Sturgist
@Sturgist@lemmy.ca
Stone Mason, Canadian ExPat living in the UK, Hobbyist musician.
- Comment on Fetcharr - a human-developed Huntarr replacement 16 hours ago:
If I’m understanding the description on the git page correctly, it scans you media library, logs the resolution/format/etc, then searches wherever it’s pointed(torrent trackers?) for better quality versions.
- Comment on Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant 1 day ago:
Depends on how much you enjoy fresh installs of your OS
- Comment on System76 on Age Verification Laws 3 days ago:
Ok, then just start region blocking places with these laws. If the OS connects to the internet and sees it’s in a banned region it locks itself down irreparably or deletes the network drivers and permanently blocks reinstallation. Region block all said regions from even downloading the install files. Put a legally valid entry in the EULA saying that use in those regions is absolutely prohibited without exception and any use by anyone is without the company’s permission and all responsibility for that is on the user.
- Comment on Tech industry is in tariff hell, even if refunds are automated 3 days ago:
See…that’s the kind of logic that gets people places!
… unfortunately in the US the place it might get you is the gulag…
- Comment on NVIDIA could enter the desktop CPU market with performance equal to AMD and Intel 3 days ago:
No worries bud! The wording is still ridiculous…and also fuck Nvidia 😒🖕
- Comment on NVIDIA could enter the desktop CPU market with performance equal to AMD and Intel 3 days ago:
25% lower clock speed isnt “far below”
AHEM! AKTCHEWALEE… it’s 20% which is even less qualified to be “far below” the other two.
- Comment on Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops 3 days ago:
I mean…yeah…I guess I could live with homebrew tech on a scale of 64gb of ram being the size of a full fridge…but where the fuck do I put it?! Between the my wife and I there’s barely enough space for us and just our stuff in the house we own…😒🖕 Fucking Big Corpo Tech is in bed with Big Housing to conspire against the space required for Big HomebrewTech to be a contender…
- Comment on Tech industry is in tariff hell, even if refunds are automated 3 days ago:
I mean… personally? I don’t feel like this is actually that much of a hot take. More of a verifiably good idea.
- Comment on Tech industry is in tariff hell, even if refunds are automated 3 days ago:
The big tech doesn’t deserve
to fail.a bail out, but will definitely be getting one. - Comment on there is a special place in hell for these scientists 3 days ago:
That kinda dodges the conflict by not engaging with ethical concerns at all.
I guess I…kinda lost the plot a bit when I wrote the second part, eh?
There’s ethics…and then there’s what the government in the country a scientist operates in views as “morally and ethically acceptable”.
Stem cell research was banned in most places for a long time. The US is banning CRISPR, if I remember right, the OG Nazis, Soviets and Empire of Japan (and honestly basically everyone else too, just those are the three that were highlighted when I was in school) rubber-stamped and funded research that should warrant execution by vivisection…die by your own methods and all that.You’re right it’s not really a solution. However the realities of modern society means that there’s room within what is morally and ethically acceptable in any country to operate in both a humane and inhumane fashion. And if it doesn’t then money and connections to those in power allow further leeway to be an example of humanity at it’s best…or a monster in a human suit…
- Comment on A Wired analysis shows that ICE & CBP have collectively spent at least $515 million on products from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir in the last few years alone. 3 days ago:
I know you are probably joking.
Its flagship products—Gotham (for intelligence and defense) and Foundry (for commercial and civil use)—connect previously siloed databases to support intelligence operations, counterterrorism analysis, law enforcement, and enterprise analytics.
- Comment on there is a special place in hell for these scientists 3 days ago:
Science and Ethics — the age old enmity between “I wanna know” and
“I’m not allowed to find out”“Am I able to find out without doing something monstrously inhumane”FTFY
- Comment on there is a special place in hell for these scientists 4 days ago:
Honestly? Sounds preferable to being stuck in the universe of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream… I’ll take a challenging power fantasy with some massively overpowered weapons over millennia of endless physical and psychological torture by an insane AI… might just be me though…
- Comment on An old excuse 4 days ago:
- Comment on Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops 4 days ago:
So, some of rakabis’ advice is pretty good. I’ll just say that if you’re wanting to get away from being locked into a computational ecosystem with an even worse support life, avoid buying a Mac. A 2018 MacBook stopped receiving 90% of updates in 2024.
Caveat that by saying that older MacBooks, i.e. pre Mac made chips, are usually pretty reasonably priced on the used market. If you’re willing to switch to Linux then there’s even really good support for the hardware, with basically every distro working on MacBooks with Intel chips out of the box. The only part of deploying Linux on my wife’s 2017 MB Air that was REALLY a headache was the webcam. There’s info on every step to get the drivers installed and everything working, it’s just not all in one place, and a little outdated. - Comment on Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops 4 days ago:
Oh yeah…for well over a decade. If you’re REALLY lucky the proprietary form factor m.2 is user replaceable and not just sad bits soldered direct to the PCB.
My wife has a 2017 MacBook Air, at some point in the last few years it stopped getting system and security updates. She didn’t notice until she got a pop-up from Chrome saying that her OS is no longer supported. Completely ignored it until around October last year when some websites stopped working and gave an error indicating out of date certificates.
(There’s a lot in those last 3 sentences that is wildly troubling to me…)
Took me from October until mid-January to convince her to TRY Linux. So I went to buy her a new m.2…and paid an extra £20 on top of standard because of the proprietary form factor. Luckily I bought before the major price hikes…got a 256gb m(ac).2 for ~£90. Would have just backed up her files and wiped the original drive but she wanted to be able to switch back to her exact installation if she didn’t like Linux…and the new drive is double the capacity 👍 - Comment on Lenovo’s New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability— Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo's new T-series laptops 4 days ago:
Hey… people win the lotto all the time! So for brief moments throughout the day there’s probably 101-107 people in the world who can still afford one!
- Comment on Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought. 4 days ago:
Already had a read through it this morning. Seems like some few not too bad ideas mixed through with quite a lot of poorly thought out ones.
- Comment on Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought. 4 days ago:
Or switch to one of the growing number of Linux distros who have taken the stance of “not a fucking chance are we complying with that idiocy” and then just hope where you live doesn’t pass a law like this and those distros are forced to region block downloads for you 👍
There’s also the worry that if enough places push something like this through, could end up being a case of a vast swath of the internet will just refuse to work without receiving an approved “Age Assurance Signal”…
Or the bigger worry that this is the beginning of the end of proper human interaction with the internet. Access and child protection laws become so strict that only chat bot agents are legally authorised to use the internet and we all become beholden to these programs for everything from looking up a recipe to requesting access to research papers to help support your masters thesis or fucking whatever.
- Comment on Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought. 4 days ago:
Honestly? I’ve done a lot of looking over the last few days and he’s literally the only person I’ve found talking about the Brazilian law coming into effect in 12 days. If you have seen any coverage from anyone else, I would be really interested if you could pass a link my way.
- Comment on BYD Reveals the ‘World’s Longest-Range EV’ as American Auto Industry Struggles to Keep Pace 4 days ago:
Well said! That’s basically exactly my thoughts on the issue.
- Comment on BYD Reveals the ‘World’s Longest-Range EV’ as American Auto Industry Struggles to Keep Pace 4 days ago:
I mean, the claims as I understand them, is that the government is subsidising these EVs and Solar-PV etc. to the point where they are being sold below cost of manufacturing. Making any competition next to impossible in any countries where parts supply chains are more costly than in China. Not sure I believe that to the extent claimed, but they definitely are, very clearly and without hiding it, heavily subsidising these industries. Without someone smarter with numbers than me and very trustworthy looking at the actual flow of money from the government to these companies? There’s no way to actually know what is in fact happening.
- Comment on BYD Reveals the ‘World’s Longest-Range EV’ as American Auto Industry Struggles to Keep Pace 4 days ago:
the fundamental difference is they saw a long term transition, welcomed it, guided it. Whereas us sees a long term transition, pulls our head into our shell
That’s one of the advantages of having a single party in power for a very long time, I don’t think China qualifies as a proper dictatorship, but it shares the advantage of the ability to plan decades in advance. The US is hobbled by the 4-8 year cycle of the next person totally erasing all the work of the previous. So there’s an incentive for whoever is in power to keep the status quo and keep any changes small enough or “bipartisan” enough that the next person doesn’t repeal it.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that from what’s visible outside the information confines of the CCP is cheating. They have a well defined goal, and no sight of the end of party rule means they can effectively do whatever they want to achieve it.
- Comment on BYD Reveals the ‘World’s Longest-Range EV’ as American Auto Industry Struggles to Keep Pace 5 days ago:
Are the subsidies specifically for destroying foreign markets? (😈MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)
Maybe, maybe not. I’m not a huge fan of the Chinese government, but I don’t think their subsidies program are intended to directly destroy foreign markets so much as put the country at the forefront of development and production… which can be perceived as the above.
In depth study of the Chinese GreenTech subsidy system.
As the study goes into in depth, tax credits are just one part of the system. There’s also direct subsidies(funding) for R&D, which is understandably very expensive, and below market value land sales among other things. In 2019 China put the equivalent of 1.73% of their GDP into industrial support, with below market land sales being a substantial portion of that. Next highest on the graphic is Korea at 0.67% GDP equivalent.
Moving away from the subsidies thing.
China has the battery production technologies and capabilities, the electric motor production, an unbelievable economy of scale, and insane levels of automation in their EV Factories,
(Found this out awhile ago when I was watching a video on how actually ridiculous the whole US - Greenland thing was.)
China has ~90% of the rare earth refinement capacity. Even if Trump wants/wanted Greenland for it’s resources, it would be over a decade to spin up enough refinement infrastructure to process whatever they would hypothetically extract.
China has invested HEAVILY in the entire supply chain from resource extraction to final product for a wide swath of GreenTech. When a lot of the rest of the world has switched from a majority production/export to majority consumption/import economy, or focused on soft products/research/etc of course they would see a country flooding their markets with products as adversarial. Regardless of if those foreign products are superior. Especially if the government of said foreign country is often interfering in political processes, intimidating other countries citizens, setting up extra judicial secret police networks in many countries, economic coercion…etc etc etc.
I’m not entirely convinced that the subsidy system is malicious, but the CCP isn’t above playing dirty. So I can fully understand the common reaction being that it is.
- Comment on I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age 5 days ago:
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state.
First sentence of the last paragraph.
- Comment on I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age 5 days ago:
The people at the top certainly don’t. There IS absolutely large swaths of the government that definitely do. Even if only subconsciously, all (or most) government workers who use a workplace computer of some kind should understand that sites are able to be blocked. They might think you’d need to be a Grey Beard of the 16th Order to set it up, but I’d wager a fair percentage have tried to go to a site and it’s been blacklisted.
- Comment on I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age 5 days ago:
People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.
When my wife and I first signed up with Virgin as our ISP there was parental control turned on by default. Had to put in my credit card info to be able to flap. This was 2021ish? So before the current stupidity.
Also, it’s easy to feel like this is all being pushed by parents who just straight up refuse to properly parent their children…but it’s mostly being championed by Puritan lobby/pressure groups. They think even totally consensual, CIS/HET amateur porn is disgusting and sinful. They don’t want to see, so they’re on a mission to make it so literally no one can see it.
With help from companies and people who have a vested interest in creating a panopticon-esque surveillance state. And the rest of the people involved in passing it are too old or ignorant or paid too well by the other two groups to stand in the way of it, or to have cut out the really egregious shit from these bills before they were passed. - Comment on WhatsApp will now show ads. 1 week ago:
Good shout. I’ll have a look 💪
- Comment on WhatsApp will now show ads. 1 week ago:
SWEET!
- Comment on WhatsApp will now show ads. 1 week ago:
I like the vibe buddy. 💖
