jocanib
@jocanib@lemmy.world
- Comment on This startup is bringing a 'voice frequency absorber' to CES 2024 | TechCrunch 5 months ago:
Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.
Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they’re travelling at the time.
Plus, I’ve seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.
- Comment on Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Fujitsu dev whistleblower 5 months ago:
The fact that there was invisibilised third party access to the accounts used as the basis for prosecutions is important in and of itself. But I’m not seeing much about the underlying reasons for it.
Fujitsu knew that Horizon didn’t work properly before it was rolled out to the Post Office. They were told by their own engineers that parts of it had to be rewitten because they were so shoddy. They chose, instead, to have a team of people correcting errors in the background, without disclosing this to subpostmasters or, apparently, the Post Office.
The concern is not that Fujitsu’s trouble-shooters might be deliberately falsifying accounts, there is no obvious motive for them to do so. But it does make it clear that the ramshackle system did not work properly, that Fujitsu knew that it did not work properly, and that the only errors which could be corrected were the ones that got picked up centrally, with the process for correcting them creating the potential for more human error in the process.
Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider
There’s an interesting report on the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance site also: Origins of a disaster (and long form version.
It is well-documented that the Post Office’s Legacy Horizon was a reconfigured version of a disastrously flawed parent project, the Benefits Payment Card. The impression given by three Secretaries of State to a Parliamentary Select Committee in July 1999 was that, once the BPC was thought to be irredeemably faulty by autumn 1998, all efforts were then focused on the reconfiguration into the Horizon project as we know it. But their evidence was far from complete. In late 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who had been warned of the system’s instability, was asked to decide the future of Horizon. The No.10 Policy Unit had advised on cancelling the BPC and the Law Officers had given a clear view on how the public sector might terminate the project. Blair’s steer, however, paid no heed.
Many extremely well-paid heads need to roll.
- Comment on Could Superman cook a batch of chilli so spicy that he couldn't eat it? 5 months ago:
If he were said to be omnipotent, this would be an interesting conundrum. But he isn’t so it doesn’t really work?
- Comment on Antenna TV is pretty cool, actually 8 months ago:
Is this another thing that the rest of the world didn’t know the US doesn’t have?
- Comment on School absences: The school picking kids up from home to boost attendance 8 months ago:
In primary school?
- Comment on Is Wealth University job application process a scam? 8 months ago:
I’m not sure it’s ever legit for the job-hunter to be paying the recruiters. It would normally be the employer.
A % commission doesn’t give that much incentive to find you the very best job as opposed to the first one that will do. You’re paying them a percentage but they’re looking at the return per hour of work they put in. You’ll come under a lot of pressure to accept the first job on offer simply because that job gives them the best return even if it is a smaller cash amount than the best job they could possibly find (if they put the time in).
Their incentives do not align well with your incentives. So best avoided, IMO.
- Comment on Re-installing a wall-to-wall closet 8 months ago:
It’s a free-standing waste of space when the nook for the cupboard is already there?
- Comment on West Midlands mayor calls for Crooked House pub to be rebuilt ‘brick by brick’ 10 months ago:
He actually made that demand before they illegally demolished it, when the facade was still mostly intact. I don’t think it would have been very practical but still, they absolutely cannot allow the developers to profit from this vandalism.
They should build a mining museum on the site, with a modern but still wonky design (and coins rolling uphill). And force the crooked developers to donate the site as part of a plea deal. It may have been impossible to prove they were behind the arson but a piece of piss to prove that they were behind the illegal demolition.
- Comment on Fire engulfs historic pub famed for being wonkiest in Britain 10 months ago:
Rebuilding this would be impossible, I think. But listing the ruins to ensure they are preserved rather than redeveloped would be fitting, as would prosecuting the fuck out of these arseholes.
Neither will happen, of course. As a semi-local, I hope the locals find ways to make sure any redevelopment is a loss-making disaster for the new owners.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
we are on the internet talking about people using social networks
Exactly. Other people care about different things for equally good reasons. Unless you are doing absolutely everything that other people might want to focus their energies on, you’re a fucking hypocrite. And if you are doing even a tiny fraction of those things successfully, you’re a rich kid playing at life and berating everyone else for not having been born lucky.
Quit it. Please.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
Because everyone has enough time on their hands, right? Capitalism doesn’t keep them scrabbling for rent money and food and too busy to know what’s going on with their family, let alone the wider world. They’ve got all the time in the world. That’s why you’re a vegan riding a handmade wooden bicycle and handwoven clothes, living off grid, never using anything with a combustion engine, or any consumer electronics you can’t make for yourself from scratch, or a corporate ISP, and not growing your own food because farming is more sustainable, so you get it all direct from the farm gates.
I mean, I’m guessing you’re not. But if you are, it’s because you’re wealthy enough to make those choices. Most people are not, as well you know. And those who can make some of those choices can pretty much never make all or even most of them. And it is not up to you to decide which choices they should make, or berate them for not making the choices you yourself made.
It is about power, not individuals. Alienating the people you need onside is downright fucking daft.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
Of course it is. But attacking other people for not joining your boycott is attacking other people, not the system. Like I said, talk about why you boycott X but don’t sneer at or lecture anyone who is not also boycotting X.
This is not hard.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
People need to do a lot of things. Very few people have the time to do everything they’d like to do, let alone everything you’d like them to do.
Attack the systems that trap us, not the people who are trapped by them. This is not hard.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
FFS. There is no point lecturing people from on high. Talk about it, sure. Information is good. But moralising will do nothing useful. Point your fingers at the bad guys, not the people who are just trying to live their lives under mostly quite difficult circumstances. Improve the environment in which people are forced to make difficult trade-offs. Don’t bully them for facing difficult trade-offs and not being obsessed about exactly the same things you are. It will do you, or anyone else, any good. The problems are structural, fight the structures.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
Stoopid sheeple. They should listen to you, sneering at them.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
I know, everyone in the world who is not on the Fediverse is an evil, lazy scumbag and the absolute best way to get them to switch is to sneer and scold. No matter what communities they have built, what access to information they need, how difficult it is to rebuild that elsewhere, they’re all just terrible people compared to you, polishing your halo in the corner.
This line of argument is bogus and self-defeating. Quit it.
- Comment on People Want To Use Things But Not Own The Consequences Of Its Use. 11 months ago:
Individual choices are constrained. Admonishing people for living in this world that we live in is straight from the Big Carbon playbook.
- Comment on Can a reply to an ongoing email conversation land in spam? 11 months ago:
Yes. It’s happened to me and it is a head fuck. The email was from a business with a perfectly legit email address.
- Comment on Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships? 11 months ago:
There are exceptions to the rule, and this is one of them.
The rule works so well because journalists who can make a statement of fact, make a statement of fact. When they can’t stand the idea up, they use a question mark for cover. eg China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment? .
This is an opinion piece which is asking a philosophical question. The rule does not apply.
- Comment on ‘World Of Warcraft’ Players Trick AI-Scraping Games Website Into Publishing Nonsense 11 months ago:
tbf this is not very much different from how many flesh’n’blood journalists have been finding content for years. [brixtonbuzz.com/…/the-pumped-up-squirrel-of-rush-…](The legendary crack squirrels of Brixton) was nearly two decades ago now (yikes!). Fox was a little late to the party with U.K. Squirrels Are Nuts About Crack in 2015.
Obviously, I want flesh’n’blood writers getting paid for their plagiarism-lite, not the cheapskates who automate it. But this kind of embarrassing error is a feature of the genre. And it has been gamed on social media for some time now (eg Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson forced to deny shooting stones at squirrels after spoof story goes viral)
I don’t know what it is about squirrels…
- Comment on Data privacy: how to counter the "I have nothing to hide" argument? 11 months ago:
