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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzMood
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    18 hours ago

    Wasps are my archetypal frenemy. I hate them, but I love them and what they do, but they can please do it far away from me, but they should also do it in my backyard, but not when I’m there, and I don’t mind sharing food with them, but I can’t stand having them near my food, and I don’t want to hate them but whenever they’re near I seize up and can barely breathe or move.

    I don’t like them half as much as they deserve.







  • Simplified: A black hole is the result of density – how much mass you cram into how little space. If something is heavy enough, even light passing near it gets pulled in and swallowed, so there’s some area where no light escapes: a black hole.

    The difficulty is that you need a lot of gravity to bend the course of light. Gravity gets stronger the closer you get to the center, so at a certain distance, it will be strong enough no matter how little mass the object has.

    But most objects are simply too large: Light will bounce off without ever getting that close to the center. You’d need to squeeze them together real hard to make them small enough, but there are other forces trying to keep them in shape that will resist you.

    What you mean with “a whole lot of stuff” is the way more stable black holes work in space: A bunch of stuff so heavy that its own gravity is stronger than the forces trying to keep shape. If it’s strong enough, it can pull itself together so close that it gets smaller than that distance. Thus, there’s now an area around it where light can be trapped.

    If you involve quantum physics, things get fucky, and supposedly there actually is some radiation still escaping, which is what the other post referred to, but I’m out of my depth there. There are also different types of black holes with their own complications, a bunch of details I skipped and a lot more I don’t even know.

    Space is awesome and big and full of nothing and tons of tiny, really fascinating bits of not-nothing sprinkled in, and we could spend our entire lives studying it and never know just how much we don’t.






  • In the United States, a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs.

    […]

    PBMs play a role as the middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, and health insurance plan companies.

    Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.

    They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.

    I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?

    Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.



  • We have one app where client management can’t globally disable update checks or notifications, but also, the updates aren’t critical enough to constantly validate and roll out.

    So we get that “update available” badge in the app and can’t do anything about it. Probably not an issue for most people, since they already do updates only when they’re forced to, but annoying to the few who even look at those notifications.


  • Entitled customers of any flavour are awful. It’s one thing to know what you want and to decide whether something is worth your money, but it’s another to demand people cater to your specific taste and be a dick about it, as if the devs’ time and effort wasn’t worth anything.

    And particularly annoying in my opinion are those who think they know how to fix a given issue, call you an idiot for not “just” doing that and have no idea of the constraints and decisions that might preclude or complicate that “simple fix”.


  • I would never be able to explain coherently the difference between UX and UI people.

    In theory, UX deals with the psychology behind it: What do people want that our product can provide? Does our product communicate that it can do so? Do people understand how to use the product? Does the product guide them through usage helpfully? Are they satisfied with the result?

    Perhaps most nebulously: How do they feel before, while and after using the product, independent of the product itself, and how does that impact their experience? For instance, if you’re buying a train ticket, you might already be stressed and annoyed, so you’ll have less patience.

    Source: My wife, who had UX as the focus of her undergrad.

    In practice, a lot of people are like you in that they don’t really know or grasp the field, particularly managers who aren’t qualified to make the hiring decisions they do and accordingly there’s always gonna be people capitalising on that ambiguity and grifting their way to a cushy “I’m important and get to have a say, so pay me well” job.