• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • There are very few hard set laws in psychology. That said, OP is wrong. There is not a study contradicting each other study. The problem is that human behavior is not very deterministic, save for a few subset of conditions and behaviors.

    Psychology did have a reproducibility and p level crisis. However, in my opinion this was the result of external political and financial pressures over universities and research institutions. Which deviated and forced theoretical analysis and statistical experimental designs that were not suited for psychological research. Researchers were forced to design and construct studies in ways that ensured publishing, grants and finance. Instead of good theory and science.

    The second factor is bad science communication. Psychology is a field were everyone feels entitled to talk with authority because it is about the human existence, and we are all human after all, no? However this leads to a high degree of disinformation that makes it hard to separate science from opinion, and often times political agendas too. This of course makes it seem like psychology as a science is less reliable than it is. Because it gets mixed in the same bag as pseudoscientific slop.

    When you sift through the misinformation and read hard psychology science, then you notice a third thing. A lot of the hard science is on neurological functional psychology. Which is dry and not very interesting to sell in blogs, tweets, and reels. And the softer, social science side, that is virtually ignored by media, because it tends to reflect that capitalism and western civilization is destroying mental health. So there’s no interest to promote that idea or to acknowledge that, we know how to fix a lot of problems. But it requires dismantling a lot of power structures.




  • There’s nuance to this.

    Fairy tales, as we know them, are a fairly recent (18th century) invention. The traditional European folktales they were based off of, didn’t include morals, weren’t aimed at children, nor were they intended to be used as teaching tools. More likely, they were stories to be told around campfires or at hearths while sewing, weaving or whatever, and mostly were told amongst adults to amuse each other. Thus the very mature topics and dark humor tone of many traditional tales, specially those that didn’t include children or animal characters.

    Stories with morals where usually of the tradition of Aesop’s fables, and more common on academic or philosophy circles as study material. It was Perrault and Grimm’s innovation, popularizing these folk stories by adapting them and mixing in a fable structure and aiming the stories to an audience of the high class, first the high royal courts, then the Victorian aristocracy. This audience were the one’s who emphasized moral rectitude and using the folk stories as teaching aids for children.

    Then the 20th century saw the commercialization of fairy tales as stories aimed at children through the rise of bedtime stories literature and Disney’s animated film tradition.


  • No, that’s how you lose users. Private, nontransparent decision taking makes projects get dropped immediately.

    The timing just sucked. 32 bit has to go, but it can’t be this year or next year. And it can’t be a blanket drop as the dev wanted. Alternatives are not ready yet to keep gaming working, and gaming was the number 1 factor holding back desktop adoption.

    He is also falling for the internet fundamental attribution error: “If I hate or love something and everybody on the internet agrees with me, it’s because I’m always right and we are all intelligent individuals. If I love/hate something, and everybody on the internet disagrees, they were lied to, manipulated, astroturfed, are ignorant, misinformed, etc.”

    It could be true. But it could also be that your proposal is very unpopular and you’re wrong.


  • Must be so nice to be so privileged as to be spoiled for choice on which fascist to support.

    Spotify is the only streaming service available worldwide other than YouTube Music and Apple.

    So for a lot of people it is either piracy or supporting a US tech megacorporation. Tidal, Qobuz, deezer. Cool, nice that they exist options. But most people in the planet would have to also pay a VPN and hope to not get their account banned if they want to use some of those alternatives.

    It’s funny really, to see how the “fascist option” for some is actually the most ethical for others.

    There’s always piracy of course, I suppose that is the only morally correct option always.



  • Surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet, but awnings. Glass is a superb thermal conductor. Not even the best curtain in the world would prevent air getting hot through the window if the sun is hitting it directly. An awning is meant to shade the window glass, preventing heating way more than a curtain alone.

    Also, if the home has several levels, open the upper floor windows more than the lower ones. Hot air expands and raises. If it has somewhere to escape it will keep the house cool and the windows will draw in wind. Wind moves faster at higher altitudes. That’s why attic fans are so effective.


  • I’m back to statistical significant data, and why it is important to have good data scientists in the loop. The idea is precisely to ask the questions you are asking. Would have been different if…? Then try to control for other variables in order to avoid the induction error. How do you know they didn’t do this with their data?

    That’s why I mention other phone models. There are Sony phones with and without jacks. There are Asus phones with and without jacks. How did they perform compared to each other? How far away is that difference from what could be expected from randomness? How does that difference compare when the other factors are compensated for? How do they compare with other phones?

    I assume they did their homework, and also want to sell more earbuds. They wouldn’t push for earbuds and wireless if headphone jacks were market drivers. It would be cheaper to install a headphone jack rather than updating the BT board? Maybe, I don’t know. But if other factors have a significant impact on sales while the jack doesn’t. Then they have their decision made for them. Market research is not about being right all the time, it is not magic, it is about reducing uncertainty and risk in making decisions. Precisely because there are other phone makers with a headphone jack that do worse than the Fairphone is base enough to understand why they feel safe keeping that feature out. It doesn’t add sales and its absence doesn’t reduce them significantly either. So they know they are free to keep going even if some vocal critics will be pissed, the actual buyers couldn’t care any less.


  • Have you tried the demo for Passant?

    I’m the furthest away as anyone can be from a pro chess player, but this game really revived my passion for chess. Somehow all people want to play is blitz or tournaments. There’s little interest in variations. It’s like amongst the chess scene having fun became taboo. It’s a serious game for serious people who only want to defeat others. And it is so tiring. Oh look, another London system game, how titillating.

    It’s a board game, I know why people enjoy competition and all, but I find competition drains games from anything interesting to me. I just want it to be fun and intellectually stimulating. Bring variations and quirky rules back, make it interesting to lose. Level the playing field so we can all participate and have fun instead of everyone just trying to play optimally like little machines.


  • Phone thickness is far from the only consideration. But Ok, you are right. There was space on the iPhone 7. That was also the first water resistant phone. Does this guy phone’s is still IP67 compliant after all the surgery he made. And that was in 2016, when IP67 headphone jacks didn’t exist. Now the phone standard is IP68. There were no IP68 compliant headphone jacks until recently, I think the ASUS Zenfone 12 is the first one.

    I think companies won’t bring the headphone jack (a shame, really). But the writing is in the wall, it went away, and phones still sold like hotcakes. While those with headphone jacks aren’t being bought anywhere near the same volume. So the signal is very clear, the effort to add a headphone jack — however little it may be — is not financially worth it. It is a feature that doesn’t drive sales. Period.


  • If you ask people what they want, they will tell you they want a phone that has 15 inch screen that looks perfect under the sunlight. But also fits into their pocket. And it has to have a battery that lasts a week, but it must not weight anything at all. But also has to play all the highly graphical games, and also have a professional level camera. It must do so and also last forever and be indestructible.

    That phone obviously can’t exist, and a lot of what people want are things that oppose each other from the engineering pov. That’s the point of surveys and market analysis. You don’t just look at what people say, you look at what they do, what they actually buy.

    It is true that the other side of marketing is convincing people that what the company is offering is what they would also want to buy. But it is never a guarantee. I mean, look at the Samsung Edge flop. Marketing is not magic, you can’t brainwash 100 million people to buy something they don’t want. Marketing is marrying what the company wants to do in terms of cost cutting and profit maxing, with what the market is actually willing to buy. If people keep buying slop, they will keep selling slop, and they will keep marketing slop to people to convince them they want the slop. To break the circle someone has to stop, and it won’t be the corporations.




  • No, we aren’t forgetting. Precisely because they are a corporation driven by profits like any other, they will do what sells units. It actually goes against the argument for headphone jacks. It is an admission that the people who vocally want phones with headphone jacks don’t buy phones (even if they have headphone jacks) and are an statistically insignificant amount of people. My original point. You are vocal, but disingenuous (perhaps not on purpose).

    Fairphone catered to the mass market with the Fairphone 4 (and removed the headphone jack) and broke their own sales records. Sorry, that’s just the truth. What you want is against the grain of the rest of the market. Yes, even the market who want repairable modular phones.

    Because when push comes to shove, you might want the headphone jack but it doesn’t drive your purchase decision. And that’s the important part. As an example, another person on this very thread asked what phone with a headphone jack is good, someone else gave a suggestion and immediately got the reply.

    I considered that phone, but it didn’t have an OLED screen, so I didn’t buy it.

    Admitting that — despite being very vocal about wanting the headphone jack — that feature is actually low in their own list of decision making priorities. At the very least it is below screen quality. Raising the question, where should a profit driven company choose to invest money in when presented with that customer?

    In marketing, people are usually very vocal about things that actually don’t influence their own purchase decisions. That’s just a fact, people are very bad at knowing what they want. That’s why you should always observe their behavior, not just ask their opinion. Because a lot of people express opinions they don’t uphold with actions.