Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: Tesla should deal

I have no idea what you're on about but this is one labour union taking industrial action out of solidarity with another labour union.

Lenovo's USB-C Power Banks pack more heat than expected

Re: 20,000 mAh

I assumed it's because they're miniatures and it's cute.

I'm reminded me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's tale about serving on a jury in a drug possession trial and arguing with the judge over the use of milligrams rather than grams to describe the alleged amounts, being prejudicial to the defendant because it makes the amounts sound gigantic.

Sure, but they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts either, they're managing their liability. At least an iPhone that doesn't work when you Hold It Wrong™ won't burn your house down...

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Re: I can't help but feel....

Elon Musk owns 42% of SpaceX and holds 79% of the voting rights. So for better or worse, SpaceX does what he tells it to. The only recourse any other investors have is to sell.

Re: Self destruct

The "leniency" in the programming of the Flight Termination System (FTS) is dictated by the launch licence, and while Elon Musk doesn't respect many things, he does respect those.

Corrective action

In the process, the heavy-lift rocket even destroyed a chunk of its own launch pad. That mess earned SpaceX 63 corrective actions from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) – all of which the space cadets seemingly took on the chin.

As I understand it, SpaceX proposed those 63 corrective actions.

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

Re: Only one choice, really

I don't know about that... Steve's in his 70s and unlike Space Karen, Zuck has actually been training.

Re: Whoever wrote this article

Hmm, they must have their heads screwed on the right way around in that part of SF

48-nation bloc to crack down on using crypto assets to avoid tax

Four years!

Why not just ban it all right now?

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

Atomic Motors?

Based on the headline alone you might think this is a rocket motor when it's just a power generator, so that's a bit misleading

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

Re: Maybe this is the issue about ALT+F4 and AI

Some yobs will say ',don't use extensions at all', and to that I say: should we bring back Lynx

We could bring back Opera 12?

The number of extensions I need to use in modern browsers just to replicate what Opera 12 did natively is still a bit ridiculous.

Major telco outage leaves millions of Australians disconnected

Re: I Feel for the small shops...

Square went down here a couple of months back. A restaurant had me pay for my lunch by direct deposit.

It was only when I got home that I noticed I'd still paid them for the Square transaction fee...

Re: I Feel for the small shops...

We were already enthusiastic adopters of contactless payments pre-pandemic, but that was basically the final nail in cash's coffin.

Re: Who, Me?

Even 000 wasn't working from Optus landlines according to some reports which is... yeah.

What staggers me is the sheer amount of critical public infrastructure that apparently doesn't have a fallback mode and simply fails when it loses comms.

Who, Me?

I cannot wait for the Who, Me? episode about this one.

GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims

Why is GPS accuracy on mobile phones such a problem?

The GPS head unit I use on my bike yields far more accurate results (to within low single digit metres and quite repeatable) than the output of <social network masquerading as a fitness tracking app> (which is low double digit metres at best).

Why is this? Are the GPS receivers in phones that bad, or is it simply the app being terrible?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Then again, supermarkets have struggled with this ever since introducing 'loyalty cards' for customer profiling.

One of Australia's big two supermarket chains recently began gating some (but not all) of its regular yellow ticket specials behind a loyalty card. I can't articulate why very well, but it feels completely bizarre to me. I suppose I'll be using the other one of the big two more regularly?

Re: For now...

I use RSS for all of the channels I "follow". You don't only watch what you directly follow, surely?

I can highly recommend a 76 minute video on flat earth...

Folding Ideas: In Search of a Flat Earth

I often tell youtube "not <category>" (e.g. road cycling videos listed as "downhill mountain biking").

Yes I know it probably doesn't help one bit.

Re: For now...

I have a painstakingly curated list of channels I never want to have recommended to me, and logging out of the google account I created for that purpose would, unfortunately, open the floodgates.

However there are already suggestions for alternatives elsewhere in this comments section, that I'll be investigating.

For now...

...it appears that you can still watch youtube videos in a private window, even if you've been blocked.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Wait...

...so you're telling me smart meters are a scam?

Knock me down with a feather.

Look, boss – Nvidia's still cool with staff working from home

Re: A contrary view

I thought that in context it was clear I was referring only to my own experience. Apologies for not inserting "my" into that statement.

If anyone finds their mental health improves after taking work home with them, more power to them!

Re: A contrary view

I agree that flexibility is best. My employer is even downsizing offices now on the expectation that a certain proportion of staff will WFH some of the time, but it's not a tech behemoth with campuses to fill.

A contrary view

Fortunate, perhaps, to have a 20-25 minute commute, I couldn't get back to the office soon enough after lockdown was lifted. Certain aspects of WFH were convenient, but it also led to work being spread out out over longer hours, and there was nobody to talk to. I've since realised that I simply don't want to have to think about work at all outside business hours, so I packed up my home office and I now keep the two entirely separate. Even though my organisation went mobile well before 2019, these days all I carry when I leave the office is my keys, wallet and phone. Much better for mental health.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

Re: Crypto Currency

They don't say it much any more but coiners used to like the glib "Backed By Math". It never made any sense, of course.

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Re: Twas ever thus...

I once had a Win7 install that was effectively destroyed by a failed update. It permanently broke the Windows Update system.

Epic cut: Fortnite games maker culls 16% of staff

Re: Unreal

I don't think we should deceive ourselves; Epic offers better store terms to attract developers. The moment the Epic store reaches critical mass, the fees are going up.

For some reason I'd forgotten about Epic's store, but it looks like the Unreal games aren't available there either. I think that settles it. Even worse, "Unreal" is now the name of a minigame editor for Fortnite...

Re: Unreal

Quake isn't and never has been an Epic Games property

Re: Unreal

As I understand it, it's absolutely because of Fortnite. At least one more UT game was in development but it was cancelled some time after Fortnite blew up.

Totally bizarre to then bury your own history, though.

Unreal

Epic could shrivel up and die and few would weep because it seems to have buried its own history.

Not only was the Unreal series cancelled, now you apparently can't even buy any of the Unreal games. I can't find them on GOG, Steam or Epic's own game store. Unreal is now a game engine and that's it.

So Epic can go to hell.

Mixin suspends deposits and withdrawals after $200m cryptocurrency heist

We're 15 years in now; there are no innocents left in crypto. Anyone who still gambles their money on it deserves everything they get. The schadenfreude is absolutely pure and clean now.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

I don't understand...

...peoples' obsession with what others are putting on their pizza.

If you don't like pineapple on pizza, don't order pizza with pineapple on it. Simple!

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

On false equivalences

It's somewhat akin to Adobe, which is already expensive software, waking up one day and deciding it requires a slice of all revenue generated where PhotoShop, Premiere Pro, After Effects etc were involved in the production of that good or service. Or a more mundane example – a tool manufacturer taking royalties from any house purchase where its hammers were used in construction.

I can understand the reaction of the community, especially if Unity itself said it would never go down this path, but I don't believe it is akin to the examples you gave. When you produce an image with Photoshop, or a movie with Premiere, or build a house with a hammer, the resulting product doesn't contain Photoshop or Premiere or the hammer. Unity is more than simply a development tool because games and other software that run on Unity also contain Unity.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Modern design standards and owner expectations would require it to weigh more than twice as much as the old car.

Have a look at how unsuccessful the Tata Nano was to get an idea of how many drivers want a modern Fiat 500...

Guy who ran Bitcoins4Less tells Feds he had less than zero laundering protections

Re: Cheap sentence?

Is early parole/release allowed on federal sentences in the US?

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Elon vs. ADL

Well you can attempt to sue someone for anything you like. How successful that is, and whether you get away without sanction, is another question...

People like Musk throw around legal threats as an intimidation tactic. Back off or we're going to waste your money, essentially. I wouldn't be surprised if he never consulted his legal team about most of them.

The only thing launched for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a lawsuit

Re: Random braking

I figured that was the joke

Los Alamos finishes installing Crossroads super to test nukes without a big bang

Tad bit late for that I think. NK has already demonstrated both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that work, at least some of the time.

I don't think even they are mad enough to attempt a live demonstration of the complete system, so I'll leave the speculation as to whether they could actually achieve that to the expert analysts...

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Huh

E-meters have software now. Does that mean there was something "wrong" with the old ones?

Hollywood studios agree AI-generated content should not reduce humans' pay or credit

Re: Not good enough

Very good.

It seems I "very might well" need an LLM to check that I've edited words into the correct order...

Writers don't make films.

Good writers still write good stuff and there are still plenty of them, but you don't see it very often these days presumably because it's too "risky".

Re: Not good enough

Perhaps I should have chosen the joke alert avatar rather than the devil, but then I'm not 100% joking either. If an LLM generates its output based on copyrighted material, credit very might well be due.

Copyright protection periods are definitely way too long though.

...

Who currently owns the copyright to Adolf Hitler's works, if anyone?

Not good enough

Credit should be given to every writer whose work was included in the AI model's training dataset.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Ahh yes...

What was it that Colbert said about the truth?

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

I don't think you understand it either.

Sure, I'm not a US constitutional legal expert or even a student of US constitutional law.

It doesn't matter very much what Elon Musk has the right to do. For him to shout from the rooftops about freedom of speech while actively censoring others is the height of hypocrisy.

Brainwaves rock! Scientists decode Pink Floyd tune straight from the noggin

Re: Visceral response

I think Pink Floyd wrote a lot of those, too.

Interestingly, there are a lot of prog rock and prog metal bands that have their own "version" of Comfortably Numb, in some way or another. For me they often trigger the same emotions as the original.