nous
@nous@programming.dev
- Comment on No sex education in schools 'until children are nine' guidance to say 4 days ago:
The first actual sentence in the article clears that up.
Schools will be told not to teach children any form of sex education until year 5, when pupils are aged nine, according to reports, with some topics being delayed until pupils are 13.
Though that could have been the title and tagline…
- Comment on Sony Confirmed To Be Behind HD2 Delisting Of 180 Countries, Not Valve 1 week ago:
I think their though process is more along the line of:
Hey, Microsoft is getting all the bad attention ATM, let’s see how much shit we can sneak in while people are distracted.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 1 week ago:
And undermine their own ai offering
- Comment on Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain 1 week ago:
They do mention it on that page:
However, if presented with a valid order from a Swiss court involving a case of criminal activity that is against Swiss law, Proton Mail can be compelled to share account metadata (but not message contents or attachments) with law enforcement.
The only ever claim to encrypt message contents and attachments. And explicitly call out account meta data here as something they can hand over if requested by law enforcment.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 2 weeks ago:
You are forgetting about Nintendo. And that is only mentioning gaming companies… look outside gaming and there is a whole shit-show going on at the moment for that position.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 2 weeks ago:
Players get sustained access to the game.
That should be the default for any game you have brought… not a compromise… Forcing everyone to have an account only serve to benefit Sony.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 2 weeks ago:
If they can make it such that you can have a placeholder Sony account that can’t access all PSN features, for the sole purpose to play this and other Sony games on Steam, that anyone in the world can access, that would be an acceptable compromise to me.
If they did that then what is the point in requiring a login at all… just remove the damned feature that is not required and very few want. We know it is not required as the game has been working fine for months without it. There is zero need for you to need a login for this game. Except that sony wants more user information they can sell to others.
- Comment on Hashicorp signs agreement to be acquired by IBM 3 weeks ago:
Well, Redhat is owned by IBM now so basically spot on
- Comment on Who all is out there, setting different sensitivities for X and Y on their mouse settings? Does anybody actually do this? 4 weeks ago:
Never seen anyone change it for the mouse, but I think for a joystick and especially gyro it is more common to have them different. Same basic principal applies to all three inputs though.
In first person games the distance you need to move horizontally is often far more then the distance you need to move vertically, quite often only needing to look up/down a small amount. So you can get better accuracy in the vertical direction by turning down the sensitivity without sacrificing the ability to move quickly up and down. But in the horizontal direction being able to move quickly is generally more important than better accuracy.
Not sure how important the difference is for the mouse though, likely why people don’t use it. But it is an easy setting to split up for the developers so why not give players control over it and set it however they like? Would be nice if you could lock them together, but that is a little more complex and requires more thought to do. And I don’t see game devs giving that much thought about the minor user experience improvements in their games settings when they have a load of gameplay still to worry about.
- Comment on Rishi Sunak facing Tory revolt over plan to criminalise rough sleeping 1 month ago:
You have failed at capitalism, STRAIGHT TO JAIL!! /s
- Comment on The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending 3 months ago:
“We had relied and started to rely too much this year on self-checkout in our stores,” Vasos told investors. “We should be using self-checkout as a secondary checkout vehicle, not a primary.”
That is the key point here. Use them to replace the express lanes but dont replace all checkout points with them.
they actually increase labor costs thanks to employees who get taken away from their other duties to help customers deal with the confusing and error prone kiosks
Now that is bullshit… how can it cost more to have someone spend part of their time to help a customer when they have a problem vs having an extra person help them full time during checkout.
Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021, presumably because they’ve never seen Terminator (wake up sheeple).
WTH… I really don’t understand why this person hates them so much. Seems to have some hidden agenda but I cannot for the life of me tell what it is.
- Comment on A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years 4 months ago:
Not all phones need to play games and gaming phones don’t need to use this type of technology. I would love a phone that I don’t need to charge and most people could benefit from one. And for the select few that like to play intensive games on it then they can get ones that would need to be charged.
- Comment on Why is there no USB-C (female) to mini-B (male) adapter? 4 months ago:
Sorry, clicked reply on the wrong comment :)
- Comment on Why is there no USB-C (female) to mini-B (male) adapter? 4 months ago:
Theoretically you could build a male to male contraption from multiple adapters and a cable.
You already can as these exist:
letting you plug in any existing USB A to mini cables together to get a male to male device - nothing unsafe about that though. So this is not a very good reason to not allow USB C to mini adapters.
Also you could be providing too much current to a device, however this is specific to the combination of adapter, cable and power supply you use.
Current is pulled by the device - you cannot supply too much current. Devices take just as much current as they need or as much as the adapter can supply. The only way a device would take more than that is by badly designed or faulty - but that is a problem with the device, if the power supply can supply the power there is no issues on that side.
Also USB C connectors can and do by default operate with USB 2 power - supplying 5V and limiting the current to the USB 2 standards and so any existing charger with USB A or mini connectors on. Thus any USB 2 device will only have access to the power given by the spec. You would require a handshake from newer USB protocols to get access to more voltage/current that some USB C chargers can supply.
There is nothing unsafe about any other this baring faulty devices - but if we worried about faulty devices then we would not allow any electronics devices to exist as any of them could be faulty. USB C to USB mini does not dramatically increase any risk of fire or devices exploding no more so than any device using USB mini or USB C alone.
The real reason is there is likely just not much of a market for them so they are harder to find - but they do exist.
- Comment on Why is there no USB-C (female) to mini-B (male) adapter? 4 months ago:
How? Anything with a mini will be USB 2 at most and USB c defaults to lower power of USB 2 without any handshakes with the device which one with USB mini won’t do.
- Comment on Best of Steam 2023: The Year's Top Games measured by Gross Revenue 4 months ago:
What is sad is that 6 of the 12 platinum games rated by top revenue are free to play games - so must be making money on micro transactions. Sad that model works so well for extracting cash out of players.
- Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes 4 months ago:
(for example) a 250GB drive that does not use the full address space available
Current drives do not have different sized addressable spaces and a 256GiB drive does not use the full address space available. If it did then that would be the maximum size a drive could be. Yet we have 20TB+ drives and even those are no where near the address size limit of storage media.
then I suspect the average drive would have just a bit more usable space available by default.
The platter size might differ to get the same density and the costs would also likely be different. Likely resulting in a similar cost per GB, which is the number that generally matters more.
My comment re wear-levelling was more to suggest that I didn’t think the unused address space (in my example of 250GB vs 256GiB) could be excused by saying it was taken up by spare sectors.
There is a lot of unused address space - there is no need to come up with an excuse for it. It does not matter what size the drive is they all use the same number of bits for addressing the data.
Address space is basically free, so not using it all does not matter. Putting in extra storage that can use the space does cost however. So there is no real relation between the address spaces and what space is on a drive and what space is accessible to the end user. So it makes no difference in what units you use to market the drives on.
Instead the marketing has been incredibly consistent - way back to the early days. Physical storage has essentially always been labeled in SI units. There really is no marketing conspiracy here. It just that is they way it was always done. And why it was picked that way to begin with? Well, that was back in the day when binary units where not as common and physical storage never really fit the doubling pattern like other components like ram. You see all sorts of random sizes in early storage media so SI units I guess did not feel out of place.
- Comment on Why a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 bytes 4 months ago:
Huh? What does how a drive size is measured affect the available address space used at all? Drives are broken up into blocks, and each block is addressable. This is irrelevant of if you measure it in GB or GiB and does not change the address or block size. Hell, you have have a block size in binary units and the overall capacity in SI units and it does not matter - that is how it is typically done with typical block sizes being 512 bytes, or 4096 (4KiB).
Or have anything to do with ware leveling at all? If you buy a 250GB SSD then you will be able to write 250GB to it - it will have some hidden capacity for ware-leveling, but that could be 10GB, 20GB, 50GB or any number they want. No relation to unit conversions at all.
- Comment on Pint of wine anyone? UK looks to bring back ‘silly measure’ 4 months ago:
And therein lies the issue, how clear is clear?
For example, if someone managed to get hold of bottles with slightly thicker glass, you could sell a bottle of wine with slightly less wine in than is obvious from the outside, increasing the price per mililitre by a few percent. Not much individually, but it all adds up over the year.
You put the volume on the label, like you already required to do along side the ABV and other markings. That tells you how much liquid is inside - not trying to judge the size of a bottle by how thick the walls are.
Standardisation simplifies manufacturing (of bottles) as well as purchasing of the end product by consumers. There is no benefit to an overly wide selection of sizes.
This makes no difference to manufacturing really. If it did then all bottles would be the same shape. We can have different shaped bottles for everything already so varying the size makes no practice difference here.
These arguments for standard volumes of bottles are very weak. There might not be any big benefit to different sizes, but there is also not a huge disadvantage either. At best it is mildly simpler to compare things of the same size rather than just at a price per 100ml (regardless of the actual volume). Though you should still have a price per 100ml so you can compare the cost of things at different sizes groups (even for the same product).
A far better argument against this is that it is a pointless stupid waste of time that no one asked for and no one under the age of 50 was even alive to remember wine being sold by the pint. There are far more important things the government can be spending their tax payers money on fighting for.
- Comment on The Telecom Industry Is Very Mad Because The FCC MIGHT Examine High Broadband Prices 5 months ago:
What?!? But then how are companies going to manipulate their pricing to attract new customers away from their competitors without actually cutting any revenue? They neeeed this to keep their numbers up so they look more attractive to investors and get more money. Are you not thinking of the shareholders? Why won’t anyone think of the shareholders!
/s … if that was not obvious
- Comment on Honda's commercials saying they are going to be carbon neutral by 2050. What? 5 months ago:
You counter your own point…
You cannot trust people to do what is right for the environment. They wont do anything until they see the effects for them selves and by then it is far too late to do anything meaningful. And if/when they do finally care all they see is a lot of green washed campaigning by every company claiming to be green when non of them are and they have no real choose and a lot of confusion. You need strict and effective regulation to curve this behavior in companies.
- Comment on Covid lockdowns had ‘catastrophic effect’ on UK’s social fabric, report claims 5 months ago:
I believe the politicians were talking about natural herd immunity at one point - aka, do nothing let people get sick and possible die and hope it all blows over. And as a bonus stress the NHS to the point of collapse so they can finally call it a failure and sell if off to the highest bidder. Not saying it was a good alternative - just one they did talk about doing.
- Comment on Honda's commercials saying they are going to be carbon neutral by 2050. What? 5 months ago:
It is not impossible for people at Honda to care. Just not the right people, those that can actually make a difference. The decision makers are all looking for what gives them the most profit, if not then they are not in their position long or, really, never get to a position that matters in the first place.
The only thing that capitalism cares about is profit, by very definition.
- Comment on Honda's commercials saying they are going to be carbon neutral by 2050. What? 5 months ago:
You assume they are even going to justify the bare minimum… it is so far in the future they are just hoping everyone will forget about it.
- Comment on Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. 5 months ago:
Sorry, I was more talking about this in particular:
Well, things affecting you unconsciously should be plain illegal
It is far too general a statement to be enforceable. There are things you can better enforce that focus on the negative effects of marketing, but things affecting you unconsciously is to vague and affects both positive and negative behaviours.
There are regulations about what you can and can’t put into edible products. There are regulations about what you can and can’t use as fuel. There are regulations on materials used in construction, so that they wouldn’t be as toxic as 50 years ago, on paints, on glue and what not.
These are all specific things though, not general broad reaching unenforceable statements. Which I agree with, there is a lot you can do with regulation that prevents bad behaviours of corporations, but these are generally specific things that are trying to solve some actual problem. And in this case you need to specific what things you are trying to prevent.
Even for just adverts, trying to ban all adverts that affect you unconsciously would be a ban on all adverts and marketing. Is that reasonable? I would not say so. It would be better to go after specific things like the regulations around advertising cigarettes. Or more relevant to today, maybe something around the shear amount of information advertising agency collect on you, IMO that is one of the bigger problems with them these days. Or the shear number of them that you get shoved into every aspect. Or putting adverts in products that you have already paid for. Those would be far more reasonable things that you could enforce.
- Comment on Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. 5 months ago:
Um, No. Basically everything affects you subconsciously in some way. Both good and bad. That is a terrible and unenforceable thing to make illegal.
- Comment on Arch and other Linux operating systems Beat Windows 11 in Gaming Benchmarks 5 months ago:
The only major roadblock is some anticheat software requiring highly invasive Windows rootkits to function, which Linux doesn’t really work with.
I consider that more of a feature then a bug
- Comment on Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. 5 months ago:
Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily use it (in fact I use arch mullvad, btw.)
No it does not mean you will pick it. It means you are more likely to pick it. Given all else being equal you are vastly more likely to pick something familiar than something unfamiliar. And it all comes down to trends and statistics. The hope is that more people will go for your brand that leads to more sales then the cost of the marketing in the first place. You might not go for NordVPN for other reasons, but can you say that about every product you have been advertised to? If anything the more you know about a product the less advertising will affect you in the familiarity sense - these adverts are not so much meant for you as they are for people not familiar with VPNs at all.
But there are a lot of studies on the topic like this and this meta analysis that seem to conclude that advertising is effective. And there are a lot of studies on what various aspects of adverts make them more effective. I am yet to see any research that says adverts are ineffective overall, though I have not dug that deeply into it.
- Comment on Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. 5 months ago:
That is and big if though. Yeah you, me and half the people here might leave over this, but we block ads already and so are not highly valued to YouTube or a lot of the creators and are only a small drop in the ocean of viewers.
YouTube is betting on more people turning off ad blockers then those that leave. And i am glad to see that it might be having a small effect on more people actually discovering ad blockers instead. Which I bet is something YouTube did not expect to see.
- Comment on Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. 5 months ago:
Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.
I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don’t think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.