dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Gigabyte (remember them?)

Sure do! Both my board and the board in my wife's computer are Gigabyte. So's my video card. The only issue I've ever had with their stuff has been a bad stick of ram a few years ago, which they exchanged without argument.

Brands in this sphere I definitely have had trouble with: MSI, Razer -- so many problems with Razer -- and ASUS.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

We all knew this day was coming. And, I suspect, knowing this is precisely why most of us are here.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

People talking about topics the marketing-droids feel is likely to result in the sale of a product, i.e., "What is the best X to buy?"

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

• Cats
• Memes about cats
• Cats using Linux
• Owning a car is evil and you should be ashamed
• You should have a cat instead
• We hate Elon Musk
• Knives

(Hey, at least I'm trying.)

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

[Scrolling through my own post history.]

[Side-eye monkey meme.]

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I don't know if matters have improved any, but back when I created my lemmy.world account specifically it had some kind of bugout about what I'd entered, but it output this to the developer console and not on the page itself. Had I not thought to press F12 I would not have discovered that it had its panties in a twist about whatever it was, I think characters in my email address or something. I forget exactly what its problem was.

So yeah, I can definitely seeing that baffling the average user.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.

It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.

And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

That's how battery chemistry works. Even this, if it is real, is a bunch of individual cells in a bank. There is no alternative; you can't have sufficient reactivity between dissimilar materials to generate the types of voltages required in a single cell. You need multiples of them in series to hit 200 volts, 400, 600, whatever is required by the vehicle's drive hardware.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Lapped by what? Vaporware? Oh, yeah. If we Americans don't get all our liars organized we'll never be as good as the Chinese at playing make-believe.

This article is an ad. This thing being described is not actually a product; it does not meaningfully actually exist. It is installed in zero vehicles, and the manufacturer's claims are completely unverified and, probably, unverifiable. It's not real. These kinds of press releases get posted all the time. The company is just simping for investor money, that's all.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

That's because Toyota is trying to put all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Toyota is the only brand that really has a functional consumer-available hydrogen fuel cell car and I think they're stuck in sunk cost fallacy mode with that technology.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

The article also calls this a "leak." Is it really a leak if it's in the insider Windows build that Microsoft makes freely available to anyone who wants it?

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Wait. After all this hype Tesla has only managed to move 3878 units of the Cybertruck? That's hilarious.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

As much as I like to see this sentiment, I think now as ever the people who actually follow through with moving to Linux will be few in number.

Most users who get fed up and decide the hell with it are likely to just buy a Mac instead, as revolting a development as that may be.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

The irritating thing about all this is, at least if Raymond Chen is to be believed, the OS letting you do what you want without getting in your way was actually a/the core design philosophy of Windows up until probably the end of the XP era. It seems with Vista they started losing the plot, and by the time of Windows 8 Microsoft had fully committed to going completely off the rails.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Windows user A will not know what their home directory is and will respond as described. Windows user B will assume that it is their "my documents" folder, which may or may not be the case, because: Windows user C will know that there are effectively three home directories in Windows (/users/username, /users/username/documents, and /users/username/appadata/local) but that won't help anybody determine which one some program actually put the goddamn file in.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I think the point the parent poster was making is that the system shouldn't be designed that way in the first place. And when the vendor fucks it up due to releasing the product in a half-baked state, the hammer needs to be brought down on them in such a way that it will functionally discourage them from doing it again.

If the electronics providing functionality in your vehicle are so complex that the excuse is being made potentially adverse interactions between its various components from various OEM's can't be tested and accounted for, what has actually happened is that designed your product wrong. Throw it away, start over, and do it right next time.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

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dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And at any time.

Cutting someone's brake lines is all or nothing and can't be done while the vehicle is already in motion. Anyone who is not an idiot will hopefully notice as soon as they start driving that there's something wrong with the brakes. But you could brick somebody's car remotely and without warning while they're taking a curve on the interstate at 80 MPH, and that'd be a lot more problematic.

In reality, few to no people outside of novels and Hollywood have actually been killed by some malefactor "cutting their brake lines."

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Yes, actually, it is.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7038fcd3-97b2-4c7a-b208-78c49b71893e.jpeg

Source.

Motor vehicle fatalities had their nadir in 2014, which coincides with the time when we had all major safety innovations sorted out: Advanced air bags, stability and traction control, ABS, RADAR/LIDAR/etc. collision avoidance on fancier models, reverse cameras, mandatory TMPS, etc.

Cars today are basically exactly the same mechanically and insofar as physical safety features existed in 2014. But the line goes back up into the 2020's as idiots started packing cars with touchscreens, everything-by-wire control systems, hiding critical controls into the infotainment screen, removing physical tactile controls, and loading everything with mountains of electronic distractions. Many of these whizz-bang electronic features nobody actually wants are also released in a sorry state. New cars are objectively worse than cars from 10-15 years ago, with the possible exception of EV range.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Note that "optimizing" Amazon package can't possibly be a very high bar to clear. Just being smart enough to package multiple items coming from the same distribution center on the same delivery route into the same box would do it... Something that other online retailers figured out decades ago but apparently somehow Amazon still hasn't.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Yes, I did. And what it talks about actually ignores my complaint, which is why I file their claim about "avoid more than 2 millions tons of packaging material worldwide" in the bogus column.

Their system obviously does not take into account multi-item orders at all, and seems to operate purely on a one-product, one-package model. Which is stupid. They're not trying to avoid landfill waste, they're trying to minimize returns due to breakages but without putting any human intervention into the process.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Amazon probably does have some programmatic way of determining how much to fit in a truck, but that's not what this is. Instead, it's them trying to cheap out on packaging materials in the dumbest way possible, by figuring out what the reasonably acceptable minimum threshold is for packaging durability but not taking into account size or packing multiples of items at all (as far as I can tell).

This is a pure cost cutting measure on their part. Anything else is just a tangential side benefit.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I write a lot of PHP for part of my job.

The beauty of PHP is that for any given task, there are always multiple ways to do it, all of which are wrong.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

If you've got four kids and you're buying them all laptops, I don't think buying them all Macs and "saving money" by getting cut-down machines with too little memory (or whatever other hobbling Apple may cook up now or later) is exactly the smart play. You would need to have a very compelling reason to absolutely have to run MacOS to the exclusion of everything else which if we're honest, most people don't.

A Lenovo IdeaPad Slim, just to pick an example out of a hat that contains many other options, costs half as much as the low spec 2024 Macbook Air the article is spotlighting while having double the RAM, double the SSD, and, you know, ports. For the cost of a 8GB Macbook Pro you could buy a Legion Slim with an i7 and an RTX4060 in it and have change left over, a machine which would blow that Mac out of the water.

There are a lot of things you can say about Macbooks, but being a good value for the money is consistently never one of them.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I have never, not once in my life, clicked on an internet or electronic ad. Even for things I'm ostensibly interested in. Jury's out on just how much manically SEO optimized retail web sites on Google count as "ads," I guess. But other than that: Zilch.

But someone somewhere must be clicking on them because billions of dollars are spent every year pushing the fucking things.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Of course marketers believe that, because it's their job to give their clients hype hope.

Middle management usually wants to hear about conversions this quarter and especially ROI, not mindshare.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

steamOS coming out for PC.

This is unfortunately unlikely. Valve controls the hardware of the Steam Deck, which in all of its variants is functionally the same platform with the same hardware in it, versus the near-inifite number of hardware combinations any random user could have in their PC. This means they can tailor it specifically to work perfectly with the platform it runs on. It won't work that way on J. Random Gamer's PC. The hardware support would be a nightmare and require a ridiculous amount of manpower to maintain.

Remember that hardware support is already the major weakness of Linux in all of its guises, and this is true even for massive distributions like Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu with tons of people working on them. Drink every time you're scrolling one of these threads and someone says something to the effect of, "I would use Linux on desktop if my [ wifi / video card / printer / sleep and suspend / Bluetooth / VR headset / etc. ] would actually work right."

I'd doubt Valve would be willing to kick that beehive just for the karma points, or whatever. That's not to say that enterprising hackers have not already figured out how to install SteamOS on devices it's not meant to run on, but that doesn't mean it'll work right with all (or most) of them.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And, "You will never print any part of these instructions."

Proceeds to print the entire set of instructions. I guess we can't trust it to follow any of its other directives, either, odious though they may be.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

The one this poster was referring to was everyone suddenly becoming an armchair expert on how bridges should be able to withstand being hit by ships.

In general, you can ask any asshole on the internet (or in real life!) and they'll be just brimming with ideas on how they can design roads better than the people who actually design roads. Typically those ideas usually just boil down to, "Everyone should get out of my way and I have right of way all the time," though...

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And I notice that after today/yesterday's update, my Win11 machine "helpfully" put a Copilot icon in my taskbar without asking me. Thanks?

I poleaxed it in the registry. Yes, I saw the toggle in taskbar settings. No, I don't care. Disable that shit. Get it off my computer.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

May as well add it to the .reg file you cart around on your thumb drive. I have one that already disables all the Windows "consumer features" and turns off all the lock screen nags, Cortana (this is no longer relevant, though), etc.

It's in:

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

And also:

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

In both locations, create a DWORD "TurnOffWindowsCopilot" and set it to 1. Reboot.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Of course we are. We've known this all along.

Ever since Windows 10, Microsoft has been treating Windows as an "OS as a service," and their expected revenue source (at least from home users) is no longer license sales but whatever they can extract from users via subscriptions, ads, and selling their tracking data.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

FWIW and for anyone else reading this, I am running Win10 Pro in the US on my work machine and it let me uninstall Copilot just now when I tried it.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Somebody who still has a reddit account and is willing to take one for the team ought to post this to the "tvtoohigh" subreddit, and inevitably get banned for it.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I clap back at your slamming of the previous poster's comment.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And the infuriating thing is you get to cross of CompUSA twice from your list, because after they tanked the first time they got bought by TigerDirect, the brand was resurrected, and then they tanked again.

At least we still have MicroCenter. For now.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

They did indeed, and the Radio Shack in my town was one the last ones I ever saw to still sell individual components although the selection did shrink rapidly in the final years. The other locations around and about seemingly all turned into basically exclusively cell phone stores, right around the time the cell phone boom was happening. The problem with that: So was every other retailer on Earth, but most of those other retailers also had other product lines to fall back on. The inevitable tanking happened shortly thereafter.

There are somehow apparently still around 500 Radio Shack stores still operating, I believe all of which are privately owned. I have seen a couple in my travels, all of them located far out into the sticks in Appalachia and the Midwest, presumably all locations that are not served well by larger competitors or the internet.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Doubt it. Most users are point-and-droolers with no understanding nor desire to learn the base concepts behind the interfaces they're using. No IT worker has ever successfully explained a technical concept to an (l)user in the history of ever. By now we're smart enough not to try.

These people learn how to use computers at their jobs by rote, not by comprehension, and to them one word processor, spreadsheet, or browser is much the same as any other once they learn where all the buttons are that make it do what they want, and their interest in any of it stops precisely at that point and no further. There will be some grumbling about "the new system is so much worse than the old system," but that very same grumbling always happens whenever the "system" changes, regardless of whether or not the new one or the old one was actually the worse of the two.

Furthermore, these days I guarantee you the majority of the work they do is entirely within a browser via some ghastly intranet site which will not look or behave any differently on Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac vs. a Chromebook vs. a graphing calculator, etc.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And the thing of it is, millions of non-tech savvy people would not mind about having to move to Windows 11 and would do so in due course if Microsoft didn't deliberately cripple it so it won't run on a wide swath of not-too-old hardware.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

We have three of them at my office. I am certain we exceed the duty cycle they were designed for by several times. The one at the front desk has been bitching about needing an imaging drum replacement for I think three years at this point, and it still prints just fine. I'll put a new drum in it when the existing one stops working.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Google's LLM got one critical fact wrong, of course. If you only need occasional color printing, an inkjet is still the wrong answer. The right answer is probably just to have Staples or your local print shop print for you, honestly. The ink dries out in disused inkjet machines and that'll cause you no end of headaches. Or force you to buy a set of expensive cartridges just to print one damn page, because the last thing you printed was three months ago.

Color laser printers aren't even that expensive anymore. Sure, a set of color toner cartridges may cost well north of what a set of inkjet cartridges would run you, but the difference is that the laser toner will probably last many home users a lifetime.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I can add that we have two Bother multifunction laser machines at work (in addition to three of the venerable HL-2360's) and the fucking things will lose scanner association with the PC's in our office at the drop of a hat, all the time, for no identifiable reason. And there is no way to reassociate a printer with a computer short of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver package, after which point it'll inevitably cack itself in a week or two anyway.

The things print just fine but getting them to scan is like pulling teeth. Everyone in our office but me is afraid of the scanners on top of the things now, they can never figure out how to make them work, and even when they do it right we invariably found that their computer has magically and silently lost connection with the scanner component -- and only the scanner component. The software side of these things is garbage.

The software side of all printers is probably garbage, as you say. For instance, my Canon ImageClass at home scans just fine, but there's no way to make it do double sided scanning through the sheet feeder by default, or from any preset or option the screen on the printer itself. You have to set up a custom preset via the driver tool on a PC, it can only remember two presets, and you can't rename them. So you just have to know that "Custom 1" is double-sided-scan-from-sheet-feeder-and-make-it-into-a-pdf. You can set it up to do a different thing in "Custom 2," and then just fuck you I guess if you ever need to do a third thing.

Etc., etc.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

?

How new is new?

I have a Canon ImageClass MF733CDW at home that's maybe six years old and it'll print with off brand toner just fine. I've run nothing but generic/counterfeit toner cartridges in it since I ran out the ones it came with. It did bitch about it on its little screen the first time I installed one, but you can turn that nag off in the options and it never prompted me again.

At work we have one (1) Canon LBP632C that's probably around a year old, our sole color printer in the building, and it too has no problem with generic toner cartridges. That one's just a printer, not a multifunction machine.

The only gripe I have with the generic cartridges is that the toner level reporting is not very accurate, but I've never found it to be very accurate to begin with so I'm not sure I'm missing out on much.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Even so, it's clearly identifiable as a Brother HL2370DW or one of its myriad similar variants.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

They use comparatively tiny drums these days, but they inherently need four of them all in a row, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. That usually makes even the smaller ones quite deep, front to back, in my experience.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

This appears to be for their business class and workgroup size printers, which makes a little more sense to have some manner of toner DRM in because they're typically leased or at the very leased serviced under some kind of contract. Sticking a toner cart some bean counter ordered from Wish or whatever in there is probably a nonzero probability of a malfunction (even if it's just the "colors being wrong") that'll result in a complaint from some PHB type who doesn't know shit about shit, and is thus something the manufacturer would really rather you not do.

Obviously I'd still rather they just not DRM anything at all, but this never applied to their consumer models as far as I can tell.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

And people who believe the Earth is flat, and that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster exist, and there are reptillians replacing the British royal family...

People are very good at deluding themselves into all kinds of bullshit. In fact, I posit that they're better even at it than learning the facts or comprehending empirical reality.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Limits of quantum observation aside, you also could never physically store the data of the position/momentum/state of every particle in any universe within that universe, because the particles that exist in the universe are the sum total of the materials with which we could ever use to build the data storage. You've got yourself a chicken-and-egg scenario where the egg is 93 billion light years wide, there.