Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.world
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Tesla quietly slashed over 3,400 job postings, leaving just 3 listed in the U.S. 22 hours ago:
I guess you’ve missed the pretty regular news of big companies firing entire teams and even (literally) decimating their head count.
From the point of view of a worker, unless it’s in a country with proper work legislation, the safety of the company one works for as a whole is pretty much uncorrelated with the safety of one’s job.
The reason why you lose your job being different isn’t going to make the result for you be any different.
That idea that large companies are safer is very 1980s.
- Comment on iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' 23 hours ago:
Yeah, I found it wierd too when I started designing PCBs (as hobby) that “mill” actually stood for thousanth of an inch.
Probably for historical reasons, there are tons of things in the older domains within electronics that are based on inches rather than metric units: for example the spacing between the legs of a microchip in the older chip package formats (so called DIP, the ones with legs that go into holes) is exactly 0.1"
The sizes in more modern electronics isn’t usually based on inches anymore, but circuit boards are old tech (even if done with new materials) so there are still a number of measures in there which are based on inches.
- 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 day ago:
This has everything to do with centralization, just not with the one small context for it which you picked.
With real decentralization in place market mechanisms work.
Monopoly situations along with existing market mechanism invariably result in centralization (“monopoly” comes from the Greek word for “right of exclusive sale”), hence market mechanism won’t “work” in the sense you mean it in such a scenario, as I explained.
Your argument is like saying that “Communism works as long as people aren’t greedy”.
- 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 day ago:
Copyright is an artificial, government given Monopoly.
Market Mechanisms don’t work when faced with a Monopoly or work badly in situations distorted by the presence of a Monopoly (which is more this case, since Stack Overflow has a monopoly in the reproduction of each post in that website but the same user could post the same answer elsewhere thus creating an equivalent work).
Pretty much in every situation where Intellectual Property is involved you see the market failing miserably: just notice the current situation with streaming services which would be completelly different if there was no copyright and hence no possibility of exclusivity of distribution of any titles (and hence streaming services would have to compete in terms of quality of service).
The idea that the Free Market is something that works everywhere (or even in most cases) is Politically-driven Magic thinking, not Economics.
- Comment on iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' 1 day ago:
I recently got a have Mini-PC which a processor with a TDP of 6W and it uses run of the mill SODIMMS and the power supply for that stuff is a pretty regular wall socket power adapter, the same kind you would see for, say, a media box.
I suspect it’s not even a few watts (at 3.3V 1W is around 300mA is quite an insane amount of current for a signal line), more like tens or even hundreths of a watt.
Mind you, what really changes here is voltage rather than current: these things run at a lower voltage, which helps with speed and in reducing the power dissipating as heat (so they waste less power and heat up less) and that’s were signal integrity on longer signal traces becomes more of a problem because lower voltage signals are closer to the noise level the drop in voltage from the resistance of the circuit board lines because a higher proportion of the original voltage so the longer the trace the more likely it is that whatever reaches the other side is pretty much at the same level as noise.
Still matches what you wrote, by the way, as power = voltage * current, so all else being the same lower voltage does mean less power consumed. It’s just that you were a bit off on the scale of the power consumption involved.
- Comment on iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal' 1 day ago:
In the design and manufacture of PCBs (aka circuit boards) a “mil” is a one thousandth of an inch.
- Comment on Mullvad VPN: Introducing Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) 3 days ago:
I can download at the maximum rate my ISP supports and I can seed after downloading (probably only to those clients which my own client has connected to).
However I cannot seed in a brand new session during which I did not download that specific torrent (as I just tested).
I expect this is because, as I explained, the NAT implementation actually tracks which IP addresses your client connected to and through which VPN Router port that went so that subsequent connections from those IPs to that port get sent to the right port in your own machine, but it doesn’t support uPNP/NAT-PMP port forwarding so the bitttorrent client cannot configure on that VPN Router a static port-forwarding so that it can listen for connections from any random client.
So if I understand it correctly it totally screws self-hosted seedboxes and if you want to give back to the community you have leave it seeding immediatelly after downloading and it’s not going to be seeding anywhere as fast since its limited to peers connected to during the dowload stage.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 3 days ago:
So are you saying that that following the Teachings Of The Prophet on how a woman should dress in a modest way and in all other thinks in life, alhamdulillah, is less important than speaking for a pig!!!???
- Comment on Mullvad VPN: Introducing Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) 3 days ago:
That sounds strange given that Mullvad works fine for torrenting in my experience.
Also modern NAT will do deep packet inspection on common well known protocols to automatically adjust the port of your machine listed on any “here I am” messages being sent out to be an actual port on the VPN Router and to have an internal association of that port in the Router with the actual port in your machine so that connections of that port can be sent to your own machine and the actual port in it that are used.
It’s only the pure listenner services (such as webservers and e-mail servers) were the port is pre-defined by convention and never sent out on any “here I am message” that require explicitly configured port-forwarding on the VPN Router side.
- Comment on Mullvad VPN: Introducing Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) 3 days ago:
Torrenting works fine with Mullvad in my personal experience, and will pretty much up to my current ISP speed limits (which is 200Mbps download).
Can’t really guarantee you that it will be as good if you’re hosting your own seedbox over their VPN (then again if you’re doing that you should probably pay for a proper seedbox hosted elsewhere) but if you’ve downloade something and the just leave it seeding, it seems fine.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 3 days ago:
Imagine that you go to an outdoor barbecue on a bright Summer day.
And some guy who is an extreme Muslim is going around telling some women that they’re not dressed in a modest enough way and that people people should follow the Teachings of the Prophet and how life is a lot better when people follow the Teachings of the Prophet.
It’s not Islam that’s the problem, it’s certain kinds of people, their proselytising and, worse, their trying to force or even imposing their own moral values on others.
Same with Veganism and some kinds of Vegans: because it’s a moral choice some of those who practice it have the very same behavioural disfunctions as religious nutters.
- Comment on Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner 3 days ago:
Oh, you sweet summer child…
- Comment on How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money 3 days ago:
Quite the contrary: it reduces wasteful consumption and reducing consumption is a requirement for Ecological recovery.
I would say that buying for very infrequent use or for a temporary need something which can be used with no problems for much more than that, is wasteful consumption.
Sure, owning your own personal high powered professional drill satisfies the greedy animal inside, but it’s not exactly wise of justified for most of us even just at a personal level. Ditto for quite a lot of other things.
The drive to own lots of shit isn’t healthy, both in a personal sense and in a systemic sense (including but not limited to Ecological), though it sure makes a ton of money for those who own most Productive Assets and all the ones is supporting areas such as Money Lenders, that most humans act as Consumers only limited by the maximum indebtness they can get into with their income.
Even if people can afford to own tons of things they barelly use, it would actually be better for everybody if that wasn’t common.
The only dystopia element of this is that people are being pushed to rental because of the miniscule and worsening share of the wealth produced that workers get - or in other words, shit salaries whilst investment income has never been this good - rather than it all being a natural thing.
- Comment on Count Binface Celebrates beating Britain First 5 days ago:
The Tories already morphed into Posh Fascists so why would any person with a yearning for anti-immigration, nationalism, extremelly punitive Justice System, genocide support and strong-against-demonstrations, vote for the non-Posh version.
- Comment on Hey there gamers 6 days ago:
2S = 100 sets of 101 S = 100/2 sets of 101 = 50 sets of 101 = 5050
I wondered about the same thing so did the Maths (which is kinda the point of the meme) back from 5050 and it all checks out.
- Comment on With two Boeing whistleblowers dead in one month, either Boeing is actively killing them, or there are enough whistleblowers that this rate of death is not statistically significant 1 week ago:
The birthday paradox derives from how the chance of somebody there having their birthday on a specific day is 1-in-365 (ish)/nr-of-people hence the chance of two people having their birthday on that specific day is 1-in-365^2/nr-of-people, but the chance of two people having their birthday in the same day out of any days of the year is quite different because it’s not a specific day anymore so it’s quite a different calculation (which I totally forgot ;)).
In here the closest to that paradox would the chance of 2 whistleblowers of any company with whistleblowers dying within a few weeks of each other (which, depending on how many companies have whistleblowers, can be quite high) compared to the chance of 2 whistleblowers of Boeing dying within a few weeks of each other (which is statistically a lot lower unless there are thousands of Boeing whistleblowers).
- Comment on fight the power 1 week ago:
I live in a building were one of my neighbours has 4 or 5 cats and has some mental problems and so at times will for no visible reason start shouting.
The cats couldn’t care less.
I suspect that of all creatures, a domesticated cat is probably one the least likely to be stressed by it, at least if it’s an usual thing.
- Comment on Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time 1 week ago:
I recently got rid of my TV box from my ISP (around here it tends to be bundled, but I found a cheaper data only ISP) and of a separate media box I had to play my collection of videos in digital files that were stored in a NAS and even the old NAS setup (which was just improvised with some external HDs connected to my router and used the older SMB v1 protocol which is much slower than more recent versions) and brough everything onto a single device which is a Mini PC with Lubuntu and Kodi which even has so additional stuff in it like an always on VPN and web controlled Torrent download server.
I never had a this good and this well integrated home entertainment setup before.
That’s basically a “make your own” version of LibreElec, but I didn’t recomend it above because that Mini PC was $150 and you do need to know your way around Linux to set something like that up yourself (plus the added value to make it worth it is in being able to hand more server services in that machine, such as Torrent downloading over that always on VPN) whilst LibreElec is a pre-assembled full solution and is also available for much cheaper devices.
But yeah, it’s actually pretty amazing how far open source home entertainment solutions have come in just a decade (which is how old my setup with a dedicated media box and NAS was before this restructuring of the whole thing to modern tech).
- Comment on evangelism 1 week ago:
They seem to be well acquainted with how the average human mentally works.
- Comment on evangelism 1 week ago:
We the People Who Work In Tech, welcome you to the World of bullshit meisters making insane stuff up around your domain expertise area.
We’ve been living in it since at least the late 90s.
- Comment on Roku OS home screen is getting video ads for the first time 1 week ago:
Librelec?
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Let me explain this in a very very simple way: buttons which are not literally mechanical switches that physically connect and disconnect from power require that at least some of the circuitry to be alive because they’re capacitive contacts, a technique which requires some power and some logic to detect that the button has been pushed.
So even shitty shit $0.12 microcontrollers often come with support this stuff, so that they can generate a hardware interrupt in the microcontroller to wake it up when a user presses one such soft button to power on a device.
Beyond this, in order to support something as simple as wakeup from the network side - for example, to support Find My Phone functionality - even $3 microcontrollers (not microprocessors, microcontrollers, their cheap cousins with puny computing power) have features such as programmable secondary low power cores that consume tiny amounts of power.
Even this “advanced” stuff doesn’t add cents to BOMs, it only adds tiny amount of extra surface on vastly more complex microchips, which translates to at most tenths of a cent of extra cost because this stuff isn’t supposed to be decoding videos or running some social media user interface (or any user interface), it’s just running small simple programs which might use a few peripherals configured to remain active in low power mode (and those can be network related) to listen for certain conditions and decide if it should wake the main cores up or not.
The functionality isn’t there in the hardware because they added it to facilitate spying, it’s there because that’s just the direction the technology evolved in the last 2 decades - soft buttons instead of mechanical ones, some amount of always on functionality for fast start, support for convenience features for users, that require some kind of wake up from the network side or merelly because microprocessor or SoC makers add everything and the kitchen sink to their designs to try an make that chip usefull for the broadest list of use cased possible (it’s quite insane the amount of stuff built-in in even the cheaper of the the current generation of SoCs) so that those chips are used in more devices and get sold more.
But it gets better: none of this is necessary:
- Hacked phones just simulate shutdown. They don’t even go into low power mode, they just show the user a fake shutdown animation and keep on running at full power.
Now, maybe somebody who has never been involved in Politics, or Demonstrations, or Strikes can go around with total confidence that their phone ins’t hacked, but if you’re anywhere close to the organisers of the kind of public demonstration that can snowball into to the current POTUS losing an election, don’t assume your phone hasn’t been hacked (which can be done remotelly) and that turning it off in the soft button marked power when you go into a meeting with other organisers has actually in fact fully turned it off in a way that makes sure it isn’t spying on you.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Flash memory preserves data without using any power at all. Ditto EEPROM. Both present in even the most basic of embedded processing cores (and the GPS protocol is implemented on those)
You need to move quite the distance for a GPS device to need to change just one satellite, much less all 3 and it doesn’t matter if you’ve been underground or not as the thing will just try first the ones in its memory and unless you travelled hundreds of km underground, it’s still going to be the same 3 satellites.
Last but not least, AirTags use CR2032 batteries with a capacity of around 200mA/h - 1/20th of a mobile phone one - and that charge is supposed to last for years between battery changes, not a mere few days until the next time the phone is charged. The power consumption of an AirTag must be thousands or even tens of thousands of times lower than what we’ve been talking about, in the order of nano-amperes not tens of milliamperes.
You’re clearly clinging on to that pre-conception of yours for reasons other than logic, and you keep on inventing wild theories based on zero domain knowledge, to try and justify that beloved pre-conception of your, so I’ll leave you to it since this feels like trying to explain that the Earth is roughly spherical to a Flat Earth believer.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
It’s not 100mA every few minutes, it’s 100mA when calibrating from scratch with no satellites known.
I looked it up and the consumption when in normal use is around 30mA, which would mean that, say, if it took 10 seconds (probably a lot more than needed if you’re not travelling) every 5 minutes - which adds up to 120 seconds @ 30mA per hour - would consume 1mA/h (by pure absolute chance my numbers ended yielding a result of 1 ;)), which is 0.025% of that battery per hour. If you’re lucky, in the phone screen were one would be visualizing the graph for the battery power charge over time that would show the line falling by 1 pixel.
It really is a whole other world out there in the embedded and low power systems domain.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Oh, in day to day usage I agree with you: we’re all one little uninsteresting datapoint in a whole lot of datapoints and there are plenty of other was in which we are tracked.
However if you’re part of a Political Party or Movement and/or attend demonstrations, it’s probably wiser to leave the phone at home, if only because that make you stand out as a much more interesting datapoint than average.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
I have an EE degree and have actually done work with embedded systems, including GPS.
The peak consumption of things like GPS is maybe 100 milliamps, with the average being in the tens of milliamps.
The wireless networking stuff is similarly frugal.
Further, stuff like encoding of audio is all done on the hardware and very efficient so even voice capture and encoding to send over the network isn’t processor intensive.
Further, the CPUs on those things are ARM designs or equivalent, specifically crafted for low consumption and which have tons of tricks to avoid spending even a mW extra of power if it’s not needed (basically the CPU will tend to activate only the bits it needs and use only the resources it needs to accomplish the operations its running, so it’s almost never running at peak consumption).
The really big power consumption in modern smartphones is the screen and from very high GPU/CPU usage in things like games.
I think you seriously overestimate the similarity between modern portable devices design to operate from quite small batteries and things like desktop Personal Computers which are designed to operate from mains.
If all they’re doing is sending your GPS position out over the netweork every couple of minutes you won’t notice that the battery has drained a tiny bit faster than expected.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance.
If however it’s an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they’re going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just “use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations”.
You can’t just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can’t just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example the UK that “pink knit cat hat white lady” would very likely be under surveillance if she was a member of the Green Party and participated in demonstrations.
Also the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed end up in that dragnet: if the authorities already have well established and commonly used ways provided by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are in your country) orders to just get from the mobile network providers all the phone numbers that connect to specific cell towers during a specific time period, pink knit cat lady is going to end up in the list just as easilly as baclava-wearing hard-core anarchist looking to break stuff.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
They’re still running in low power mode and can wakeup from the network so they can absolutelly be made to “boot up” without turning the screen on and you being aware of it.
This is not like bloody PC were the lights turn on and you can hear the fans when the thing is going, it’s a machine with a low power mode which itself can already do a lot and which can be brought to a high power mode if needed without there being any visible or audible side-effects to alert the user.
Unless you completelly cut it off from power (by taking the battery out, which you can’t in most modern smartphones) that smartphone with the lights off, the screen of and making no sound can just as easilly be in low power mode waiting for you to press the On button as it can be in full power mode with a mobile network connection active, accessing the microphone and the GPS microchip and sending that data out, and it looks exactly the same from the outside.
- Comment on I like this text. In which Lemmy community can I best share it ? Thanks. 1 week ago:
People change, their learn new things and their wants and objectives change.
I would be wary of considering a failure that somebody who started with the aim of running a coffee shop forever, at some point changed their minds and quit.
It depends on how they quit - if it was good while it lasted and it was their own choice to quit, it doesn’t sound like a failure to me. For me a failure would be quiting against one’s wishes. In fact I would see keeping running a business you’re fed up with against your wishes a failure.
As for relationships, some of the biggest failures I’ve seen involved people staying in something that had become hellish “for the sake of children”, due to money constraints or just for keeping up with appearences, whilst I would consider a successful relationship when people live well together for some years and when they do drift apart do the adult mature thing and separate by mutual agreement, often still being friends afterwards.