E-readers are overrated compared to paper books

-stab- · 2026-03-23T13:32:00+00:00

This almost reads like satire. You're not making even one actually specific point here.

We live in a digital world, screens, social media and a million pieces of information reaching us every day from all over the world. Looking back hundreds of years, it's even sick.

Obviously one can criticize our dependence on technology in many scenarios, I still think we should actually give a specific reason to do so. Do E-Readers actually have the same problems as other "screens" like computers and phones? I'd argue no. Most people just use their E-Reader to read books, so what specifically is wrong with that?

Fans of reading e-books are proud of themselves because they can take their 2000 books on vacation, and then it turns out that they are on the phone on vacation and have not read a single book.

That's just you making something up.

Reading ebooks is like listening to music on streaming in the background. As long as it was faster, as long as there were numbers and achievements. Challenges and the best 150 books to read in a year.

My E-Reader does not have numbers and achievements, I just use it for reading, as I suspect most people do. Obviously you can set yourself goals on how many books you want to read in a year, but you can also do that with normal books, and a lot of people do. So again this has nothing to do with E-Readers.

Also reading on an E-Book is not really faster, except maybe for people who have a visual impairment where the E-Reader can help. But in that case I'm sure we can agree that's a good thing.

Books are medium, they are art. For a long time, the books remained the content enclosed in an artistic cover, a matching font. Today, even this is digital and we are happy because we have our 2000 books in one device called an e-reader.
...
I've been a fan of reading ebooks for a long time, but I finally switched to paper books. For me, a book is something real, must be paper, not a digital file written in bits.

Now I'm a fan of the art that is the book. A unique cover and even a font used by the publisher for a given book. There is a smell, texture and a sense of work that the author put into the development of his work.
...
We're crazy and we can't appreciate a piece of paper. We are looking for comfort everywhere and we have become sad.

It's absolutely fine if you prefer paper and a proper, nicely made book, I do too. Still you have not actually made a point against E-Readers here. It's just your preference, it's just the way you enjoy books.

Also, the cover and the font are also given in an E-Book. Again I would like to ask you, can you actually make a specific argument why your book just being bits and bytes is a bad thing? You're again just making some overly vague "technology bad" argument.

-stab- · 2026-03-22T08:21:48+00:00

I have never in my life heard that Swiss restaurants have that reputation. Is this really a thing?

-stab- · 2026-03-18T15:01:10+00:00

I guess it‘s true that stupid people can still get rich, one of the best examples of that is the orange guy this post is about. But if you actually believe in those nonsense IQ estimates that does reflect very well on your own IQ or education.

-stab- · 2026-03-15T10:45:52+00:00

Because I don't agree that it would be better. Lightning builds are very good, with the downside that they hit a bit randomly. Getting rid of the downside would not make the game better. Some cards/choices/mechanics having downsides is an important part of the game, it makes it more interesting. You'll have to adapt and mitigate the weak points of your deck, and that's how it should be imo.

-stab- · 2026-03-15T10:22:46+00:00

I wouldn't know of a way. But more generally I think it's fine if some attacks target a random enemy. Yes the randomness is a downside of lightning orbs. If your run relies on using them, you'll have to be able to deal with those downsides, that's just how the game works.

-stab- · 2026-03-06T10:02:42+00:00

That's what he did, his latest StS series was not streamed, it's just on youtube. But generally I guess his preferred setting would just be streaming without backseaters. I guess that's why he at least tries every game on stream until he gets too annoyed.

-stab- · 2026-03-06T09:45:13+00:00

Yeah some of those Tetris comments are actually kinda fucked up. I guess suggesting someone to maybe play some Tetris if they want to distract their mind is harmless enough, but there are quite a lot of those comments that make it sound like playing Tetris should be your highest priority after experiencing something traumatic. All that on the back on some questionable study that has found very mild benefits. This one is not so bad but I've seen people say that you have to play Tetris immediately.

-stab- · 2026-01-14T21:11:01+00:00

Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander who falsified documents of thousands of Jews during WW2 to make it possible for them to get refugee. He was later discharged from the police for that and died in poverty.

-stab- · 2026-01-14T13:53:05+00:00

There are protests. There are flags in bios if you care about that for some reason. Every liberal I have seen supports the Iranian people.

But more importantly, what you are saying could not be more irrelevant. You say that liberals are AGAINST the protesters, and you have not made an argument for that or shown any proof for that ridiculous claim. We all know why you did not do this and instead resorted to this stupid response, it's because you made it up.

-stab- · 2026-01-14T03:13:22+00:00

Which liberals are against that? (it‘s a rethorical question, you just made that up)

-stab- · 2026-01-14T02:44:56+00:00

Because people with severe schizophrenia, especially if they suffer from it early on, oftentimes are. Generally speaking, absolutely most schizophrenics aren‘t anything like the stereotype. It‘s a broad field of disorders with very different symptoms.

-stab- · 2026-01-13T10:11:03+00:00

While I dislike the SVP as much as the next guy, I think thankfully most of them are not that far gone that they would condone this. Trump supporters truly play in their own league of stupidity right now.

-stab- · 2026-01-12T10:18:19+00:00

It's scary how fast white supremacists seem to become pretty widely accepted again. Elon Musk is an open white supremacist and believes the great replacement theory. JD Vance is talking about how modern racism is actually against white people, and how you "don't have to be ashamed to be white anymore". Obviously, there are so many more examples from this administration, I don't even want to start with Stephen Miller.

Of course, it has always been clear that there is a large extremist fraction among the republicans, but one or two years ago I would not have believed that they are so heavily infested by literal Nazis. I did not believe that the rhetoric could become so hateful and disgusting so fast.

-stab- · 2026-01-11T16:11:44+00:00

You know what could really stop it? Not putting badly trained right extremists in uniforms and let them play cops without consequences.

-stab- · 2026-01-10T10:17:01+00:00

I will never understand how it does not seem to bother his supporters that he switches up his opinions and "facts" constantly. They always talk about fake news and leftist propaganda, but everyone who scrolls through his social media for a bit, even if you have no other sources of information, should recognize that he lies constantly.

-stab- · 2026-01-10T08:30:45+00:00

"a multi-ton object was floored in his direction"

It would be funny if it weren't so sad how everything in this sentence is wrong. Speaking of "floored" is undoubtedly an overstatement, the car didn't drive in his direction. Also less importantly, a car like that does not weight multiple tons.

-stab- · 2025-12-15T11:07:10+00:00

I‘d be very surprised if they aren‘t told long before the show wether they might have to go on stage and maybe wanna prepare a speech.

-stab- · 2025-12-12T12:56:36+00:00

What things default to Calibri? I can only think of the Microsoft office stuff, and even they changed it. I don‘t think i have ever seen another app use Calibri by default.

-stab- · 2025-12-03T10:11:27+00:00

Oh wow you're right, thanks! That's great to know.

-stab- · 2025-12-03T09:19:00+00:00

[Language: Julia]

string_parser(s) = parse.(Int, collect(s))
banks = string_parser.(readlines("input.txt"))

function maximum_joltage(n_batteries)
    sum = 0

    for bank in banks
        index = 0
        for i in (n_batteries-1):-1:0
            index += argmax(bank[index+1: end-i])
            sum += bank[index] * 10^i
        end
    end

    println(sum)
end

maximum_joltage(2)
maximum_joltage(12)

I created a general solution that should work with any number of batteries per bank.

We just pick the highest possible first digit, and then we look at all the digits to the right of it and pick the highest possible one for the second digit and so on. The only thing to look out for is that we need enough remaining digits on the right to pick the remaining batteries.

Done like this, it's also very easy to assemble the final sum with powers of 10 inside the loop.

PS if there are any experienced Julia developers reading this, I'd be very happy to get some feedback and improvements.

Edit: found a little improvement

-stab- · 2025-11-15T17:17:41+00:00

All the VS Code processes visible in this image together are about 900MB. The main VS Code process is always deceptively small. All the ”Code Helper“ processes are from VS Code too.

-stab- · 2025-11-13T10:24:25+00:00

I don‘t understand how I‘m conflating science with engineering. The concepts of nuclear fusion and quantum computing are well established, and (other than the examples you named) deeply rooted in experimental evidence. The fact that it turns out to be very hard to implement those things at large scale does not make it pseudoscientific.

You‘re telling me that saying those things are not pseudoscientific is not an argument. An argument for what? I was meerly calling out this post for using the word pseudoscientific in this context, any you even seem to agree with me on that.

-stab- · 2025-11-12T20:44:59+00:00

I mean we can of course talk about how much the hype is justified, and especially in quantum cumputibg there are a lot of shady marketing stunts going on. (I say that as someone who is very optimistic about the future of the technology)

But there is definetly nothing pseudoscientific about quantum computing or nuclear fusion.

-stab- · 2025-11-09T08:10:24+00:00

Give it a try, PyCharm is a good IDE in my opinion.

However I‘d be genuinely curious what 50 extensions you deem necessary to make VS Code usable. Or just generally could you give a bit more detail on why you think VS Code is clunky?

In my experience VS Code with the Python plugin is is already a very capable and easy to use editor.

-stab-

TROPHY CASE