WaterWaiver

@WaterWaiver@aussie.zone
1 Post – 126 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It's not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

Replacing a TCP socket with a UNIX socket doesn't affect the amount of headers you have to parse.

Other manufacturers of all manner of stainless products seem to have figured out a solution to the problem.

Two design choices together probably make the problem multiplicatively worse:

  1. Flat panels are not anywhere as stiff as curved panels.
  2. Mechanical parameters of the stainless alloy they're using (eg it might retain the coiled shape more than some other plain steel alloys).

I can't get over the flatness... those panels surely rattle too? Or do they void-fill the doors and body with something?

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There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen's perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical ("battery") and electrostatic ("capacitor") energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can't mix.

My university login no longer works so I can't get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

"holds promise" and "has the potential" are not miscible with "May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries".

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Workaround for fingers having the wrong count.

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Very misleading title. This is not an energy efficient process (what we need for energy storage), instead it has a high chemical yield.

I've been encountering this! I thought it was the topics I was using as prompts somehow being bad -- it was making some of my podcast sketches look stupidly racist, admittedly though some of them it seemed to style after some not-so-savoury podcasters, which made things worse.

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4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.

I'd be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.000000000022% (sic) chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain, like a gentle muon tickling the server's drive bus during the read, could affect you. Did you have a way of checking integrity? Or were tiny errors tolerable (eg video files)?

Public line: Cameras are because of theft. Theft is because of cost of living.

I feel that quite a bit is being glossed over. The sources for this article seem very one-sided, I'm also skeptical of the chosen union's line:

Gerard Dwyer, National Secretary of the Shop Distributive & Allied Employees Association, the country's main retail union, said while security technology was being upgraded it was up to the justice system to act as a deterrent by imposing tougher penalties.

I thought that stronger penalties didn't impact this sort of thing? Maybe I misheard.

I would never dob someone in for stealing food, especially if the penalties suddenly got worse, unless I knew a lot about exactly why they were doing it.

Other things worth considering:

(1) Is there a relationship between theft rates and self-checkout rates? They don't want to pay checkout staff, so if there is a correlation (which I suspect they would have researched in depth using their own store data) then it is unlikely they would be public about it. Instead they would only speak about other correlations that are not their fault, like the rising cost of living.

(2) Do these cameras provide other benefits to Colesworth? Better tracking of individuals? Saleable data?

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File I'm printing: A4 PDF
Default printer setting in Windows: A4
Default setting on printer itself: A4
Setting that gets chosen automatically in the print dialog: Letter

Gah English.

"My sketches" as in "me using the AI software to draw pictures". It's not my podcast, I was trying to guess at what the presenters looked like based off the topics they discuss.

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Projects that attempt to put things in the road tend to fail to be economical or practical. It's almost always better putting the same (or less) investment into something equivalent that sits next to the road rather than inside it.

The key features of roads that make them so economically successful are:

  1. They are very cheap per km to build
  2. They are very cheap to maintain (they're fully recyclable, they get remelted during resurfacing).

Installing anything in the road surface completely voids these two points.

Detailed problems:

  • You will need a pickup device on the bottom of your car. To make it efficient you will need it as close to the road surface as possible.
  • Roads are dirty and covered in debris. Your pickup device will get torn and worn.
  • You will need a LOT of road installed with this, which makes it intrinsically much more expensive than roadside chargers. 10 mins of charging at a standstill requires one charger, 10 mins of charging at 40kmph is about 7km of underroad chargers. Intersections might do better, but they're intermittent and provide unreliable charging opportunities. Even 1km (6kmph*10min) is silly expensive compared to a cluster of roadside chargers.
  • The charging coils underneath the road will need to be as close to the road surface as possible (to make it efficient).
  • Worn or buckled (from truck braking) road surfaces will require specialised work and extended road shutdowns to repair.
  • You can't ignore this costly maintenance: exposed electronics (even if isolated) will have inconsistent traction and may damage tires.
  • Under-road assets such as communication wires (even just for traffic lights, let alone internet infrastructure), power cables (11kV and up), water, sewage, stormwater and gas will be much more expensive, slow and complicated to install and maintain. More and longer road shutdowns will result.

The fundamental, core problem of all of these "put solar panels in roads" or "put chargers in roads" projects is that they are romantically and narratively attractive. Roads are ugly wasted space, but if we could put them to better use then wouldn't it be magic? Sadly this never works. Roads are ugly and wastes of space because nothing else works as well for transport infrastructure (other than railways).

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I thought my monitor was broken -- the grey it tends to show looks like an LCD from a bad angle. If it were not for this Lemmy post then I'd never know it was a feature, not a bug.

It's much easier to watch with it off (it's really distracting). Settings icon (where you find video quality) -> Ambient Mode.

Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.

"Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!"

"Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?"
"No Thomas, that would just make them lazy."
"Then shouldn't you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?"
"No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy"

Have they tested this lignin+resin against a control of just resin? Does the lignin reinforcement add much in the way of advantages?

At the end of the day it's more resin than wood, so I think "transparent wood" is misleading. It's wood-reinforced resin.

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As well as everyone else's answer here about bias power: it could also just be because a 3-pin TRS are cheaper/easier to buy and get assembly tooling for than 2-pin TRS. Economies of scale.

(For a good example of this: 3-axis accelerometers are cheaper than 1-axis and 2-axis ones. Everyone wants 3-axis for mobile phones, drones, human inputs and the like. You're better off buying a 3-axis chip and ignoring the extra channels)

N.B. to anyone reading this: ask your isp to "opt out of CG-NAT". Talking about IPv6 may confuse the staffer you're talking to, it's partially related but not the fully picture.

Do you have more info?

The minimum specs I've seen for NAND flash chips are 10 year retention time at room temperature.

Being powered on isn't enough to change this, the firmware would have to be actively reading, erasing and writing blocks of data to refresh them. I'm sure there are some that will do this, but it would increases some other data loss risks, wear rates and power draw; so I suspect (?) it's not universal.

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This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it's the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

Very pretty stuff. I particularly recommend Ken Shirriff's Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer:

He goes into detail about how non-linear equations are implemented using shaped cam gears (and how such functions can be difference-encoded against linear forms). It's insane.

And because it’s analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors.

Eh, I'd say that runout and stiction are their own demons with potentially more bias than those error types :) Not to mention temperature sensitivity -- hot days will give different answers to the equations!

These two paragraphs in a row are weirdly similar:

His key fund has spent nearly all of the more than $150 million it raised, and is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his fund for 2024 ads, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. And some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

After raising more than $150 million, his key fund is sitting on less than $4 million, according to the latest numbers available. He’s already dug into his 2024 super PAC, and borrowed money to post bail in Georgia. Some of his allies are begging for donations, saying he won’t pony up.

Am I seeing both the article and a preview version of the article? Or maybe the author was under time/etc pressure and left a duplicate drafted paragraph in? It doesn't seem ML generated as far as I can tell.

The next two paragraphs end with similar sentences too.

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I assume you're joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.

The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).

Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that's vendor specific, not documented and I don't think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).

Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.

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These days Win10 & Win11 only let you temporarily hide things you don't want. The next major update resets the settings, especially if it's for a feature that could potentially earn MS money, like ads in the start menu, cortana in the tray, microsoft account nags and onedrive nags.

We already have memory wafers glued to our CPU wafers in the form of L3 cache. It's lower latency, higher throughput, up to a few hundred MiB in bigger models and can potentially be used without external RAM sticks (but I've not heard of using that feature outside of BIOS firmware early boot -- that's probably the only change we'll see). Sometimes it's DRAM, sometimes it's SRAM, its size varies quite a bit.

Finally did this a week or so back, I had one of the original accounts (username login, not email). Made me feel like shit and manipulated, all to make Microsoft happier.

Ditto with my printer. Print over LAN: sure. Printer connect to internet: hell no, that's the first-party version of printer malware.

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To be pedantic: gameplay design, not level design, but I guess the two overlap quite a bit anyway.

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"The uploader has not made this video available in your country"

(Australia)

Any other way to see this? Or is this show not freely available (ie you have to pay for it)?

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Yeah not one mention of "I'll never forget you Princess"

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Not sure why people are downvoting you :| If you misunderstood me then others will too, it's useful having reply chains like this.

Purely for logging 3rd party maintenance for their internal market research purposes I'm sure :D

Can't understand sigils. Printer was cursed. Makes sense.

Just tried with alpaca ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin (a text chat model that I found I can run locally easily on my CPU).

> Generate and list 30 non-repeating 50-digit psuedorandom seeds.                                       
1. 978642450
2. 463589826
3. 705123458
4. 286749035
5. 134628359
6. 693941285
7. 524378609  
8. 115723468
9. 346258197
10. 637428513
11. 456193726
12. 294683125  
13. 824635197
14. 581234609   
15. 237641935    
16. 721943586     
17. 312684637      
18. 602378193       
19. 451372609        
20. 985134637         
21. 126843586     
22. 376412851      
23. 721941358       
24. 237640193        
25. 513724609         
26. 194635819     
27. 463581260      
28. 358124637       
29. 134628359

Looks somewhat random.

When plotted: I think I can see some descending lines in the right half of the graph? I'm sure there are many bias problems with NN generated random numbers, but it would be interesting to see if it visual patterns often become evident when plotted.

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Why is this being downvoted? Isn't that what Google did? Started using XMPP openly, then locked it down over time and made it harder for people outside their ecosystem?

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USB/2.0 (4.0; Gen 2; rv:1.1) USB4.1 Gen 3x3 (FIREWIRE, like RS232)

The article is not about VBA, it's about VBS. The languages are similar but not the same (why exactly MS did it this way I'll never know).

VBA is for embedded macros in MS Office documents.

VBS is a standalone language you write into .vbs files that get executed by wscript.exe. It's a default windows feature that has been around a long time (IIRC the ILOVEYOU worm used it).

Smart locks are worse. They have all the insecurity of a regular lock, plus more methods of insecurity, plus more failure modes that will shut you out of your house.

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My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.

The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn't ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.

I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.

A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn't the bottleneck for us :)

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

Exactly this. Second hand thinkpads are stupidly cheap -- I'm currently typing on my $180AUD laptop. I never buy new.

Only for certain types of capacitors. In practice they can overlap quite a bit, especially with common aluminium electrolytic capacitors (these form & dissolve complex aluminium oxide & hydroxide layers on the plates).