• 1 Post
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 19th, 2023

help-circle



  • How exactly do you know the motives of the extreme conservative Justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump? Are you a mind reader?

    That’s my point.

    We don’t know what the motives are of the Supreme Court. Yet because people who want to see Trump removed from the ballot didn’t get the decision they want to see fast enough, they’re inventing conspiracy theories of the Supreme Court manipulating things to benefit Trump, and the media is playing right along, saying they’re “helping” him. It’s precisely this kind of behavior that makes me despise the far right. (Well, not just this behavior, but still.)

    I don’t want to see Donald Trump anywhere near the oval office ever again. But I do want to see a decision from the Supreme Court on this specific question, because I want to forever silence the people who have been trying to create a “unitary executive” in the United States.




  • This came from a gag Jon Stewart used to do on the Daily Show. It started with the Larry Craig scandal. The Daily Show was good at showing hypocrisy in Republican candidates who were anti-LGBT. In the late 2000s, it seemed like there was a story of an anti-gay Republican being outed as gay every month.

    Stewart compared Graham to a melodramatic southern belle and got huge laughs. It stuck. I wan to point out that Jon Stewart never explicitly said Lindsay Graham was gay. But he was an expert at hinting it, and paired with the clips of Lindsay Graham, it was hilarious.




  • Using AI to flag footage for review by a person seems like a good time-saving practice. I would bet that without some kind of automation like this, a lot of footage would just go unreviewed. This is far better than waiting for someone to lodge a complaint first, since you could conceivably identify problem behaviors and fix them before someone gets hurt.

    The use of AI-based solutions to examine body-cam footage, however, is getting pushback from police unions pressuring the departments not to make the findings public to save potentially problematic officers.

    According to this, the unions are against this because they want to shield bad-behaving officers. That tells me the AI review is working!








  • Using the search bar in iPad OS to solve equations does not require access to the internet.

    If you have a keyboard, press command-space. You can then enter an equation that you want to solve in the search bar. If the syntax is correct, it will give you the solution. Try this equation as an example:

    (2+pi)/(3^3)

    It will display this result: 0.1904293575

    If you press enter and you do have internet access, then it will send the equation to Safari and execute a search in your default search engine. I’m not sure why it odes that; that doesn’t seem too useful.

    Some other operations you can do in the search bar:

    sqrt(n), cos(n), sin(n), tan(n), log(n), ln(n), etc.

    Some other functions that I’ve used in Excel also work in the search bar, such as min(12,2)

    My guess is that it supports many or all of the functions that are supported in Numbers.

    With this, you should be able to quickly solve just about anything you would type into a calculator app.



  • What bothers me is that Apple doesn’t document its features very completely. Here’s an example:

    In CarPlay, I do a lot of navigating using Apple Maps. I discovered years ago that I could say “Details” to Siri to get the map to zoom in to allow me to see upcoming turns. I could say “overview” to get it to zoom out to show me the whole trip on the map. Very useful! I had to discover this feature by accident, though. As far as I know, there’s no button in the interface to do this, and there certainly isn’t a list of commands that Siri users can use, CarPlay or otherwise.

    Even more infuriating is that this feature was removed about six months ago. Does it exist under some other spoken command? Who knows? Apple doesn’t document anything!