Posts by SlippyBuckfast

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

It's in the AWS interview process

Assuming these employees have passed the Amazon interview process to get in, they are either fun loving incredibly social people who love interacting directly with people and working 60 hour weeks for a billionaire. Or... they lied there way through it like I'd imagine most british folk would - and would much rather not deal with the realities of their sweaty boring coworkers in their face 8 hours a day, microwaving tuna, talking constantly, pulling them into useless meetings. The roost POI is coming into view... I suppose lucky in that my UK company was already really flexible, with only key support folk being in the office and meeting already starting to migrate to Team/Slack/Google when covid hit - The CEO read the room, closed our office and we now all work from home - no office overheads, wasted time in meetings plummeted, and happy people who can actually combine their work with their life - something that US companies never seem to see a distiction between. One of several reasons why I could never work for a US company, The old mantra of 'I work to live, I don't live to work' is an anathama to US companies - to them that just means you are slacking.

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

Here here. The sooner facebook goes titsup the better imho. Nothing good has ever come out of it. It's negative by design. If you've not read it, "Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" by Jaron Lanier is worth a read.

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Re: An option to turn them into security cameras would make this really popular

can do that now - i use 'AtHome' app.

only issue is that I've gone through 3 phones now, since plugged in all the time the battery charging circuitry seems to be absolute shite. so after about a year the battery starts blowing up like a whale, inflating the whole phone till it stops working. by then its buggered it and a new battery isn't enough.

all caused by crap charging circuitry. So far thats been one chinese thing, one motorola, and the last a very nice samsung s6..

Apple now Arm'd to the teeth: MacBook Air and Pro, Mac mini to be powered by custom M1 chips rather than Intel

memory

As a long term mac user (8 of em in the house), I'm more interested in this than I thought I was - if it can really make editing my 4k video and 360 video quicker out traveling. But I reckon I'll wait for independant benchmarks. Especially for how fast rosetta2 stuff runs - since other than apple apps that's what you'll be getting for a good while.

I'm concerned about memory for the pro stuff though - that 8gb now has to do GPU and CPU duty. Before you had your discrete 4 or 8gb GPU memory also. Seems to me that GPU intensive tasks are going to hog most of that 8gb now, and cause real problems ?

For example, on my 2017 macbook when I process/stitch 360 footage with Instal360 Studio it heavily uses the GPU. Since it only has intel graphics I found I needed to reduce the screen resolution down to 720p (not HiDPI) to free enough system memory to allow the GPU to do it's stuff. I'd have thought you'd have the same issues on the M1 ? Only here they are selling that as 'pro'.

Talking of which - what exactly IS the difference between the air and pro ? 1 extra GPU core (which you can have on the upgraded air) and a fan ? that seems to be it really ? unless you count the stupid touchbar. I'd hardly say that counts as 'pro'... the fact it has only 2 thunderbolts also suggests under the covers it's just the air with a fan....

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

Helping Google

Privacy aside, the reason I hate them is I'm effectively helping google build it's AI by finding fire hydrants, traffic lights, etc. They have effectively built the world's largest free human labour image recognition machine - and that's what gets my goat most.

'I don’t want to see another computer for the rest of my life'... Brit Dark Overlord cyber-extortionist thrown in an American clink for five years

white collar crime

5 years.

If he was working class, black and just shop lifted 3 times he'd be in for life. The wonderful US justice system in action

Facebook rejects Australia's pay-for-news plan, proposes its own idea: How about no more articles at all, sunshine?

Re: Klaatu Barata Nikto!

"no different than trying to a charge a web site for linking to your content"

I don't think it is. facebook is sort of a walled garden. Kinda like AOL was. except everyone is on it. So whereas it was never possible to stop 'the internet' linking to and effectively copying your stories - it is with facebook - the analogy I'd make is more like say a newspaper coming out that is just a copy of the previous days competitor newspaper. you'd not accept that either morally (stealing) or practically (day out of date). facebook steals it, makes money out of it, and it's up to date.