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“Lots of forensics is much more dubious than CSI would have you believe.” was what was being replied to.

FWIW, the protests were called “No Tyrants” in Canada

Indeed: one of the first things I do on a new android phone is activate developer mode specifically so that I can set the animation timescale to 0×.

Which the majority of people think is a horrible experience. There's even a sibling comment in this thread pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518721

Unless you can back that up, "Majority" is something you're making up. It's a guess.

It also doesn't matter whether it's true if the majority or not- "Instant transitions are only good in theory" is not a true statement. Instant transitions are good in practice for many people and that has been true for decades.


I see Kiro's guess and raise you an anecdote. I just turned animations off on my Android device, and instantly it feels faster and more responsive.

Maybe software programs got faster with our faster CPUs but all the animations just made everything feel slow.


Yes! It feels faster and more responsive now because it is faster and more responsive now. Your device is taking less time to do the same work.

Most people with that opinion keep using apps and devices with animations, but thinking it would be better without them. Very few actually torture themselves like that in practice.

I thought I had disabled animations on android, but it looks like I have it set for half duration.

Probably because I had run into some apps with bugs when animations are disabled, and making them run twice as fast as normal is more compatible and reduce the annoyance enough that I forget its enabled. Apps that animate at normal speed in defiance of my settings get deleted.

But I also set windows not to show window content while moving or resizing, because I find that to be annoying too.

Reducing duration or eliminating animation is one of the first settings I do on a new install.


For me, animations are the torture, and I am most productive on machines that aren't artificially hobbled with animations one can't turn off.

Your experiences are not universal.


Most people aren't even aware that it's possible to turn them off.

Most shoulder-surfers who see my phone ask me how everything's so fast, and get me to show them the settings. Being able to disable the extremely-excessive animations many things have nowadays is fantastic, and is a great reminder that hardware actually has made progress in the past two decades.

(I use accessibility -> reduce motion, personally. less flaky than the dev options, though also less reliable)


Finally someone not roleplaying. You're the first person who acknowledges the flakiness of the dev options. People are self-reporting when they claim they set it to 0x without realizing it's unusable due to the bugs.

Denigrating others as "roleplaying" is unnecessary and not serious.

AOSP is not the only operating system that allows you to disable animations, even if its implementation is not the best. And yes, I still use 0x on my Android, because it's still that much better than having animations enabled.


It mostly works fine, I ran with it for a year or so. Actually needing to disable it is extremely app-specific and rare enough that many people probably never experience it (it's essentially always a sign of buggy code).

Though it does kinda often make inertial scroll/pan very bad feeling, as it jumps ahead of where you released, to where it will settle. "Reduce motion" is dramatically better there, which is a big part of why I use it.

Much MUCH more problematic is that Android (on a Pixel) has had a badly broken "recent apps" view for years now, when you have both a third party launcher and reduce motion enabled. It frequently (literally most of the time) gets stuck in its animations and won't scroll anywhere except to leap to the start or end of the list.


Perhaps you should note the replies to that sibling comment

Setting animations to 0x is famously broken on Android with the UI jumping up and down on transitions. It's a litmus test to spot people falsely claiming they have it disabled without realizing it outs them.

You continue making unsubstantiated claims with loaded terms, denigrating others by accusing them of being dishonest when just stating their preferences.

It's not a litmus test, you are simply wrong in the way you dismiss other people.

Some of us like it at 0x, even when some apps are janky. Further, plenty of us here use desktop operating systems. Android is not the only way to get on the internet.

Both Windows (at least as of 10 and before) and most Linux distros allow you to disable animations too, and it works fine. Desktop operating systems ~15+ years ago lacked these animations entirely.


s/better/blurrier/

Life without retina displays is possible, but pointless.

Lower DPI is quite okay with good font rendering (FreeType, slight hinting, subpixel rendering). I have both kinds of devices.

I get kind of nostalgic when I see Verdana on 1024x768 in winxp/2k.

ClearType was/is a nifty technology. I remember I had a HP Jornada PocketPC that came preloaded with The Time Machine to show off ClearType.

I sometimes wish I’d never seen a Retina display. There’s no going back for me now.

Careful, you’ll bring out all the “but it’s true to print media” people.

Yes: IIRC some large generators work exactly like this, as the energized rotor gives a lot more flexibility in managing frequency and power output.

Not just some, approximately all of them. It greatly complicates the logistics of a black start. † Of course that situation has additional complexity due to the need for substantial additional power in order for the various fuel supply systems to operate but I digress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start


Generator excitation is not the hard part of a black start. You have to run coal feeders, blowers, and water pumps for an hour before you can spin the generator. Then you get power instantly upon applying power to the field windings.

And even that's not the hard part of a black start. The plant control is relatively easy. What's hard is grid coordination.

All generation and consumption have to be almost perfectly balanced every second of every day. And the power company doesn't have good addressability of load. Worse when you restore power to an area all their stuff turns on in parallel giving an inrush that could be 3x or more the steady state.

A black start is a very drawn out process of bringing generation and load online in a balanced way and with wait times between load increases for stabilization.


> You have to run coal feeders, blowers, and water pumps for an hour before you can spin the generator.

That's probably the reason most grid black start facilities in my country (Brazil) are hydroelectric dams, which need none of these.


Instructions unclear, digitized subject into a mass of fingers.

Thanks for reigniting the PTSD of reading about SCP-4051.

You mean the 4051 from There's No Antimemetics Division and not the mainline 4051, right?

Yes. I'll confess that I started with the novel :)

Perfectly formed fingers.

I hope that pun was intended‽

SCP-48510055

A request that typically completes in a second or two being queued for an hour is absolutely a mess in view of the end-user. All such a queue is doing is hiding the user's exposure to the mess from the admin.

American exceptionalism was always a lie; name an “un-American” practice, and I'll show you a piece of American foreign policy.

A lie, or an ideal to try and live up to, depending on the context. In the context of discussing liberty-destroying privacy invasions it's an ideal, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it.

Violations of the US Bill of Rights.

Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.


It's hardly un-American if America does it the most, is it?

Fuck blind people I guess?

Certainly no. But point taken. This really isn't intended for use on a website like that, more a fun exploration of the difference between human and AI perception. That being said, I updated the project with an analogous audio experiment version for the unsighted.

I don't know why you'd feel so hostile towards the blind, but you do you...

They meant that this is a technique that relies on a person's vision, which means that the blind, by definition, are being excluded. They weren't being hostile toward the blind, they were pointing out that the project itself is hostile towards the blind.

Huh?

I mean you're not really making use of MVCC etc. at that point. Foreign keys are far less relevant because your transactions are all fully atomic, so it doesn't really matter if your data is in an inconsistent state in the middle of a transaction, and conversely you've got no risk of e.g. adding a reference to a row that another transaction deleted concurrently. Why not just use e.g. Redis at that point?

This is a misunderstanding of what serializable in an ACID datastore does, neither that trust developers without FK is always trouble, and that the suggestion of Redis show how much is lost here.

Big point: Serializable not exist alone in a decent ACID datastore, and no, less strict rules for the MOST important thing you have(your data) is NOT a good idea.

Over and over again Acid RDBMS have proven that trying to "relax" the rules in pursuit of performance or worse, mystical holy grails that have never been right or correct for a primary datastore, is a mistake. And then people goes back to them, because is the best tool for ALL the primary data store jobs. ALL OF THEM.

Is like the mythical C developer that "not need safety", that at least has more chance of be possible (after MANY passes over the code) that a datastore without safeguards.


> Over and over again Acid RDBMS have proven that trying to "relax" the rules in pursuit of performance or worse, mystical holy grails that have never been right or correct for a primary datastore, is a mistake. And then people goes back to them, because is the best tool for ALL the primary data store jobs. ALL OF THEM.

On the contrary. The most successful RDBMS by far was MySQL in an era where it didn't have any kind of ACID (you could write the transaction keywords but they didn't do anything). As the story we're talking about now shows, RDBMSes are routinely deployed with transaction settings that their users don't understand, much less use; there are settings that would reduce bugs if anyone cared to use them, but no-one does. People cargo-cult the idea that they should be using an Acid RDBMS but they almost never actually want or need one.


The success there had more to do with it being a) free, at a time when there were far fewer of those options combined with that it b) ran on windows. The enterprise's pathological windows use for developer machines and the state of apples devices at the time and the near non-existence of linux enterprise laptops which continues today meant that they had the perfect product for that moment in history. I cannot overstate this: the people making these decisions think an acid transaction is a felony and not a term of art used by some of their employees.

Serializable doesn't mean serialized. It means if two transactions access the same data, one must be delayed or aborted. It doesn't mean they all wait for each other.

people mostly use RDBMS because they want the advanced querying that SQL provides, not because of the isolation levels

but ignoring that, serializable isolation level means the database acts AS IF the transactions are serial. but most databases in fact will execute them concurently, with careful tracking to make sure they appear serial


TBH I think I've seen more database use than not specifically because it serves as the central race-resolver in a system, because doing that anywhere else is many, many times harder and more mistake-prone. Fancy querying has been much less needed (and is sometimes a significant code smell), and is often fully offloaded into a data warehouse style system to reduce the risk.

Sometimes though, yes definitely. It's hard to claim anything universal at all about databases.

(Unless you mean "being able to choose between different isolation levels", then yes, completely agreed. Very very few use anything but the default, somewhere below serializable, and it always concerns me unless they can describe exactly what they're intentionally allowing and why it's okay for their system. Most cannot.)


> TBH I think I've seen more database use than not specifically because it serves as the central race-resolver in a system

But you usually don't need serializable for this, cause READ COMMITTED locks the rows during updates.


MVCC is not inherently non serializable. For example, Postgres adds serializability on top through SSI.

Cause I want relations and SQL. But also I kinda get what you mean and would not use serializable in Postgres.

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