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Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.Coding since 1998..NET Foundation member. C# fan https://d.sb/Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • They usually have a coupon code for $7.99 for any footlong, which isn't too bad.

  • Only bogans tend to use it though.

  • Every service you can sign up for online in the USA has an easy cancelation process, as Californian law mandates it. However, some services geogate that process so that only Californians can use it, making everyone else go through a more tedious process, just because they can.

    FTC click-to-cancel (which is modeled after the Californian law) can't come soon enough. Companies are complaining about it because they make a lot of money by retaining customers that want to cancel, but it would be very easy for them to all roll out their California-specific cancelation flows to everyone.

  • How long until they replace driving lessons with a page that says "not driving a car is the only 100% effective method to prevent car crashes"?

  • China has banned practically all US social media sites, not just Meta-owned properties. A bunch of other sites are blocked too.

    China generally wants major internet services to have servers in China itself, similar to how the EU wants citizens' data to remain in the EU. In order to operate servers located in China, you need to get a license from the Chinese government (ICP license). Large sites that don't do this tend to get banned by the Great Firewall.

  • I think they became more shady after the investment from Francisco Partners, who are likely trying to squeeze more value from the company. I think Gamers Nexus mentioned this in the previous video.

  • RIP. HowStuffWorks was one of the first websites I used, in the early 2000s. I think I found it via Yahooligans (Yahoo directory for kids).

  • Yeah I think Framework does it well and they've worked with AMD to have first class Linux support. AMD have submitted bug fixes to the Linux kernel specifically for the Framework laptops. For Linux, AMD is a much better choice than Nvidia. I've got a Framework 16 but don't have the dGPU.

    At work I have to use a Lenovo with Nvidia graphics though, with Fedora or Windows (or a MacBook Pro, but Apple is not for me). I've got a desktop (ThinkStation P620) and a laptop (X1 Extreme Gen5).

    My personal desktop PC has a GTX1080. I don't really game on it any more so I've considered buying a roughly equivalent AMD GPU second-hand to have a better experience on Linux. Honestly I'd be fine with onboard graphics but the CPU (an older Ryzen) doesn't have onboard graphics.

  • Tap to pay is much safer though.

  • Mastercard started removing the magnetic strip from new cards this year in some European countries, and want to completely remove it worldwide by 2029.

    In the US, I've actually got one card that doesn't have a magnetic strip: a debit card for Target stores (gives 5% discount for every purchase which is why I have it).

  • It's a thing (or used to be a thing) in Australia too: a voucher or prepaid debit card that can only be used to buy food, given to low-income residents.

    Australia actually has a proper safety net for low-income residents though, with public health care and monthly payments from the government if you're unemployed and looking for a job, or you're a child / young adult and your parents are low income, or a few other cases.

  • I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can't ban maths.

    If I remember correctly, there's also a law in Australia where they can force tech companies to introduce backdoors in their systems and encryption algorithms, and the company must not tell anyone about it. AFAIK they haven't tried to actually use that power yet, but it made the (already relatively stagnant) tech market in Australia even worse. Working in tech is the main reason I left Australia for the USA - there's just so many more opportunities and significantly higher paying jobs for software developers in Silicon Valley.

  • Most laptops with discrete Nvidia and AMD GPUs also have onboard/integrated graphics and only use the Nvidia/AMD GPU when something graphically-intensive is happening (playing a game, video editing or encoding/decoding, etc). They call this "hybrid graphics".

    However, the HDMI port on the laptop (as well as the USB-C graphics) is wired directly to the Nvidia GPU (I'll call this the "dGPU" from now on). This means that when an external monitor is plugged in but nothing graphically intense is being done, the screen is rendered on the iGPU, then sent to the dGPU to send over the HDMI port.

    The hand-off between the dGPU and iGPU (called "reverse PRIME") is basically voodoo magic. People have tried to get it working in Linux, but there's a bunch of issues with it.

    To get dual monitors working properly on my work laptop (Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen5 with an RTX3050), I have to go into the BIOS and force it to only use the dGPU (disable the hybrid mode). If I don't do that, the external monitor renders at maybe 5fps? A coworker got it working by instead forcing the Nvidia card to always use a high clock speed for the RAM instead of reducing it to save power, but I haven't tired that.

    This is a laptop-specific problem, only for laptops with hybrid graphics. I have no problems using three monitors on a desktop PC.

  • USB-C supports both digital and analog audio. HDMI only supports digital audio though, so in that case the DAC would be in whatever device you're plugging the HDMI cable into.

  • Which is a great approach IMO. The advantages of dongles without the inconvenience. The Framework 16 has 6 ports which is more than enough for me. I use two USB-C, two USB-A, headphone, and SD card. I sometimes swap the SD card slot for MicroSD, and one of the USB-C for Ethernet. I have HDMI and DisplayPort for if I need them.

  • They've got a deal that's three years for $99 but you have to really push them to offer it to you. They say it's for new customers only but it really isn't.

  • I learnt HTML and JS by viewing the source code of major sites like Yahoo (this was in the early 2000s so CSS wasn't extremely widespread yet). That's practically impossible these days due to how much bulkier sites have gotten. Back then, HTML and JS were simple, unminified, and easy to understand.

  • CSS is still used.

    Modern CSS is pretty different to MySpace-era CSS though. Floats are practically never used any more, absolute positioning is a lot rarer than it used to be, and flexbox and CSS grid have made making page layouts far easier. There's also many things we can do with pure CSS now that used to require JS.

  • Honestly, one of the criteria when I was looking for a house was whether Sonic was available in the area. Really glad to have escaped Xfinity (I didn't have a choice at my previous place)

    In case you didn't already see it, take a look at their transparency page :) https://www.sonic.com/transparency