cynar
@cynar@lemmy.world
- Comment on Fictional 2 days ago:
We do, light travels 1 lightsecond per second.
Oh, and 1 lightpicosecond is around 2.998mm.
100 lightpicoseconds is also very close to 1’.
- Comment on How would you quickly describe Lemmy to a non-fediverse person? 1 week ago:
I’ve found comparing it to email works well. It’s about the only (mostly) decentralised service that most people have used.
“It’s like Reddit, but is decentralised, like email is.”, “This makes it far harder to manipulate to hide information.”
- Comment on Logitech will brick its $100 Pop smart home buttons on October 15 - Ars Technica 2 weeks ago:
That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.
Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.
- Comment on Imgur is now geoblocking the UK 4 weeks ago:
Making a lot of us angry. Unfortunately we are not as good as the french at complaining about it.
We also have the issue of this party being the better of the 2 viable options.
There’s talk of a new party forming, to the left of modern labour. Unfortunately, in a FPTP system, that can split the vote and make things worse, if done poorly.
- Comment on ICE tries to kidnap random food delivery driver off the street. He jukes them on a foldable bike. 4 weeks ago:
I thought they put it in, but accidentally reversed the sign. Instead of slowing, they actively accelerated.
It was back when it was a street racing game. The idea was that cops would box you in, and slow you down.
- Comment on There is a limit how much power the pedal assist of an e-Bike is allowed to provide (at least in many countries). There is no limit though on how strong the exoskeletton is that you use on a regular b 4 weeks ago:
It’s more the power that can be applied. Most people capable of getting a pedal bike up to those speeds also know how to read the road for safety. Even then, bikes can basically disintegrate in a (initially) minor accident.
A powered bike is capable of destroying itself if misused.
- Comment on Average plant behavior 1 month ago:
Given what it does, it eating you might be considered more humane! But no, is the fuck you, I just want to cause pain tree.
- Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself? 1 month ago:
Latin is used BECAUSE it is dead. It means the terms don’t drift. It also lets the names/terms be a descriptive as necessary.
Asking a doctor to memorise some Latin words is a lot easier and less error prone than a sea of acronyms.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 2 months ago:
It frustrates me as well.
Apparently the biggest problem for male teachers is accusations. For a female teacher, there needs to be proof. They get the benefit of the doubt. Male teachers don’t. Many parents and even other teachers take the “no smoke without fire” mentality. It’s stressful to do the job, when you dare not let yourself be in a room with a student without someone else present.
As a dad, I try and help with dad’s being seen as care givers, as well as just providers. It’s a long and slow fight however.
- Comment on Many primary school kids will never have a male teacher, and experts say that's a problem 2 months ago:
We are not allowed to be caring and nurturing. Any man that is, is often seen as “suspect”.
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 2 months ago:
Fully agree with that. Tesla got thoroughly screwed over.
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 2 months ago:
He could give lectures, but the computer massively slowed conversations. He also apparently had a bit of a temper. Some of his colleagues took to wearing steel toe cap shoes because of him (electric wheelchairs are heavy).
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 2 months ago:
Apparently he didn’t trust patents etc. He would come up with fanciful ideas, that sounded vaguely plausible, as cover for what he was actually working on.
At this point picking apart the Good, the bad and the cover is an …interesting exercise.
- Comment on SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink 2 months ago:
For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.
The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.
Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 2 months ago:
I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.
As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.
I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.
- Comment on Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display 2 months ago:
I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
- Comment on Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display 2 months ago:
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
- Comment on It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed 2 months ago:
It’s the one in Barcelona. I’ll edit for clarity. 👍
- Comment on It must have been a whole lot more difficult to design and build tall buildings before computers existed 2 months ago:
I still love that the basilica cathedral was designed upside down.
Stone only works under compression. If any area ends up under tension, it will just fall apart. String only works under tension, if it is under compression, it crumples. Critically, if you invert the model, the forces invert. The basilica was designed as a string model upside down. This made mismatched forces obvious, and is easy to correct.
Historical designers had a lot of tricks, that we have mostly forgotten, to make things work.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 2 months ago:
It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.
It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.
I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 2 months ago:
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.
- Comment on Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse 2 months ago:
Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
It can, actually be done. It’s just inefficient and requires too much trust.
You either do a general broadcast of power. This is incredibly inefficient, at any real range. To get power to the edges, the power near the transmitter will likely be enough to cook your cat.
The other method is directed. You basically put out a power beam that improves efficiency. Unfortunately, you also now have a directable energy weapon in your living room. I wouldn’t trust something capable of cooking my brain, while I’m sat on the sofa, if it gets hacked.
Neither are likely viable for general use, though both could be useful under certain conditions.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 2 months ago:
The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.
Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?
- Comment on The worst day to get Groundhog Day'd would be when you have an early flight in the morning 2 months ago:
The original tends to have a certain magic that makes it work so well. Whenever you remake something there’s the risk that the magic is diluted, or lost completely. It’s extremely rare to add more of what makes it work. Sequels often suffer the same problems.
Basically it’s not that remakes are inherently worse, they tend to be more average. It’s just that studios don’t remake poor shows. So we tend to see a lot more of the decline.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 2 months ago:
Collusion and bandwagoning are real things. A large number of accusations implies guilt a lot more, but doesn’t make it reliable. Trump particularly is slippery when it comes to pinning thing on him.
Women aren’t good or evil, they are human. Most are honest, some aren’t.
- Comment on Watermarks offer no defense against deepfakes, study suggests 2 months ago:
There are already plans for metadata signing. I think some high end Canon cameras might do it already. It basically allows proof (via public private key of the hash) that a particular camera took that photo.
The idea is that you can create a chain of custody with an image. Each edit requires a new signature, with each party responsible for verifying the previous chain, to protect their own reputation.
It’s far from perfect, but will help a lot with things like legal cases.
- Comment on 6G mobile could divide the world 3 months ago:
For many places, your signal isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the back haul from the tower to the main internet. 5G won’t help if there’s a straw connected to the fire hose of 5G.
- Comment on Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding 3 months ago:
It’s actually not law, just custom. Most/all speedometers over estimate for this reason.
The motorway cameras, near Birmingham have been known to issue tickets for doing 71mph.
- Comment on Emma Watson banned from driving for speeding 3 months ago:
I would be wary of those roads. I’ve ran across several that seem like national, or 50 roads, yet limited a lot lower. Generally, there is a hidden danger on that stretch. The classic being a blind junction joining, or a school kicking out nearby. It won’t be obvious, unless you are familiar with the area.
At the same time, i also know of a 30 limit on an otherwise national road. It’s along the stretch in front of a previous Mayer’s house.