I passed the AIs this image and asked them how many fingers were on the hands: https://media.post.rvohealth.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...

Claude said there were 3 hands and 16 fingers. GPT said there are 10 fingers. Grok impressively said "There are 9 fingers visible on these two hands (the left hand is missing the tip of its ring finger)." Gemini smashed it and said 12.

u/rottencupcakes

KarmaCake day2634May 28, 2009View Original