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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • There’s a difference between summer and winter fuel for gasoline engines in some areas. It’s usually to do with smog restrictions.

    The same octane can be reached with different blends of hydrocarbons. So instead of just ‘pure’ gasoline to hit a desired octane, refineries can mix together higher and lower octane fuels to reach the same overall octane rating. This increases the amount of refinery products that can be used to blend gasoline, so it can be made more cheaply. The trade off is that it’s less pure, and most importantly for this comment - that some components of of these cheaper blends may evaporate more readily, leading to smog.

    In summer, when it’s warmer, some areas mandate gasoline must meet certain standards for evaporation. In winter, those standards are decreased, because it’s cooler.

    Ethanol has a relatively low evaporation point. I don’t know the specifics of the commenter’s location, but I could see ‘summer gas’ having no ethanol to meet these standards.

    More info: The Vapor Rub: Summer versus Winter Gasoline Explained — Car and Driver


  • I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.

    Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
    You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.

    Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.

    Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?













  • So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.

    But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.

    I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
    By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.

    Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
    But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.



  • Term limits have been shown to create ‘brain drain’, and ultimately what winds up happening is that that legislators must focus on career growth - either spending their time in office campaigning for the next elected position, or looking to opportunities beyond politics. It takes time and experience to become skilled in crafting bills that don’t have adverse effects and cannot be overturned or lawyered to do things they aren’t intended to do.
    The net result is that it creates a slew of amateur legislators, and professional lobbyists, as legislators are forced to retire just as they become skilled at the job.

    An alternative to a retirement age is mental/physical fitness reviews, but that’s also tricky. If there isn’t a defined process then unscrupulous people will just use a doctor of choice to get the results they want, but if there is a process, politicizing that process to serve one party or the other could mean using mandatory retirement to force key vacancies.

    I do think that at some point we need to pry the hands of people off the levers of power, and I can’t think of a way that is as ‘non-corruptible’ as a set age limit. It would not always be personally fair, but it would probably be for the greater good.



  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.orgtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAdvice on finding a partner?
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    2 months ago

    It’s not bad. I’m like, 5’9”, but I have a 29” inseam. I’m all torso, so I got these short legs that are pretty thick. So, I got that curvy booty.

    Technically, I baited her into it. I told her I had just sent butt pictures for a friend - explaining that it was a quirk of our otherwise normal friendship (my friend and I had quasi dated for awhile until she moved out of state, and she liked my butt).
    My now-wife said I should send her photos next time I took some. I sent my butt, she sent her butt, and somehow we wound up with pets.