The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially “free” to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it’s awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.

Everything is fine in the Apple ecosystem as long as you want to do something The Apple Way™.

As soon as you want to do something differently to how Apple decrees it should be done, then you’re screwed.

love that it has to repeat my command back to me before executing it

This is inserted to give enough time for the LLM to process your command. Otherwise Google would have to pony up for a lot more compute horsepower to make it performant.

“Why do people do X, when in my opinion if you disregard the two top reasons for doing X, it’s pointless? Prove to me that it would be better!?”

Well, anything’s possible, I say we give it a try and see what happens.

Have you tried…

you know,

(cough)

maybe just, ah …

(air quotes) “heavily implying”

the , ah, you know …

particular…

(taps side of nose)

ah, torrent

in

(eyebrow waggle)

ahem,

QUESTION?

Eh?

Ehhhhh?

They aim to actively deorbit starlink sats.

(Edit: they keep a small amount of propellant in reserve for the initial deorbit burn, and then position the solar array to give maximum drag which hastens things considerably)

As far as I know, apart from the first few batches, the “production run” of sats has a pretty low failure rate and are proactively sent to their demise.

Older engines had them in their timing gears - they were in 6 cylinder Holdens, for example.

They give an amount of cushioning/vibration dampening that you can’t get with steel gear sets.

rustfmt

is stopping me from writing code like this, and I have never been more happier using it after viewing this.

Bastard user from hell

Every IT/software group needs to have one, otherwise you get complacent.

Yeah it’s steadily getting enshittified.

I used to have a mythtv box that I’d built , like, 15 years ago and it was pretty good. For a while there TV UIs were adequate enough that I didn’t need it, but it seems that maybe it’s time to build another one.

TVs that do anything more than displaying a signal exactly as it’s input shouldn’t exist.

Some of that input could do with a bit of tweaking though.

I wouldn’t mind if the TV was able to do things with the audio track, like remove background music, or lift the volume of people speaking, or erase laugh tracks/live audience hooting& hollering.

There’s probably similar manipulation that you could do on the video side (eventually, once TVs stop getting the worst processors ever, not here and now). Imagine a prompt that says “Airbrush every recognisable brand name on-screen so that it blends with the background”.

I seriously doubt if any major manufacturer would do that kind of thing though, so better get working on jailbreaking those TVs.

You can just use a soulseek client.

However I have a build of this daemon running on a Qnap storage device, which is super handy just for ad-hoc music searches, and people can also peruse my music library 24/7.

I search for complicated things on google, because that’s when I need to search for stuff.

I take about three seconds to look at the LLM-generated summaries/answers, disregard them as tedious monotonic bullshit, and then scroll down to links where real people are discussing the real problems and the real solutions they have.

22 million users. 2700 million likes. 122 likes per user?

That engagement ratio seems a little off?

You’ve got the motive back to front.

yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.

Something like a raspberry pi or equivalent, and use reverse SSH set up to connect to a server with a known address on your end.

This means that ports don’t need to be opened on their end.

Also if you go with a gateway host, shift SSH to a randomised port like 37465, and install fail2ban.

As if the software was as permanent as the hardware lol

There’s no guarantee that the software will ever be updated to something that the user finds usable though.

Google could just one day go “meh, we don’t think folding displays are where we want to be right now”, and - ta-da! - you’re left with a folding doorstop and Google’s got yet another entry on the “killed by Google” list.

Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.

Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.

Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.