• 3 Posts
  • 957 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

    I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

    I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

    One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

    I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

    I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.






  • I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

    What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

    Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

    If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.



  • I have a different Boox product, the low-end Poke Lite (I think version 4?).

    Pros:

    • E-paper display is easy on the eyes
    • Customizable backlight temperature and brightness
    • Runs arbitrary Android apps
    • Battery for days
    • Can install open-source reading apps like Librera
    • Still receiving software updates after a few years

    Cons:

    • Only runs Android 11
    • Installing Google Play requires jumping through some weird hoops, because it’s not Google certified. I recommend using F-Droid instead, or using a throwaway google account to avoid this security liability.
    • Built-in apps kind of suck in general
    • Home screen strongly pushes their own ecosystem, shoving regular Android apps into a different section
    • Most apps look like ass on a B&W display
    • Most apps look like ass on a 4:3 display (not applicable to the Palma)
    • The various display refresh modes are unintuitive

    The newer models, from what I understand, use faster-refreshing display tech, and some even support color.










  • Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

    Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

    Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

    To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.