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sunbeam60

@sunbeam60@lemmy.one

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sunbeam60 ,

Lol. What a load of hogwash.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

“Sophisticated scripts to scour pirate sites”.

I think we’ve just found a new tagline for radarr and sonarr.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes it went so well with innovation from NASA’s existing practice.

sunbeam60 ,

I mean you can giggle at the turn of phrase, but clearly what is meant is to be more willing to tolerate risk. Very clearly that’s been a much shorter path to success than the one NASA took.

sunbeam60 ,

No they’re somehow managing to blow it neither launching nor exploding rockets.

sunbeam60 ,

That might be true. But every organisation has to achieve its goals in the context that it exists. And to be fair to NASA they’ve realised it’s better to outsource development because it’s less prone to porn barrel politics.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Wow 🤣 I am not sure what happened there. Should have been PORK barrel politics.

I’m also intrigued. Clearly things are more exciting at NASA than I thought.

sunbeam60 ,

Monitoring employees in this way is just the shittiest shit of all the shit. Surely they can assess output in a different way?

sunbeam60 ,

What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?

sunbeam60 ,

Do you actually understand how this works?
It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.

At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.

And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.

sunbeam60 ,

You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Agreed, many young people can’t save. That’s why I said “maybe not today, but at some point”. I’m not saying it’s easy for young people, I’m trying to explain why companies seek to increase profitability and that almost every investor is self-centred.

sunbeam60 ,

You’re arguing against the world that is. I’m just trying to explain the behaviour, not necessarily condone it.

A pension fund manager may not move in and out of stocks on a daily basis, but at some point they’re going to take a look at how their portfolio is doing and react.

sunbeam60 ,

Once you’ve gone public, unless some entity could do an offer to take you private, you have investors (aka owners).

To take Google private would be in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars. Even the Norwegian oil fund would struggle to do that.

sunbeam60 ,

Agreed you have to trust them. However, I suspect GDPR punishments keep them to their word.

sunbeam60 ,

Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

They definitely do. The vast majority of cars (Tesla being a notable exception) run their critical systems on CANbus with AUTOSAR and QNX or VxWorks. That’s why their entertainment system can still crash while the car drives on just fine. That doesn’t mean one can’t obscure the other; on VW group cars, for example, the reversing camera is run by QNX on CANbus but shown on the entertainment screen as an overlay. Occasionally you’ll see QNX starting to show the camera before the entertainment system has had a chance to draw the frame around it.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

Or watch the film Finding the Money: https://youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.

sunbeam60 ,

Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?

Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

Yes more or less, that is indeed how the central bank creates money most of the time; the government creates a piece of paper that says “IOU 100k and I’ll pay you 5% interest on it for 20 years and then I’ll return your original 100k to you in 20 years” (that’s a bond), which they sell on the open market, at auction (where the variable element is the interest rate someone is willing to accept). When the central bank wishes to increase the money supply they buy government bonds on the open market (ie from other holders, rarely from the government directly) by materialising money out of thin air.

When they wish to shrink the money supply they sell their government bonds and destroys the money that they receive from the sale.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

<giggle.gif>

Not really. They’ve got a version of the euro, called kroners, which allows Danes to believe they have their own currency. They are locked into an exchange rate band (extremely tight) which means the Danish central bank has to follow every decision the ECB takes within minutes). And this makes complete sense, in that it’s a compromise that’s edible by voters (maintaining the illusion that Denmark didn’t adopt the euro) and edible by business (allowing businesses in Denmark to participate fully in the common market).

And that’s one of the reasons Denmark has such small national debt and runs a government surplus - they can’t really invent new money because it would break the bond with the euro. So the Danish budget is sort of a “household budget” in that in contrast to, say, Sweden, they cannot create money (meaningfully) and the books have to balance (which they do; lots of oil, Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and a few other big international plays who still pay a majority of their tax in Denmark obviously helps a lot).

sunbeam60 ,

Yes completely agree. The cool thing about opencollective is the transparency - that should mean the core devs should be happy to pay themselves some money for their time. This is how projects sustain themselves IMHO.

sunbeam60 ,

Dunno about affordable but you can usually find some decently priced 1L Dell Optiplex micro systems. I’ve got one running under my desk 24/7. Great Linux support.

sunbeam60 ,

I’m forced to use Chrome quite a bit (workplace silliness) and exclusively use Firefox at home. I seriously cannot see this edge that you claim Chrome has. Do you mean in loading speed? Scrolling speed?

sunbeam60 ,

This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.

sunbeam60 ,

Most of the people in those concerts are employed. They’ll have stock with Amazon, as does everyone working for Amazon on a full time, permanent contract.

You do realise Amazon is a public company, don’t you? If your country allows fractional shares, you could become an owner of Amazon for £10.

Is the “ruling class” anyone who has a report at Amazon?

sunbeam60 ,

They aren’t “solving it”, yet. They’re desperate to do something to wake up the stock and for investors to have some, any belief in the future of the business.

Whether they’re actually solving anything remains to be seen.

sunbeam60 ,

Earlier than mine, I was 7 digits, but started with a 7 IIRC.

sunbeam60 ,

I used mine in my mail signature for a while and I’ve kept all my emails since late 90s.

sunbeam60 ,

This is what Mozilla should have done a LONG time ago - focussed on browser features, ease of use, compatibility and speed. Make a better browser if you want to win a browser war.

sunbeam60 ,

I definitely don’t want them to continually add more feature cruft. When I said “focussed on features” I simply meant “make sure what they’ve got is second to none”.

sunbeam60 , (edited )

I definitely don’t believe Mozilla should continue to add features. But I like them focussing on the ones they’ve got.

Edit: Changed this comment to better reflect what I actually meant.

sunbeam60 ,

My apologies. I definitely wasn’t meaning to come across indignant. I guess it’s just one of those things of things sounding perfectly clear in your head and not perfectly clear in the receiver’s ear. Hope you have a good day going forward.

sunbeam60 ,

But they don’t keep your history, nor target you, nor enable others to target you. Why is it an issue, under those circumstances, that they rely on bing’s index?

sunbeam60 ,

You can’t. At the end of the day, you’ve got to trust someone. You cannot personally verify every layer of your technology stack. I’m happier with DDG than any other place.

sunbeam60 ,

Let’s spend all that new-found battery life by translating x86 code to ARM code.

sunbeam60 ,

On the x86 architecture, RAM is used by the CPU and the GPU has a huge penalty when accessing main RAM. It therefore has onboard graphics memory.

On ARM this is unified so GPU and CPU can both access the same memory, at the same penalty. This means a huge class of embarrassingly parallel problems can be solved quicker on this architecture.

sunbeam60 ,

Yes unified and extremely slow compared to an ARM architecture’s unified memory, as the GPU sort of acts as if it was discrete.

sunbeam60 ,

It’s been a while since I’ve coded on the Xbox, but at least in the 360, the memory wasn’t really unified as such. You had 10 MB of EDRAM that formed your render target and then there was specialised functions to copy the EDRAM output to DRAM. So it was still separated and while you could create buffers in main memory that you access in the shaders, at some penalty.

It’s not that unified memory can’t be created, but it’s not the architecture of a PC, where peripheral cards communicate over the PCI bus, with great penalties to touch RAM.

Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads (www.techradar.com)

Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....

sunbeam60 ,

Cancelled last month. Don’t miss it. Entertain myself by downloading and installing Linux distributions instead. They usually can be downloaded using torrent/magnet links.

sunbeam60 ,

Yeah, Plex downloads work fine still, on all devices.

Firefox 126: New Search Data Telemetry, Improved Copy Without Site Tracking, Security Fixes, and More (www.mozilla.org)

Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development. These categories are based on 20 high-level content types, such as "sports,” "business," and "travel". This data will not be associated with specific users and will be collected using OHTTP to remove IP...

sunbeam60 ,

For the love of Darwin, really?

Any product manager needs data about how a product is used to make the product better. Of course they need to test if moving a button to a different place leads to an easier to understand setting screen; or if moving extensions into a separate menu means fewer people find the malicious extension and turn it off.

I’ll be the first person to say that Mozilla is bigger than it needs to be and their org size isn’t justified by their results. But to think collecting data automatically makes them suspect seems to me lazy. It’s what they do with the data that counts.

sunbeam60 ,

If you go through my comment history you’ll find me saying, multiple times, that Mozilla has worked itself into this problem, by adding far more people than they need. The browser would be healthier, I suspect, if there was a 50-strong, open-collective backed, dev team working on just the browser. At the minute the org is enormous and they now need to find a way to pay for that enormous org.

sunbeam60 ,

Because that allows them to sell the default search engine spot for more; the more you know about an audience the more it’s worth, even this high up the food chain.

sunbeam60 ,

They are specifically not tying it to people, but to countries.

sunbeam60 ,

Discord is honestly the most awful way to create a helpful community.

It’s a great way to give the 20 most active members of the community someplace to trample on top of newbies trying to get questions answered.

sunbeam60 ,

I’ve already paid for a lifetime license of Plex. Is it worth considering a switch?

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