Paul’s online math notes are by far the best resources out there for the first few university level math courses.

https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu

It is a great shame that his linear algebra notes were removed years ago.

Part of it is just getting a feel for Chinese goods and using that to determine what is a good deal or what is a scam. I’ve worked with a lot of Chinese suppliers for a long time so I have a sixth sense for their bullshit.

Generally I avoid anything that could be a safety risk (e.g. Mains power) , and keep an eye on the photos to see if they look too good to be true. Official stores are good, as are items with many purchases and reviews that include pictures.

Was transiting through the Iceland airport once and had a random thought about how I was quite far from anyone I know there. No sooner do I finish the thought I look about 20m in front of me and an old university classmate of mine is walking towards me.

I can get just about any style of pizza I want from local shops, why would I go with a major chain? Rarely I’ll get Pizza Hut because it is its own thing that nobody else replicates.

Yes, someone stole a game console from my room in university. Then I caught them selling it on craigslist, contacted them, got their name and got them arrested and my console back.

Lucky for me that I had reported it to the police since I was considering using insurance to cover it. The officer that took the info recognised the persons name because he had pulled the guy over that week and thought it would be fun to catch him with stolen goods as well.

I wouldn’t worry too much about replacement batteries. They are just standard sealed lead acid batteries that you can replace with generics without paying the high OEM prices. The ones I’ve replaced are just a spacer between two batteries with a sticker holding it all together. I just took my bad ones to a local battery place, said I need replacements and then they recycled the old ones for me.

I do know that Cyberpower has some reports in the past of their UPSs being a fire hazard. Definitely caused me to go with APC when I bought one a couple years ago. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpower-upses-reportedly-pose-fire-hazard

I desperately want to know what you were imagining might happen when you asked this question.

It really isn’t faster though when you risk having some issue that requires help half the time.

No, purple is a non spectral colour meaning it is incorrect to call it “a wavelength” but rather you say it is a perception of multiple wavelengths. Not that this is special, pretty much everything you see is a non-spectral colour.

Or the engineers have been given bad requirements and made the wrong product.

As someone that worked in a battery lab for a short period of time I agree. These are exactly the types of questions that need to be asked for any battery related technology article (not just China, other institutions around the world do this as well)

“Please” is used more in verbal or formal communication in English. I wouldn’t typically use it when writing a comment here as online comment sections are considered informal written communication. But I would always say it if I was asking a food service worker for something.

My grandmother is like this. Then occasionally she tells some new story and we are all like, this is way more interesting why hasn’t this been part of your repertoire for the past decade?

I can’t even get Gboard to capitalize “i” FFS, you expect it to do something even more complicated!? The state of keyboards are so bad today. I remember when you could vaguely type or swipe in Swype or Swiftkey and it would get your word correct most of the time, now they all fucking suck, Swiftkey just happens to suck slightly less than GBoard.

major tech companies are pretty good about giving reviewer samples to anyone with a large enough audience

That isn’t true, for example LTT doesn’t get seeded Apple products anymore because of what they have said about Apple. NVidia has also been caught revoking early access to products to some outlets because they were unhappy about reporting as well.

I had called out the bullshit about devices being less durable if you make them more repairable on MKBHDs video, but of course it got lost in the comments. Apple just refuses to make the compromises that would allow for durable and repairable devices. Not to mention that a repair being difficult shouldn’t be used for justification for blocking repair or making it impossible/not worth it to get parts.

Samsung M540 “Slyde” phone - The software was incredibly buggy including things like just randomly typing the wrong letter. Randomly bad tech is so much more irritating than tech you know is bad.

Google Nexus 7 (2012) - The tablet had defective chips that slowed down over time. Turned into a horrible slow piece of shit over time.

A local sandwich shop used to have maple bacon ice cream sandwiches during the summer and they were epic. Your buddy definitely did something wrong.

One major downside of hybrid working really is that if you are having a meeting where even a single person is not there, then the entire meeting may as well be a video call. If you are on a video call, then why do you need to be in the office for it?

At my job we work with physical objects, so being in office is a requirement at least part of the time, but if I’m just going to be in meetings for most of the day, there is no way I’m going into the office just to sit on video calls all day.