u/TomosLeggett

Just wanna give a quick hats off to Daniel Bünzli for all his work with OCaml. He seems to have created a lot of really well designed, comprehensive libraries, tools and utilities for the OCaml community.

He's made a whole declarative vector graphics library, a fairly well polished Js_of_ocaml middleman, a unicode decoder, a slightly nicer alternative to TyXML, an API for interfacing with the QOI image compressor...the list goes on.

Just take a look at his stuff: https://erratique.ch/software

FYI: I am not associated or affiliated with this man in any way, I am just impressed and wanted to send some appreciation

If a lot of amazfit smartwatches have speakers, how come they're not utilised particularly often?

Like I lost my watch the other day and I used the Zepp app to locate it, and it made my watch vibrate. That's neat and all but like...make it beep?

And the alarms as well. When an alarm goes off, surely it should do more than gently vibrate my wrist?

Am I missing something? Is there a setting for this?

Edit: the alarm sounds when you switch "ring for alert" on in settings but then every notification you receive also makes a noise. Ugh.

Edit: it's an amazfit active 2 square

This is a super subjective question so there's not going to be a definitive answer since it's a question ripe for biased answers, but I'm curious as to what you think?

View Poll

I visited Barcelona on a solo trip recently, and this is probably an oddly specific thing to notice, but I really like the way your yellow traffic lights look.

They genuinely look like something Teenage Engineering would design.

From what I gathered online, people don't seem particularly fond of the traffic light system itself, and apparently they're often out of sync. But purely from a design perspective, they look neat.

Coming from the UK, where most street furniture is designed to be as utilitarian as possible, it was one of those small details that stuck in my mind. Not just the traffic lights, but a lot of the public infrastructure seems to have had more thought put into how it looks as well as how it functions.

https://preview.redd.it/468okvg5rj4h1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=1340c90ffc31c9191d8010355849cd2014c804fc

I think it's kind of cool that they stack on top of each other like this. I think it's pretty neat that they're all a uniform size and entirely LED based. I like the contrast between the black and the yellow and the modern, clean look.

I have no idea why my brain picks up on these kind of things, you must think I'm nuts.

Hello everyone,

I've got an amazfit active 2 square, and I'm in love with the battery life. It makes it far more practical than those other smartwatches on the market that last a day, if that.

However, I've found myself to be quite conservative about battery life, and am wondering if maybe I'm taking it a bit too far and sacrificing genuinely useful features in the name of perhaps 5% of total battery over the span of a single charge.

Right now I've got:

• no wake on raise
• no tap to wake
• no workout detection
• no AOD
• no double tap to wake
• no automatic brightness
• brightness at a permanent half
• no passive health monitoring, all manual.

I have spectacularly good battery life from this formula, but I do wonder to what degree I'm being far too conservative? If it shaves an entire day or two off the battery life, then yeah, I'd rather do it the slightly worse way. But is there anything on that list that sacrifices usability for the sake of nothing much beyond maybe 5% less a day at most?

Swansea city centre just feels tired and a bit ugly these days. A lot of the local businesses always seem like they’re struggling, and there’s not much sense that anyone — council, landlords, whoever — is really incentivised to make the place feel nice. It’s not somewhere you’d take a visiting tourist either. You’d take them to Mumbles or the Gower instead, which says a lot. Honestly, it’s a bit embarrassing.

It also just feels like the whole place is built around this constant “in and out” rhythm. Drive in, find parking (if you’re lucky), grab what you need, and leave. Everything feels like it’s set up for people who are in a rush because everyone else is also in a rush. You end up with this weird shared pressure where nobody actually wants to linger because you’re always half-aware of the parking time ticking down or traffic building up on the way out.

I was in Groningen recently, and I’ve noticed this in a few European city centres actually — they just seem to do it better. It’s hard to pin down exactly why, but the centre there felt like somewhere you’re meant to be for the whole day, not just some area of the city you pop into quickly when you need something or you fancy overpriced chicken.

Groningen is a decent-sized city, still busy, still congested in its own way, but the city centre feels completely different. People actually seem to live there. There’s a proper mix of stuff packed together: small flower shops next to cafés next to sandwich places next to little museums and art galleries next to restaurants and hotels. You don’t get these huge sterile blocks of chain retail. It feels more like a dense village inside a city than a shopping district.

You can get ice cream, you can eat some Thai food, you can buy flowers, you can check out a craft brewery, you can sit outside a nice restaurant that isn't a spoons and people watch, you can buy vintage clothes, you can check out the weird shop that sells all manner of odd things, you can get a coffee and maybe some chips.

It's night and day compared to retail chain, retail chain, bank, retail chain, shoe shop chain, CEX, Greggs #1, retail chain, Greggs #2, vape shop, bank branch, retail chain, bank branch, bank branch, fast food chain, bank branch, some sort of sad gambling place, Greggs #3, retail chain, group of teenagers in all black Adidas harassing people and doing wheelies because they're bored and there's nothing to do, bus station with Greggs #4 and a coop, massive supermarket chain, retail chain and another vape shop.

And that’s the other big thing — people actually live in the centre. Flats above shops, housing woven into everything. So it’s not just a zone you go into to consume stuff, it’s a place that stays active all day because it’s someone’s neighbourhood as well and it's to be expected and modelled as such.

Compared to that, Swansea feels very segmented. A lot of chains, a lot of repetition, a lot of “pop in, pop out” energy. It doesn’t really invite you to stay. If anything I want to get the hell out of there as soon as possible and head West.

Manchester feels like it’s already started shifting away from that older model and made its centre somewhere people actually spend time again, not just somewhere you go to shop and leave.

I just think Swansea should be aiming to be a place you actually want to spend time in. Not somewhere you briefly stop on the way to the Gower.

PS: I love Swansea and don't think it's uniquely bad in either a UK or global context, nor am I dismissing the financial, historical and cultural challenges facing the city and many others like it. I just think the city centre could be a lot better than it currently is, and I'd rather say that than pretend I don't think it because otherwise we'd never have anything to improve, and to pretend that any city on the planet is perfect would be somewhat inaccurate even for a seaside city with cheap rent and amazing beaches.

The UK has had a rough couple of years and fixing the UK's many issues is a huge undertaking that certainly won't be easy.

We've now got:

• An aging population
• Wealth inequality (9th worst in the OECD)
• Regional inequality
• A birth rate of 1.4
• Asset rich, cash poor pensioners
• An over-capacitive NHS
• An unaffordable triple-lock state pension
• A migrant crisis
• A voting system that isn't particularly proportional
• A low voting turnout from younger people
• Stagnant wages since 2008 coupled with no real wage growth
• Underfunded councils
• A general litter problem
• Meal deal has gone up by 59p
• UK plummeting down the happiness index
• Exhausted, dirty, inconsistent and patchy street furniture
• Car-centric infrastructure that also sucks ass
• Mediocre public transport at best
• An economy almost entirely centred around London and the finance sector
• A regressive council tax system
• Declining high streets
• A hostile and powerful media landscape
• A restrictive and overbearing planning system
• A system that struggles to build basic infrastructure without going over budget
• The inability to actually supply new housing stock
• Low GDP per capita compared to general GDP.
• Skyrocketing cost of living
• Rent being ~40% of wages sometimes
• Low productivity

(I'm sure there's more)

These aren't issues unique to the UK and are multi-faceted. Fixing all of these issues is practically impossible unless you're a magician, demigod or the UK suddenly struck oil. What's far more likely is incremental reforms that'll take decades. We all know that.

However if you one day woke up as Prime Minister, leader of a party with a lot of seats and a loyal party, poised with doing SOMETHING to get this country back on track with a population that expects the quality of life to increase even just a little bit...what would you do?

What do you think would be your golden bill? What do you think is the one thing the UK Government struggles to do that you think would fix a big chunk of these problems?