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deranger

@deranger@sh.itjust.works

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deranger ,

Yeah they stopped using the more environmentally friendly bags and switched back to what they used before thanks to people complaining so much.

deranger ,

I picked up an AW3423DWF for $800, originally $1099 MSRP. No regrets, perfect price to performance ratio for me.

deranger ,

My old appt charged a $17 fee for paying online, check is free. We still wrote checks until recently.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad (www.theregister.com)

The ad itself depicted a mechanical crusher destroying artifacts of human creativity. A trumpet, guitar, sculpture, piano, drawing board, paints, a metronome, several analog cameras, a turntable, and hi-fi equipment were among the much-loved items yielding to the machine's unstoppable force.

deranger ,

Can we just STFU about this mediocre ad already? You’re giving it more airtime and more mental bandwidth. I didn’t think it was worth one day of headlines much less two or three.

deranger ,

I have to read the headline to ignore it. That puts the ad in my brain, which is what the purpose of the ad is. The post itself is doing advertising despite being negative. I don’t want to think about ads. Fuck em.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

deranger ,

Not sure if this is exactly good news, but Epic Games doesn’t own it anymore, it was sold to Songtradr.

deranger ,

Still is, for now. I run a small vaporwave tape label via Bandcamp. No significant changes under Epic Games or Songtradr that I’ve noticed. That could change, though.

deranger ,

Sure, https://mysticspools.bandcamp.com/

Most of it is pretty fun- find music, reach out to artist, make a few tapes. We just do small runs of 25-100 tapes depending on how much will sell. The worst part IMO is order fulfillment, you either pay a third party a boatload or you DIY and packing 100 cassettes is a bit of a drag. Coming up with good art if the artist doesn’t already have something is quite difficult. The label is on a short hiatus for that reason, but I think we’ll do some more tapes now that some labels have dried up. There’s waxing and waning periods when it comes to these little micro labels, and I can tell people are feeling the economic squeeze.

The most fun part is mastering to tape and dubbing. I’ve got a Nakamichi Dragon and 3x NAD 6300, and I’ve dubbed probably 500-600 tapes across them all. Dunno what it is about tapes, but I really like em.

deranger ,

It’s not like BMW locking heated seats, a trivial feature, to nickel and dime the owner out of $300.

Yes it is; it’s exactly that.

Reducing the battery capacity severely alters the value of the car possibly dropping it into the range of more budget conscious buyers.

Or they could not reduce it for the same production cost. No money is saved by tasking an employee to develop the battery nerf.

There are benefits too. Less wear on the battery by not using its whole range, faster charging to “100%,”

There are no benefits. You could simply unplug at 80%.

deranger ,

Then decrease the cost. Nerfing the battery benefits no consumer. Make maximum charge level a user controlled setting (up to 100%) and you’ve gained any benefits you’ve mentioned in this thread (faster charging due to lower capacity, less wear) without fucking the consumer over.

deranger ,

That’s correct, but you could do this just as easily by allowing the user to toggle a “battery endurance” charge that stops at 80-90%. My friends GM EV does this, she uses it during the work week as a full charge isn’t necessary for commuting needs.

deranger ,

It’s only cheaper because they inflated the price from a limitation they created. There is absolutely no reason to limit the battery capacity in software in this manner other than to create an artificial divide to upsell people on the “”higher”” capacity.

deranger ,

There is no “larger battery”. It’s an identical battery with different software limitations on the charge level.

No consumer benefits from artificial limitations being imposed on them like this. It exists solely to extract more money from consumers. The fact people are defending this blows my mind.

deranger ,

They must have determined that it was cheaper overall to do it this way rather than physically rip the batteries out of the vehicles or they wouldn't do it.

Or, you know, just keep the capacity the same and lower the price without imposing a battery nerf. It costs the same to make. The only reason the nerf exists is to extract money from consumers.

deranger ,

None of those other behaviors you describe are any less shitty. “Look, Tesla is doing the same shitty things as other corporations, they’re not so bad!” What a terrible argument.

For the record I pirate my content for the reasons you describe; I also don’t fuck with AAA games with day 1 DLC or paywalled content. Those get pirated or purchased on a heavy discount later.

Got any compelling argument as to why this software nerf should exist?

deranger ,

If they can sell the same battery, just one has a software limitation, they can just forgo the limitation altogether and sell full battery capacity models at the reduced limited capacity price. The only reason this limitation exists is to juice customers and it’s bullshit. They are going out of their way to make a product worse that costs them exactly the same regardless of if the limitation is there or not. You cannot convince me that the software limitation they impose is anything but hostile to consumers.

deranger ,

I do this on Windows, it works fine. Never had an issue with mass uploads / initial library sync. I have a large library of 30k tracks, mostly lossless ALAC.

I switched to Plex / PlexAmp though, it’s better and I don’t have to pay a subscription.

deranger ,

Big fan of media player classic / MPC-HC for many years now.

deranger , (edited )

I’ve never stopped getting updates.I’ve been using K-Lite Codec Pack since Kazaa lite was relevant. It has always come with updated MPC-HC. Looks like the GitHub is here:

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases

MPC-HC with madVR and a beefy GPU for the upscaling algorithms is godlike.

deranger ,

I’d like one example where MRSA has been used for bioterrorism. Never heard of it when I was a medical lab tech in the military, nor as a medical lab scientist later in my life. Bioterrorism is extremely rare, and MRSA is a poor choice for a biological weapon.

E. coli O157:H7 would be a better choice, or Vibrio, or really any of the enteric pathogens introduced to food or water supplies.

deranger ,

Salmonella is not MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). The point I was trying to make is Staph isn’t a good bioterrorism agent. It doesn’t spread like weaponized anthrax, it’s not particularly deadly, and it can’t be spread by food/water like the enteric pathogens. It’s just not suitable or we’d have researched the fuck out of it at USAMRIID.

deranger ,

did we very gently slay a ton of animals learning how to do surgery and heart transplants

While I can’t say for certain whether or not it’s true for your example, animals are frequently used (to this day) for medical research. I know for a fact sheep are used for burn/smoke inhalation studies and pigs are used for trauma studies at US Army institute for surgical research. They also use rabbits and mice.

All of them are heavily sedated before experimentation; lots of fentanyl etc. Death comes by way of potassium injection after the data is collected.

deranger ,

This isn’t related to the pig trauma training they provide for medics, but rather to optimize blood product usage in cases of massive blood loss. Similar idea but it’s not for training purposes, strictly research. They’d punch a hole in their spleen (I think), bleed them out, then try different strategies / combinations of blood products and other fluids to see how well it resuscitated the pig. They’d then get killed with an injection of blue juice (KCl solution).

I said no to animal research and stuck to obtaining the blood products from human volunteers and doing some analysis of blood drawn from patients in the burn ward who were getting treatment, which was another angle of research done there.

deranger ,

Disagree. Watched a 4K HDR remux of Alien on my OLED TV last night and the quality was mindblowing. Bitrate matters more than resolution overall, but once you’re at the “enough” point you’ve gotta increase resolution to really push the quality up.

deranger ,

I find this impossible. As I try to write the second word of the sentence, my mind is already paragraphs later in the train of thought.

deranger ,

U-P-G-R-A-Y-E-D-D

Using AI to spot edible mushrooms could kill you | AI tools are good for some things, but don’t trust your health to apps that make frequent mistakes (wapo.st)

In particular, know how to identify the common and deadly species (eg: much of the genus Amanita) yourself, and get multiple trustworthy field guides for your part of the world.

deranger ,

Of all the things to use machine learning for, identifying poisonous fucking mushrooms seems like a poor choice. I’m sure it sounds very confident in its wrong answer, though.

deranger ,

Watch out, you can’t say anything good about any Apple products on Lemmy lest you seek downvotes. Anything less than hate is insufficient.

Microsoft is once again injecting pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows in a bid to get people to switch to Bing (www.theverge.com)

The software giant first introduced malware-like pop-up ads last year with a prompt that appeared over the top of other apps and windows. After pausing that notification to address “unintended behavior,” the pop-ups have returned again on Windows 10 and 11....

deranger ,

I looked at the links in the source and they’re Windows popups, not Chrome injections. Shitty reporting from the verge.

deranger ,

I don’t disagree but damn, can we get some accurate reporting? No need to lie about how shitty Microsoft can be.

deranger ,

Still incorrect, I believe. The pop ups are from Windows. They’re not doing anything to Chrome. Maybe that’s a pedantic technicality but it matters to me, and probably in a legal sense as well.

Microsoft has plenty of shitty practices to report on, including the browser pop ups in windows. There’s no need to lie for clicks. I dunno what the commotion about The Verge is you’re referring to, I’m just commenting on the headline.

deranger ,

I heard the color accuracy and gamut on these signage displays are terrible. Know if there’s any reviews out there with this kinda info?

deranger ,

OLED TVs are insanely good and spoiled using the computer altogether for me, until I got an OLED monitor. At least on my LG B2, the color gamut and contrast are extremely good. I can’t stand LCDs for anything dark as the backlight bleed really washes out the picture.

deranger ,

Apple makes my life as the family sysadmin significantly easier. If I only had to worry about myself I’d do Android with a privacy focused ROM, but I doubt I could handle my entire family doing that. No way am I putting them on stock Android.

It would be nice if there was some competition but I’m not holding my breath.

deranger , (edited )

Did you not read my post? I use Apple because it makes managing my family fleet easier. If I were by myself I would use a privacy focused ROM.

I’ve got users to manage, and Apple’s locked down approach makes it significantly easier. Everyone gets updates the same day, and phones are supported for years, not months. Backups are stupid easy if someone needs a replacement. iCloud is forgettable, which is ideal for the children and grandparents I manage.

Apple is collecting data on me, but selling data isn’t their primary business. The same cannot be said for Google, which is one of the reasons I’m not putting my family on stock Google. Apple is the lesser evil.

deranger ,

I know a lot of people really enjoyed this game, but I couldn’t play more than a few hours despite loving Doom 2016. Restricted ammo quantity really killed the enjoyment for me. Adding Denuvo only after it was reviewed was a really shitty move and the soundtrack isn’t as good either now that I think of it.

deranger ,

I really don’t think it’s better than nothing. You put a biased AI in charge of reviewing footage and now they have a reason to say they’re doing the right thing instead of doing nothing, despite what they’re doing being worse.

deranger ,

Tubgirl is the OG shock site for me. It’s also why my friends and I are phishing avoidance masters.

deranger ,

It’s just a brick with a USB socket. I still have 5W usb chargers from iPhones a decade ago that work with anything USB.

They didn’t change connectors on the cables frequently either. The old big one, lightning, and USB C are the only connectors iPhone used.

deranger ,

I use DNS level blocking for blocking ads on iOS devices.

deranger ,

Can’t do that on ARM. Windows on ARM sucks and there isn’t a good app ecosystem.

deranger ,

NextDNS. Pretty cheap and supports DNS over HTTPS.

deranger ,

You’re incorrect. Tons of apps are native ARM on Mac now, also rosetta2 emulation is really fast. Obviously not as fast as native ARM but it surprised me.

deranger ,

Exclusivity isn’t the point. A healthy app ecosystem is what we’re discussing, which ARM on Mac has. It wasn’t great for 6 months or so, but it’s quite good now.

deranger , (edited )

There isn't a good app ecosystem for arm on osx either? What's your point?

Did you forget what you said? This is what I’m responding to.

macOS (not osX for many years now) has a healthy app ecosystem, unlike windows for ARM.

And you can load Linux and Windows on all Mac's.

just install windows

My point is “install Windows” isn’t a valid option for anyone with an ARM Mac, so suggesting it is silly. Mac hasn’t made an x86 computer in a couple years.

deranger ,

Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn omnibus is often recommended. It’s all I’ve read thus far, good books.

deranger ,

IMO NextDNS is a better solution if you don’t wanna roll your own pihole

deranger ,

A Blu-ray laser diode and a flashlight body with some DIY electronic components seems to hold the most promise, and it’s not that far off from some flashlight projects I’ve done.

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