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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
1
Comments
248
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • Now I am wiser! Thanks AON.

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  • Bad for the bee as well...

  • Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags

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  • I'd like to think that the bag is step 1. Step 2 is to balance an old car tire on top, and set it on fire.

  • What if you dropped a bowling ball in the Mariana Trench?

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  • Water is compressible; it has a bulk modulus of about 2.2 GPa. So at the 1086 bar at the bottom of the Mariana trench (~109 MPa), it'll have compressed about (109 / 2200) ~= 5%. Materials with a different bulk modulus to water may start to float at sufficiently high depths.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_modulus#Selected_values

  • xkcd #3248: 182.8 Meters

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  • If you've 24" tyres and a first gear ratio of 3.5:1, then:

    RPM x (pi x 24" circumference )x (1/63360 miles per inch) x (60 minutes per hour) x (1/3.5 ratio) = 4.5 mph

    Giving the RPM at a satisfyingly round 221.6 rpm.

  • A security researcher says Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, releases an exploit to prove it

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  • It's extremely easy to fuck up cryptography code; you require both extraordinary mathematical insight and the programming skills to defend against every known and future side-channel attack. I would suggest instead trusting software where you can read the source yourself, and which has been openly reviewed by a selection of experts in the field.

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    ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

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  • "Also, be sure not to hallucinate and don't make any mistakes."

  • Movies

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  • Completely perfect as it was, no? Stallone and Snipes having a great time chewing the scenery and playing off each other, Bullock perfect as the ingénue that's down to cyber; lots of iconic ratburgers, sea shells and Taco Bell. Admittedly, the far off year of 2032 doesn't seem that far off any more.

    If we're going to be remaking action movies from 1993, then I'm voting for Hard Target. JCVD is amazing at kicking things but terrible at anything that does not involve kicking things; don't mind some dumb stylish action but you don't have to be stupid.

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  • Scientific method and all that. Any conjecture is okay.

    Now, what's the hypothesis that you can make out of it? We've plenty of observations that don't match theory, which we believe to be on account of dark matter - galaxy rotation speeds, what happens in the core of a type 2 supernova, and so on. Does this hypothesis explain those problems better than what we have?

    If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, discard it. Repeat, until we've solved all the mysteries of the universe by banging our heads against them.

    This strikes me as the kind of conjecture that has no predictive power, and therefore must be discarded, but I'm no PhD-level theoretical physicist.

  • Amazon employees are “tokenmaxxing” due to pressure to use AI tools

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    Amazon staff use AI tool for unnecessary tasks to inflate usage scores

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  • Our forever-DM is all-in on AI generation of stuff. Which I understand; it's a role that requires a lot of thankless prep, and he wants all of the in-game maps and character artwork to look fancy. But on the other hand, I play D+D for the human interaction of it, and actually prefer the 'theatre of the mind' way of playing it. Dry-wipe pens on a whiteboard, there's your adventure map. Now get roleplaying. If I wanted to play a computer game, then I'd play a computer game.

  • As the U.S. starves it of oil, Cuba is pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet — with China’s help

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  • My wife used to work for a company that manufactured the glass for solar panels in the UK, but there was just no way that they could compete with Chinese prices. They would have had to have sold it below cost to match, let alone make any profit. It's not the most labour-intensive of industries, but the energy costs are massive to melt all the glass. China has made massive investments in hydro and has a lot of cheap power for industry, which ironically means that making solar panels for green power is easier too.

  • A reimagined classic

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  • "This looks shopped" to "This looks slopped" is just such an easy single-character change. And not making the effort to get six fingers on his hand is just a missed opportunity. Needs more reimagining.

  • Microsoft finally open sources DOS 1.0 - and it's so much more than the code

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  • An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there's much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can't be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn't changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there's not much point in redoing it.

    When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don't touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can't touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That's not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.

    And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn't any Linux at that point.

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    "This could cost people their jobs": VS Code added Copilot as co-author without permission or notice

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  • Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I've found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it's unbeatable.

    I've also found that "fancy Git dialogs" just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.

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  • I just don't see the thinking here.

    • buy a decent steak
    • leave it out at room temperature for an hour so that it will cook properly. During this time, prepare the vegetables, potatoes, sauce that will go with it.
    • cook the steak for two minutes a side in a heavy frying pan on high heat
    • let the steak rest somewhere warm for ten minutes while you finish assembling everything else.

    I could spend a fucking fortune, enough to live on for months, to cook my steak upright in a toaster for 90 seconds instead, for a worse end result, and it would save me zero time, because cooking the steak is not the time-critical step here.

    Would only save you time if you're buying the kind of steak that can be cooked in 90 seconds, and taking it straight from the fridge, cooking it, and then putting it in sandwich, and anyone who thinks that sounds a good idea frankly doesn't deserve to have a decent steak.

  • This one goes out to the guy who said made up British words is his least favorite meme genre

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  • How do you feel about chimneysweeps with a cock-er-nee accent and their own dancing penguins? We've got one of those going spare. :starts whistling:

  • What Is A Good Sub $300 Computer I Can Use For A Server?

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  • They're quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.

    Fortunately, there's businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won't run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it's my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.

  • When you love systemd so much every aspect of your life has a unit file

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  • ... which is ironic, since SystemD is what happens when someone comes up with a problem to fix your solution.