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Patch

@Patch@feddit.uk

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Patch ,

See, now I'm fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That's a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they've shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

Patch ,

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They're the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

Patch ,

Realistically, they could just love their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it'd only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it's also not the likely outcome.

Patch ,

Oh yeah, I'll just tell my wife that we're never having sex again because we've now got enough kids. I'm sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

Why is Matrix mentioned more often than XMPP in self hosted forums?

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?...

Patch ,

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone's tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

Patch ,

Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don't provide anything unique that isn't provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).

YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we're a long long way from that right now.

Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn't to my interest. Other than my local football club's channel, I can't think of anything on there that I actually seek out.

Patch ,

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they're relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I've never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a "they're all the same!" when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.

Patch ,

Yes, it's always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.

But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren't trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.

Patch ,

It probably isn't legal most places. EULAs are already considered fairly flimsy in terms of enforcement, but changing an EULA after you've already bought a device, in such a way as to reduce your statutory rights, is almost certainly a complete non-starter.

Patch ,

If a company takes you to court, you can't just decide to ignore them. Either you/your representative turns up on the designated court dates and presents a case, or you'll most likely lose by default.

If it was possible to make a court case go away just by ignoring it then everyone would just do that.

Patch ,

An EULA is nominally a binding contract, in the sense that it is presented as such. No court has ever ruled and given precedent to the effect that EULAs are universally non-binding (because companies have always settled out of court for cases where it looks like they're going to lose).

It is well understood that the arguments against EULAs being binding are solid ones, and that the reason why so many cases settle is because companies are not confident of winning cases on the strength of EULA terms, but you still need to go through the rigmarole of attending court and presenting your defence case. That's how court cases work.

Edit: And perhaps more to the point of the OP, if you want to sue a company over some defect or service failure, it'll be them who introduce the EULA as a defence, and it'll be for you/your lawyers to argue against it. Which adds complexity and time to what might otherwise have been a straightforward claim, even if you win.

Patch ,

Everyone loves Brother for good reason.

I've had a decent experience with my Xerox too.

Patch ,

Different countries and states obviously have different electricity source mixes.

Here in the UK, coal accounts for around 1% of electricity. Natural gas is about 35%, biomass about 5%, and the rest is various clean renewables (wind, solar, hydro) or nuclear.

So although charging an EV is by no means fossil-fuel-free, it's considerably less fossil-fuel than an ICE car.

Patch ,

It's also loud.

I don't need or want everyone sat in the same room as me to know every little thing I do on my phone. Leaving aside things that are actually private, that's just a level of inane garbage that we all don't need to know about each other.

Sometimes I just want to glance at the football scores without announcing to everyone: "OK Google, what is the current score for the football match between Swindon Town and Harrogate?".

Edit: It's currently nil-nil, if you're wondering.

Patch ,

We had one in my town until it closed down 3 years ago. Now the nearest one to me is a 90 mile round trip away.

Hydrogen definitely feels like a fad which has had its moment.

Patch ,

Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the "future centuries" sense of the long term things might be different, but in the "we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so" sense it's a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn't have enough hydrogen.

It's basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn't necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.

Patch ,

Biogasoline is a thing, although I'm not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.

Patch ,

1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it's transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications

Grid storage is a genuine problem that needs solving, but there's no particular reason to believe hydrogen is going to be the technology to fill that niche. There are much simpler and more efficient competitors, not least of which being pumped hydroelectricity, but also including exotic technologies like molten salt thermal plants or compressed air mineshafts. And batteries, for that matter; once portability stops being a concern, other battery chemistries start to be an option which don't include lithium at all, like sodium-sulfur.

And even if hydrogen electrolysis does make sense as a grid storage medium, there's no particular reason to think it's a good idea to package up this hydrogen, transport it, and stick it in vehicles to convert into electricity through their own mini power plants. The alternative, where hydrogen is simply stored and converted back into grid electricity on site to meet demand leveling requirements seems far more likely.

Patch ,

For comparison, grey hydrogen currently costs around $2 per kg, and green hydrogen costs around $12 per kg. Filling a Toyota Mirai tank with green hydrogen would cost you about $70. That's production at today's electricity prices. The cost to fully charge a Tesla is about $15, same rates.

So for green hydrogen to beat grey hydrogen on the open market, costs need to drop by a factor of 6. And because it can only do this if electricity prices drop off a cliff, it'd be doing this in an environment where you can fully charge a luxury BEV for $3...

Hydrogen is also not the only game in town in terms of competitors with BEV. For those niches where fully battery-operated vehicles aren't practical, there are also biofuels, which are (from a climate change point of view) greener than green hydrogen anyway (although they have their own controversies).

Patch ,

Having data means nothing if you can't monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they've been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

Patch ,

Ubuntu has live patching free for personal use built right in. It's not exactly a niche thing.

(I don't bother on most machines because I reboot my laptops every day anyway, but you know; nice for servers and whatnot).

Patch ,

I have both WhatsApp and Signal installed.

In the 3 years or so since I installed Signal, I haven't had a single conversation on it. Only a handful of people from my Contact book are showing as Signal users, and none of them people I speak to regularly.

I live in anticipation of someone deciding to message me on there, but I'm not exactly optimistic at this point.

Patch ,

It might be OK for you to be "disconnected", but some of us have got stuff to do.

Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. (insideevs.com)

Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here.::The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can't make its operations work here. All seven of its California stations...

Patch ,

Solar costs whatever it costs to buy, install and maintain a solar PV farm, which is not nothing.

If you're going to build a solar PV farm, you're obviously going to want to sell the power you generate in whatever way is most profitable.

At the moment, it's still magnitudes more profitable to sell solar back to the grid than it is to feed it into an inefficient hydrolysis plant, create a load of hydrogen and oxygen, and then move it by leaky tanker somewhere to sell it.

Patch ,

The trick isn't making hydrogen, it's capturing it, refining it (so that it isn't mixed with a tonne of air), and compressing it into a pressurised storage tank for later use.

Patch ,

Now I'm as sceptical of handing over the keys to AI as the next man, but it does have to be said that all of these are LLMs- chatbots, basically. Is there any suggestion from any even remotely sane person to give LLMs free reign over military strategy or international diplomacy? If and when AI does start featuring in military matters, it's more likely to be at the individual "device" level (controlling weapons or vehicles), and it's not going to be LLM technology doing that.

Patch ,

The pain of this. I have two separate Windows work laptops (one for my employer, one for the firm we work with; data separation fun). The number of times I've booted up the second laptop ready to dive into a meeting or to quickly grab a reference only to be confronted with 15 minutes of that.

Between pestering me to check for updates, pestering me to restart to complete updates, hanging on shutdown to carry out updates, and hanging on startup to finish updates, I feel like I spend an unfeasible amount of time and brainspace thinking about system updates. Why? I've got actual work to do too!

Patch ,

What I really want to know is why and how it went away.

The move was in place because of the fear that IE was becoming a monopoly. Now Edge is very very far from the most popular browser, and Google Chrome is looking like the overwhelmingly dominant player, there's no reason to make MS prompt people to download rival products anymore.

How can open source hardware be a movement if the raw materials still have to be mined and factory produced?

Am I not understanding FOSH (free and open source hardware)? I have always dreamed of open source hardware but it has always seemed unshakeably and fundamentally reliant on for instance massive open pit mines mining all over the world in finite dwindling supply wrecking local ecosystems every element necessary for computer...

Patch ,

This is essentially a novel version of the "free as in freedom" versus "free as in beer" distinction. In this case not exactly about the cash value per se, but about the physical aspects and systemic realities behind the having of a thing.

An open hardware design means nothing more and nothing less than freedom to access, share, use and modify the designs. It is about ownership and reuse of the intellectual property.

Open hardware doesn't change the fact that most hardware will still be manufactured by the same large corporations. It says nothing about the technical feasibility of amateur fabrication. It has nothing to do with the environmental impacts of a technology or the production thereof. It isn't fundamentally a socialist paradigm.

For an open hardware spec like RISC-V, the reality of it is that the freedom afforded by the open designs is a freedom of large corporations to enter market with a competitive product without being squeezed out by a handful of established monopolistic giants. This is a positive thing, but it's a positive thing with distinct limits that fall very short of any ideas of utopia.

Patch ,

It doesn't really mean anything anymore. The transistors are not 5nm either. It's just marketing.

Quoth Wikipedia:

The term "5 nm" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors being 5 nanometers in size. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a "5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers". However, in real world commercial practice, "5 nm" is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density (i.e. a higher degree of miniaturization), increased speed and reduced power consumption compared to the previous 7 nm process.

Patch ,

No shit that it's easy to live with marginally slower (but still really pretty fast) shipping and access to a second-tier streaming service.

It's pretty much the definition of a luxury purchase.

Patch ,

Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it's effectively ensuring the engine isn't turned off (as there'll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).

But more to the point, regardless of whether there's a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn't be used to claim on a "technicality" that autopilot wasn't active "at the time of the crash", as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.

Patch ,

Or read Renée Descartes.

Patch ,

Maybe I'm a lone voice here, but my Skoda has QNX and it's...not very good? It takes an age to start up, and an age to load navigation mode to a point where it's ready to start being used. Bluetooth integration is rudimentary (in the context of the age of the vehicle) and unpredictable. The touch UI is spongy and easy to make mistakes, even if you're the passenger giving it your full undivided attention. The voice command system is almost unusable.

It's not terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why anyone would be writing any lovesongs about it.

Patch ,

At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.

The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

Patch ,

It's a fair point. Curiosity has "only" travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

Obviously it's absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

Patch ,

In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.

Not only does that make more sense in the sense of "humans don't make a great power source" (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.

My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.

Patch ,

In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.

But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).

Former CEO of Google has been quietly working on a military startup for “suicide” attack drones. (www.forbes.com)

Former CEO of Google has been quietly working on a military startup for “suicide” attack drones.::The former Google CEO has been quietly working on a military startup called White Stork with plans to design “kamikaze” attack drones.

Patch ,

The headline is kinda burying the lede. You're absolutely right that "kamikaze drones" already exist. Others have rather glibly pointed out that cruise missiles that have existed for decades are essentially this, and more recently there have been a great many "loitering munitions" drones which are what this startup is talking about.

The thing that seems to be novel here is that they are intending to make them fully automated, with AI-driven target acquisition, and capable of operating in a zero-comms environment. Currently drones generally still need a human at the controls.

The idea of what amounts to the equivalent of Tesla's "Full Self Driving" tech being in charge of deciding who lives and dies and what should be reduced to a smouldering crater is, it has to be said, faintly unnerving.

They warned you: Someone allegedly used a politician's cloned voice to interfere with an election | It will most assuredly not be the last time this happens (www.techspot.com)

They warned you: Someone allegedly used a politician's cloned voice to interfere with an election | It will most assuredly not be the last time this happens::undefined

Patch ,

Desecrates could think that if he has an idea it has to be true

That's not what Descartes said, by the way.

"I think therefore I am" was all about "I know I must exist, because I'm here to think about it". It wasn't about "if I think something it must be true".

In Discourse he sets about trying to establish what things you can know for sure, vs which things are subjective (and could just be a trick of the mind or an illusion). He establishes the first principle that the one thing he knows is definitely true is that he is an entity that is capable of thought (because otherwise, who else is doing all this thinking?) and therefore at the very least he must exist, even if nothing else does.

If you're of the position that truth isn't subjective, "Cartesian doubt" should be right up your alley. Trust nothing until you can prove it! Not a bad position for a philosopher to take.

Patch ,

It can be Occam or Ockham. It's named after William of Ockham, but it was the fashion at that time for scholars to "Latinise" their names, hence the alternative spelling.

Patch ,

Why not Airbus? They're the largest manufacturer in the world by market share. Boeing is not a monopoly.

Patch ,

Did you reply to the wrong comment or something?

I didn't say anything about Boeing not being able to make aeroplanes. Only a note of surprise that the parent comment would dismiss Airbus as an alternative manufacturer of aeroplanes when they are the largest manufacturer of aeroplanes in the world.

I'm stoked to hear that you live near a Boeing factory though. That must be very exciting for you.

Patch ,

How dare you question Ming-Chi Kuo 😤

Patch ,

Some of them were actually pretty good artists; occasionally you'd see them do other stuff and it'd be genuinely good on an artistic level.

The whole stick man, lumpy face, primitivist thing was just an "in" aesthetic (while also being conveniently really quick to produce).

Patch ,

It's also worse because it completely undermines the point by using a horrendous fixed width typeface and dark green on black colours for the text.

Patch ,

DDG is largely Bing search at the backend, unless I'm much mistaken. They do value-add work around privacy, but in the basic sense of "does a DDG search return good results", it's largely the same as Bing.

Patch ,

I can imagine an engineer looking at a push-button bean to cup machine and thinking "how can I make this slightly less efficient and a lot more complicated".

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