Elishah's recent activity

  1. Comment on Is it me, or does spicy + sweet = bitter? in ~food

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    Huh. Your expertise here clearly dwarfs my own knowledge, so I'll have to rework my understanding of things. Thank you for the correction and the additional information!

    Huh. Your expertise here clearly dwarfs my own knowledge, so I'll have to rework my understanding of things.

    Thank you for the correction and the additional information!

    16 votes

  2. Comment on Is it me, or does spicy + sweet = bitter? in ~food

    Elishah
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It looks as if the pH of soda is generally around 2.5-3, and beer ranges from 3-5.5. So soda is substantially more acidic than beer, and the acid/base reaction would be significantly stronger....

    It looks as if the pH of soda is generally around 2.5-3, and beer ranges from 3-5.5. So soda is substantially more acidic than beer, and the acid/base reaction would be significantly stronger.

    Also, I'm not a beer person myself, but my understanding is that bitterness is often a substantial note of its flavor profile all on its own. That might mean that the bitterness from the acid/base reaction doesn't stand out quite so starkly as it does against the background of sweet soda.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Is it me, or does spicy + sweet = bitter? in ~food

    Elishah
    Link
    Almost. It's that acidic + alkaline = bitter. The most familiar example of this is the unpleasant combination of orange juice (quite acidic) and toothpaste (alkaline, as minty things generally...

    Almost. It's that acidic + alkaline = bitter.

    The most familiar example of this is the unpleasant combination of orange juice (quite acidic) and toothpaste (alkaline, as minty things generally are). Each tastes fine separately, but when combined you get that bitterness that we all know and hate.

    Spicy is alkaline, and soda is acidic, so the results are similar. You'd get the same effect even if it were just plain carbonated water without any sweetness.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Every flashing element on your site alienates and enrages users in ~design

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    Yes, introducing software to intentionally slow down displaying information on a web page is incomprehensible. I have also been annoyed by Apple's version of that, though they do come with the...

    Yes, introducing software to intentionally slow down displaying information on a web page is incomprehensible. I have also been annoyed by Apple's version of that, though they do come with the tepid saving grace of a "Tech Specs" link right at the top for the "yeahyeahyeah, just tell me what the fucking thing actually is" experience.

    Overall, I would say that such pages are one of many strong arguments that javascript is an abomination that should never have existed in the first place, and should never be used now.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on Every flashing element on your site alienates and enrages users in ~design

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    "This page has been pessimized for Internet Explorer, as those of you listening to William Shatner singing Mr. Tambourine Man have realized."

    "This page has been pessimized for Internet Explorer, as those of you listening to William Shatner singing Mr. Tambourine Man have realized."

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Every flashing element on your site alienates and enrages users in ~design

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    By contrast, I absolutely find those examples to be valid and similarly repugnant. It's still an animated/changing/flashing element, constantly forcing my attention back to it. And, as is usually...

    By contrast, I absolutely find those examples to be valid and similarly repugnant. It's still an animated/changing/flashing element, constantly forcing my attention back to it.

    And, as is usually the case, there's no benefit to it that would offset that unpleasantness. What action am I supposed to take based on a "Draft Saved" notification? In what way is this information useful? Especially when the whole point is that drafts are saved continuously, so even if the information were somehow actionable, it's still not actually news.

    At most, one might be able to justify some indication (with much more hysteresis than this) when it attempts to save a draft and fails to do so. But constantly flashing at me just to continually re-inform me that everything is working normally is abhorrent.

    8 votes

  7. Comment on Nostalgia -- what programs do you miss? in ~tech

    Elishah
    Link
    Aperture. Apple defined an entirely new genre of software (batchable, non-destructive photography adjustment combined with catalog management), and it was glorious. And then for some inexplicable...

    Aperture.

    Apple defined an entirely new genre of software (batchable, non-destructive photography adjustment combined with catalog management), and it was glorious. And then for some inexplicable reason, they just abandoned it, and left us to far inferior options like Lightroom and its ilk.

    12 votes

  8. Comment on As a cis het white male, how do I better understand trans and trans issues? in ~lgbt

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    Certainly! The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375. And honestly, it's not even some rare edge case. You probably use singular they/them all the time, even when not talking...

    I do like correctness, so I want to ask for a citation about the singular "they".

    Certainly! The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375.

    And honestly, it's not even some rare edge case. You probably use singular they/them all the time, even when not talking specifically about trans or nonbinary people:

    "Make sure you greet each customer as they come into the store."

    "Oh no, looks like someone dropped their phone!" "Let's look for them, maybe they haven't gone far."

    "If someone cuts you off in traffic they're a jerk, but you should just let it go rather than getting angry at them."

    9 votes

  9. Comment on As a cis het white male, how do I better understand trans and trans issues? in ~lgbt

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    The thing is, English is rife with ambiguities like this. The term "you" can be either singular or plural. (Previously it was only plural, and thee/thou were the singular version.) This...

    Yeah. The grammar is something that I think is unreasonably painful to me.

    The thing is, English is rife with ambiguities like this.

    The term "you" can be either singular or plural. (Previously it was only plural, and thee/thou were the singular version.) This occasionally causes some confusion, but mostly we get along fine.

    The term "we" can be either inclusive or exclusive; you might be including the person you're speaking to in that we, or you might not. This occasionally causes some confusion, but mostly we get along fine.

    Some pronouns have separate subject/object cases (I/me, we/us, they/them), and some do not (you/you). This occasionally causes some confusion, but mostly we get along fine.

    Like every natural language, English has a bunch of quirks and things at which it is bad. But objecting disproportionately to this one particular ambiguity usually has some roots in transphobia, even if the unconscious and unintentional kind.

    11 votes

  10. Comment on As a cis het white male, how do I better understand trans and trans issues? in ~lgbt

    Elishah
    Link
    You're probably familiar with the idea that sexuality is complicated. That there are a billion variations on whom people find sexy, and what they want to do with them. There certainly are...

    You're probably familiar with the idea that sexuality is complicated. That there are a billion variations on whom people find sexy, and what they want to do with them. There certainly are combinations that are more common that others, but those don't cover anywhere near the whole spectrum of human experience. And that the only real authority on someone's sexuality is themselves; you can't measure it from the outside, you need to just take people at their word about how they work internally.

    You can use that as a frame of reference to recognize that gender is also similarly complicated, and similarly internal.

    Being cisgender is obviously the most common situation by far, and the next most common is being trans in the sense of being clearly a man or woman, but not the one that matches how most people originally perceived you. But there is a rich universe of detail and variation even beyond those two cases.

    That's where pronouns like they/them can be valuable. And if it helps you come to terms with it, note that using "they" to refer to a singular person is not only very common even for cis people, it has several centuries of precedent. In fact, singular "they" is far older than singular "you."

    Also similarly to sexuality, the only real authority on someone's gender is themselves. Whatever external measurements you might imagine, based on genitals or chromosomes or whatever, are starkly limited. They're okay approximations most of the time, but in this case "most" is critically far off from "all."

    In terms of trying to imagine the experience, I find that the "imagine everyone calling you a woman" example often falls short. Cis people (especially cis people who are also privileged on other axes) are often so comfortable with their identity that the concept of other people mischaracterizing them doesn't really have the same impact.

    Instead, try to imagine a life of everyone attributing some other trait to you that is not only inaccurate, but that you find distasteful. Imagine every single person you meet instantly concluding that you are a very cruel person, or a very stupid one. Imagine having to work hard to try to convince every single person in the world that you are not this thing, and often still failing. It's not only distressing, it's exhausting.

    And one final note: the odds are pretty good that you actually do know some trans people. There is no reason that it would be particularly obvious to you whether any particular individual is trans, and it's really not so rare as all that.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on How Apple's new Mac Pro completely misses the point in ~tech

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    That probably would be too high. Good thing they don't sell a $7k laptop, then? Looks as if that price in 2016 would have been the 13" model. Whereas today, the 14" macbook pro costs... still $2k....

    7$k USD for a laptop is way too high.

    That probably would be too high. Good thing they don't sell a $7k laptop, then?

    For reference, when I bought my 2016 MacBook Pro, it was 2$k USD. A 3.5x price increase seems absurd

    Looks as if that price in 2016 would have been the 13" model. Whereas today, the 14" macbook pro costs... still $2k. Meaning that, after adjusting for inflation, the price has actually decreased by ~21%.

    9 votes

  12. Comment on How bad is it to live in San Francisco? in ~talk

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    My first though was to wonder if this might be a classification issue: does this really count "police officers" in the strictest sense, and thus exclude things like sheriffs, jail and prison...

    On a per capita basis, the US is ranked #141th for number of police officers. That's right, #141.

    My first though was to wonder if this might be a classification issue: does this really count "police officers" in the strictest sense, and thus exclude things like sheriffs, jail and prison guards, marshals, and other law enforcement personnel? The answer appears to be at least somewhat yes, but to an unclear degree.

    The wikipedia page for "List of countries by number of police officers" ranks the US at #101 with 242 police officers per 100k inhabitants. It also says that the worldwide median is 300 per 100k.

    But the FBI page that wikipedia sources does seem to indicate that this is a somewhat narrow definition, though it's unclear by how much. The total 697,195 that the wikipedia page counts are explicitly "officers," while the total number of law enforcement employees is nearly 50% higher at 1,003,270.

    So if we use the narrowest possible version of "police officer," the US has 80% of the median per capita number. If we use the broadest definition by counting all law enforcement employees, the US is at 116% of the median.

    Unfortunately, I don't easily see a breakdown of the rest of those employee roles to know how many of them should reasonably be counted, much less see a version of that for every other nation to make sure that we're counting consistently. So I don't see an easy way to determine where in that 80%-116% range we are.

    If you have some better or more detailed sources, I would love to see them.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on How bad is it to live in San Francisco? in ~talk

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    It's an appropriate categorization, as they are both deaths that are both mediated and partially caused by guns. We have hundreds of studies, spanning decades of research, all consistently finding...

    it feels odd to lump both types of deaths together as “gun deaths”.

    It's an appropriate categorization, as they are both deaths that are both mediated and partially caused by guns.

    We have hundreds of studies, spanning decades of research, all consistently finding that guns are a causal factor in suicide.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on What are your favorite webcomics? in ~comics

  15. Comment on What's a "sore thumb" for you? in ~talk

    Elishah
    Link
    Getting into photography has basically ruined me. Things that most people don't care about, but that completely dominate any picture for me: Pictures that are even the tiniest bit crooked....

    Getting into photography has basically ruined me. Things that most people don't care about, but that completely dominate any picture for me:

    • Pictures that are even the tiniest bit crooked.

    • Pictures that are even the tiniest bit out of focus.

    • Pictures of people that are centered on their faces, and thus are 50% ceiling.

    • Fluorescent lights, and nearly all LED lights. They have absolutely wretched spectral consistency.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on What did a fictional character say that stuck with you? in ~talk

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    One modern practical example of this is that everything should be encrypted, regardless of whether or not it is important or private. If you encrypt only the things that are important to keep...

    "He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep."

    One modern practical example of this is that everything should be encrypted, regardless of whether or not it is important or private.

    If you encrypt only the things that are important to keep secret, you have already given away which things those are.

    6 votes

  17. Comment on What is your least favourite window manager or desktop environment and why? in ~comp

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    If it's helpful, there is a keyboard shortcut to do what you're looking for: command-down. It's part of a whole conceptual framework in which command-up will ascend one level of directory, and...

    I'll reiterate his point about "enter" being used to rename an item rather than open it. It makes keyboard navigation of the file system feel cumbersome.

    If it's helpful, there is a keyboard shortcut to do what you're looking for: command-down.

    It's part of a whole conceptual framework in which command-up will ascend one level of directory, and command-left and -right will close or open disclosure triangles. It's intended to represent navigating the filesystem as moving through a two-dimensional space.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on What is your least favourite window manager or desktop environment and why? in ~comp

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    Arguments can be made for either of those approaches. Merging might be what is wanted, but it also produces non-deterministic results, especially once one considers races. Overwriting rather than...

    If there are two folders named the same in different places e.g. /tmp/a and /tmp/b/a, and you wanted to move /tmp/b/a into /tmp, in Explorer it would at least try to merge the files in /tmp/b/a into /tmp/a. Finder deletes /tmp/a and replaces it with /tmp/b/a. I lost a lot of files doing this - luckily they were versioned control with Git or otherwise I'd be screwed.

    Arguments can be made for either of those approaches. Merging might be what is wanted, but it also produces non-deterministic results, especially once one considers races. Overwriting rather than merging has the merits of transparency and predictability.

    I can open a terminal in the current directory in Explorer. With Finder, I had to install a third party application to get the ability to open a terminal.

    I find integration between the finder and a terminal to be quite good, but it is different. In this case, the method that is builtin and consistent with how other things work is that you can drag any finder icon into any terminal window, and it will be translated into that path.

    The other direction is also well supported with open. The open command will do the equivalent of doubleclicking on any item, from within the shell. If that's a directory, then it opens it in a finder window. (I'm not familiar with Windows, so I don't know if it offers similar functionality.)

    When you right click on a file and select Properties, Explorer is insanely helpful by providing all sorts of useful information such as file extension, media type, program associated with extension/media type, and all sorts of useful things to help you manage files or at least understand basic properties of the file. Finder does this too via a "Get Info" which essentially replicates a lot of these details, but the UI is absolutely inpenetrable. I feel like I have to have a few cups of coffee before I can fully digest the information.

    I think this may just be a familiarity issue. The Get Info window seems very clear and useful to me, whereas the few times that I have tried to use the Properties window in Windows it seems like an impenetrable mass of nearly-identically-named tabs, and a giant snipe hunt to find where whatever I'm actually seeking is buried.

    On the same note, because Explorer has an address bar, it has some pretty sensible defaults that I'd like to navigate to by default - including my home folder. Finder does have this, but it's tucked away at the top menu bar.

    I don't know that I would characterize being a top-level menu item, with a default keyboard shortcut, as "tucked away." Menus are a pretty intrinsic part of the whole platform, and the default first place to go for everything.

    But if you do wish to have it directly in the window, the default for finder windows is to have a sidebar that includes that and several other locations by default, and of course can be customized with whatever items you wish.

    If I double click a zip file in Explorer, without a third party zip manager thing Explorer will allow you to navigate the entire zip file and browse around before deciding if you want to unzip or not. Finder just flat out unzips into the same directory without any options.

    This seems like much more sane behaviour to me. I can count on zero hands the number of times that I have wanted to unzip part of an archive. Again, the few times that I have done this with Windows, I have been baffled and annoyed: "...why did you just throw me into some very opaque application where I guess I need to jump through some more hoops? What do you think I want, just unzip the sodding thing!"

    It's an underlying issue on how Windows and macOS operates, but I absolutely love how Windows can handle a USB drive from being unplugged. This is something that infuriates me every time I just yank out the USB stick on a Mac and I get a notification scolding me for my data recklessness whereas Microsoft devs have figured out how to solve this problem.

    No, they haven't, they've just chosen to lie to you. Filesystem integrity is a property of the filesystem itself, not of the OS. You can usually get away with rudely disconnecting a filesystem, especially if nothing is writing to it or has been recently. But it is never guaranteed to be safe, and the range of risk varies with the filesystem type. MacOS chooses to be honest with you about there being risk, whereas Windows just ignores it and allows users to go on believing that it is a safe thing to do.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on What is your least favourite window manager or desktop environment and why? in ~comp

    Elishah
    Link Parent
    You are correct that fullscreening applications is the less mac-like way to approach things. And I would go so far as to say that it's just genuinely less good, unless one is constrained by a very...

    You are correct that fullscreening applications is the less mac-like way to approach things. And I would go so far as to say that it's just genuinely less good, unless one is constrained by a very small display.

    However, even on a large display there are a few specialized occasions on which it's a good tool. And apple has recently made the way that it works significantly worse, by making "fullscreen" mean "move to a new ephemeral desktop that has no keybindings."

    If I launch Lightroom on desktop 8 and choose to fullscreen it (reasonable, given that images are all much larger than displays, so every pixel narrows that gap), swap momentarily to do something else, and then come back to desktop 8, it's mysteriously empty. Because it has been silently moved to a new desktop, and, unlike all my existing ones, there is no keystroke that will take me directly to it. The only route is either through a varying series of relative desktop moves, or a trip through Mission Control, both of which are much slower.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Will Declining Monogamy Lead to an Increase in Violence? in ~humanities

    Elishah
    Link
    Rare are the times that I have wished for a downvote button on tildes, but this piece has occasioned another of those few. Much of it is the tiresomely familiar evopsych claptrap, which...

    Rare are the times that I have wished for a downvote button on tildes, but this piece has occasioned another of those few.

    Much of it is the tiresomely familiar evopsych claptrap, which retroactively defines current societal gender roles as intrinsic manifestations of sexual reproduction. Many of these passages would be comfortably at home if inserted into the average Jordan Peterson screed.

    And, in similarly Petersonian fashion, it is rife with a set of largely unrelated worrisome tangents, cloaked under a layer of positive suggestions that are uncontroversial to the point of being banal. Yes, approximately everyone agrees that banning pornography and criminalizing prostitutes are bad ideas, therefore[sic] white men are the real victims here. This is then tied--somehow--into an opposition to banning hate speech.

    Its central logic is irreparably flawed, and the goal it serves with that logic appears to be smuggling in a political agenda that is (rightly) too unpalatable to be presented directly.

    5 votes