Similar issue, although I'm not sure if it's the Logitech webcam or just how webcams are automatically configured on Linux these days in general: if I use a really bright LED lamp, the automatic exposure time goes down to the point that it doesn't matter if the webcam is set to 50hz or 60hz, it's going to catch flickering from other subtle frequencies affecting light output. I've also had situations where I wanted to use it to film a white piece of paper that I'm writing on, but it automatically adjusts exposure to make it gray instead.

It took me forever to find something with a straightforward GUI that lets me manually override this behavior on Linux. I ended up settling for cameractrls.

https://github.com/soyersoyer/cameractrls

It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.

A ruder variation of that is "dat slaat als een … op een drumstel", or "that hits like a … on a drum set".

For some reason I felt like sharing this trivia.

I don't think that number is correct…

https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox#all-charts

Just to clarify where I started from: JS has the notion of String Primitives and String Objects[0], and concatenating two string primitives results in another string primitive. It's as if it always calls .intern(). Except, since from a user perspective there is no option to not intern it, JS implementations are free to do optimizations that don't seem available to Java. Like avoiding heap allocation for provably short-lived strings in the first place, and not interning them if they are never compared (I don't actually know if it does those optimizations, but I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to prove these things with many short functions).

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Wait, why would interned immutable strings require more instructions when doing regular string access? You can still point to the start of a zero-terminated C-string, it just requires storing extra metadata like lenght and a string hash somewhere. Which can be done at the negative indices of said pointer.

Or do you refer to the extra rolling-hash pass needed when concatenating two strings to verify if it would result in an already-interned one? Because yes, that's one extra rolling hast pass over the appended string the first time a string is constructed, but after that doing so again likely saves memory and construction time, because any concatenation that would result in an already interned string would avoid actual memory allocation and copying of the string's characters.

Plus string comparisons become cheap O(1) pointer comparisons this way, which is really nice in many use-cases.

And that's not even considering more advanced tricks like interning short strings in the 64-bit word of the pointer to the string itself, relying on the fact that modern memory allocators never return an address with the lsb set, so it can be used to flag it as such[0].

[0] https://squoze.org/

Millennials catching strays I see.

That's E and Self erasure.

The funny thing is that apparently "cucumber time" also existed as an expression in English for a while in the 18th century. One suggested etymological origin for the Dutch "komkommertijd" was as a loan work from the English around the same period, except ttat it survived after the English stopped using it. According to some sources cited on the Dutch wiki page the expression was mainly used by German tailors in London.

[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komkommertijd