It says the word 'test' in the post title, but if it helps I don't think you need to take it so literally.

This isn't necessarily "setting up" specific situations for people, but more like how people respond in normal everyday situations which you might consider to be either red flag or green flag behaviour.

For me, an example is littering. I'm not so sociopathic that I'd create some trash just to test someone, but if trash happens and they throw it on the ground, it's a bad personality indicator.

Some people only feel 'successful' through their perceived 'position' in society.

They want to believe they are above others.

If you think like that, then pushing others down is a perfectly valid route to happiness - and far faster and easier than working on yourself would be.

I just did a search in the store and discovered there are at least 15 separate workout apps published by the same company with the same red icon theming. (men, women, abs, legs, lose weight men, lose weight women...)

Like, what the actual fuck. Its the same company. It could have just been one app.

I guess when people treat the app store like a search engine we get into this situation where apps become hyper-specific to match the hyper-specific things people are searching for, using individual app names as if they are search results.

I hate it, and I hate the human behaviour that has lead to this being a profitable tactic for app developers.

Finding a decent hub is a minefield, but I don't think this is the fault of USBC as a specification. It's just the incentive towards cheap manufacturing.

If watching a load of videos from the legendary bigclive has taught me anything, its that electronics can be built sometimes very well, and sometimes very poorly.

When people buy hubs on Amazon they will consider the features (ports), the appearance (nice and shiny to match the laptop), and the price. What they often fail to consider is what's on the inside.

We can't see what's inside and assume that any hub is as good as any other, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Electronics can be built with a whole load of extra components that go above and beyond the baseline. Extra electronics to do things like help prevent overheating, smooth out rough voltages, or prevent damage to themselves or other electronics they are connected to.

But these components cost money, and so the incentive is to leave them out to keep the price down, while the budget instead goes to making sure the case is shiny and there's a premium-looking braided cable, because those are the external (and often false) indicators of 'quality' people are looking at.

This is very different scenario from when the ports are built into in the computer/laptop itself, because in that situation the equipment price point is already expensive - so the engineers will have leeway and incentive to make sure the ports and surrounding electronics are of high quality.

I'm thankful to bigclive, because now I avoid no-brand cheap electronics like the plague. Even if they function to start with they may not last long, and they definitely aren't being gentle on my connected laptop while they are at it.

I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

Linux has problems, but I'm so glad I don't have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he'd consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

He didn't even know about onedrive, just phoned me like "The Internet isn't working, what's wrong?" and of course onedrive is the last thing I'd have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

Much nicer now his OS doesn't do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.

Ah. Apparently it's called a slug snake because it EATS slugs, not because it looks like one.

Which is good, because it looks like a stick. Literally the most twig-ass looking snake ever.

My definition: aggressive spread and resilience to removal.

Plants that are pretty might get more of a 'pass' than ones which are ugly, poisonous or thorny, but ultimately, even the most beautiful flower becomes a weed when it's suddenly everywhere and you are fighting constantly to get rid of it.

That's pretty damn cool, to be fair.

These categories of geometric problem are ridiculously difficult to find the definitive perfect solution for, which is exactly why people have been grinding on them for decades, and mathematicians can't say any more than "it's the best one found so far"

For this particular problem the diagram isn't answering "the most efficient way to pack some particular square" but "what is the smallest square that can fit 17 unit-sized (1x1) squares inside it" - with the answer here being 4.675 unit length per side.

Trivially for 16 squares they would fit inside a grid of 4x4 perfectly, with four squares on each row, nice and tidy. To fit just one more square we could size the container up to 5x5, and it would remain nice and tidy, but there is then obviously a lot of empty space, which suggests the solution must be in-between. But if the solution is in between, then some squares must start going slanted to enable the outer square to reduce in size, as it is only by doing this we can utilise unfilled gaps to save space by poking the corners of other squares into them.

So, we can't answer what the optimal solution exactly is, or prove none is better than this, but we can certainly demonstrate that the solution is going to be very ugly and messy.

Another similar (but less ugly) geometric problem is the moving sofa problem which has again seen small iterations over a long period of time.

Nah this one is easy.

If it's green and sparkly, it's a good thing. If it's green and bubbly, it's a bad thing.

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you're a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The 'Alien Language' game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is 'cool' in a gaming context.

It's a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.

When the 1950s thought flying cars would be real they didn't mean military VTOLs or expensive and noisy helicopters.

They meant flying cars that are efficient, quiet and affordable. Flying cars that are so ubiquitous they are parked on every driveway in the country. Flying cars where you go to the showroom and test-fly one in your favourite colour, and it only costs as much as an SUV does today.

More importantly, it's not really the car itself that matters for the meme, it's the idea of the society that goes along with it. The imagined future where we have flying cars on every driveway is one where we also have robots doing all the menial labour, one of utopian prosperity, where everyone is educated, happy, and spends their days in fulfilment of personal pursuits.

That's what "flying cars" alludes to, and it's a long way from a society where people have to be warned not to eat a sandwich wrapper.