Jrockwar
@Jrockwar@feddit.uk
- Comment on Boeing retaliated against its own engineers working for FAA, union says 2 months ago:
I worked for Airbus for 3-4 years. I wasn’t wildly happy with how many things are done, but when I read news about Boeing I routinely think “woah, that’s wild”.
I only get on a Boeing plane if there is no other option. It’s not a case of voting with your wallet in an “I won’t buy a phone without a headphone jack” situation, but a serious safety matter. Many of their decisions (particularly the MCAS / MAX8 fiasco) are absolutely insane. They might rectify whatever they want, but as semi-informed passengers I don’t see how we can trust that the current board is prioritising safety over shareholders…
- Comment on Meta says you can’t turn off its new AI tool on Facebook, Instagram 2 months ago:
God this is equally terrible and hilarious 😂
For example, The Associated Press reported that an official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms. It claimed it too had a child in school in New York City, but when confronted by the group members, it later apologized before its comments disappeared, according to screenshots shown to The Associated Press.
- Comment on I bought frozen BBQ eel and the best before date says LJ349. What does this mean? 2 months ago:
Thanks GPT, very useful
- Comment on I still don't get why people spend money... there's tons of it for free 3 months ago:
I can’t read “My mate Paul” and not hear it in Philomena Cunk’s / Diane Morgan’s voice. Well played sir!
- Comment on Qualcomm's Powerful PC Chip Is Worse for AMD Than for Intel 3 months ago:
I have a surface pro x. I can’t install Google drive on windows. I can’t install Linux. Affinity apps don’t get graphics acceleration because of some missing directX support. Neither does Blender, or Fusion360. Darktable and Rawtherapee only work under emulation. How is this a $1000+ laptop? All those things work flawlessly on an underspecced base MacBook air with 8GB of RAM (up until you need to use all the ram to keep five chrome tabs open anyway).
I know there’s some hyperbole here, but my point still stands: the author is right when they said that Microsoft hasn’t given up… Because it feels they’re not even trying. Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW, and compatibility problems lasted a year. Not ten years.
- Comment on UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot 3 months ago:
Ah, it was just because of the “ban cars” comment with no more context around it. I’m happy with reducing cars, not with expecting cars to get banned altogether or to cease to exist magically.
- Comment on UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot 3 months ago:
Well it might be off, as there are other factors, but I wasn’t meaning it as hyperbole - road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and a typical bus weighs about 10 times the weight of a compact. This is called the Generalised Fourth Power Law" and there are tons of links about it:
…org.uk/…/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/
(Which btw, you can apply the other way and state that you need an insane amount of bicycles to match the road damage of a single car).
If they took the top end bracket of SUV weights and the bottom end of bus weights, they could have reached vastly different numbers. I used 1800 kg (large sedan or compact SUV) and 18000 kg for a bus (the mercedes Benz citaro starts at roughly 18500 kg), to keep the numbers simple.
- Comment on UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot 3 months ago:
Good public transit does not mean less wear and tear on the roads, absolutely not. As I stated in a different comment, a bus that replaces 10-20 cars causes similar road damage as 10000 cars. Which is fine, but for completely different reasons. Public transport is good because it allows more pedestrian-friendly cities, reduces pollution, etc; just road wear and tear is not one of the reasons why it’s good, it’s one of the drawbacks.
- Comment on UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot 3 months ago:
Did you know that road damage is proportional to the fourth power of weight? A single city bus does similar road damage to 10000 cars. Since we’re talking about road damage here, shall we ban buses too? Do I need to tell my 78 year mom with limited mobility to suck it up and cycle?
I work in a related field and having fewer cars on the road is a priority of mine, but I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.
- Comment on Microsoft advertising Copilot on lock screens 3 months ago:
I put the blame on Microsoft here. I am more pro-ARM than I’m pro Apple; I had a surface pro X and ended up giving up on it because Microsoft has put zero effort into enticing developers to make ARM versions of their apps. Google drive still doesn’t have a functioning app (!!) for Windows on ARM, which at this point has existed for over 10 years. (Emulation doesn’t help here as it needs drivers).
In contrast, Mac has had apps since basically day 1 of Apple Silicon, and ARM support in Linux has been pretty good for years.
- Comment on Apple is officially dropping iPhone support for web apps in the EU - The Verge 4 months ago:
I have no idea what you’re on about. MacBook airs start at £999, and I’ve still been able to configure one at £1199 with 16 GB of RAM.
Also I haven’t said anything about that magic ram nonsense, please don’t try to paint me as an idiot. Even my personal laptop has 32 GB. But different needs, different price points. I still maintain that at the price points apple operates, it’s hard to find something better with windows - not because I’m an apple fanboy by any means, but because of the laziness of Intel and the lack of decent ARM alternatives (and Microsoft’s half assed approach to ARM).
- Comment on Apple is officially dropping iPhone support for web apps in the EU - The Verge 4 months ago:
I have to disagree when it comes to laptops: the gap has closed a bit now, but there’s still no intel- or amd-based alternative that comes close to the MacBook air in terms of performance/battery life at the £1000-£1200 price point. When the M1s first came out, the fanless MacBook air shattered the intel i9 MBP in any conceivable metric other than pure GPU power (which the MacBook Pro could use for about a minute before overheating).
Even if expensive, the current MacBook lineup is really compelling. If you’re prepared to spend £3000 on a laptop, you just can’t get anything similar in terms of performance, battery life, and noise. You might get a workstation like an HP ZBook with similar oomph but then you’re looking at a beast that weighs 50% more than a comparable MBP, has the fans buzzing all the time at full blast, and lasts a couple hours on a battery charge. I’ve used my work MacBook Pro (M1 Max) for a full Atlantic flight of ≈9 hours and it still had juice to go.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
And even the most expensive ones sound worse than £10 earbuds of the normal kind.
- Comment on Zuckerberg Brags About How Your Facebook, Instagram Posts Will Power His AI 4 months ago:
Meta’s llama2-70b response to that:
The message you provided is a ciphertext encrypted using the Enigma machine. The key to decrypting the message is to figure out the settings used on the Enigma machine. The Enigma machine has three rotors (M3) with different positions (UKW B VI 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1). Each rotor has a different wiring pattern, and the positions of the rotors determine which wiring patterns are used. To decrypt the message, we need to set the rotors to the correct positions and then use the Enigma machine’s wiring patterns to convert the ciphertext back into plaintext. Here are the steps to decrypt the message:
Set the rotors to the positions specified in the key: Rotor 1: UKW Rotor 2: B Rotor 3: VI Set the plugboard (Steckerbrett) to the position 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1. Write out the ciphertext in groups of four letters, with each group representing a single letter of the plaintext. For each group of four letters, use the Enigma machine's wiring patterns to determine the corresponding plaintext letter.
Here’s the decrypted message: bk nbwo ud iywqr krlqoa mh vjldngahae Decrypted message: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG This is a well-known pangram, a phrase that uses all the letters of the alphabet at least once.
- Comment on This console generation seems skippable 5 months ago:
The steam deck is my favourite console of this generation by far, and it’s not even 100% a console.
- Comment on VW solid-state battery retains 95% capacity over 1,000 charge cycles in lab testing 5 months ago:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen
It’s common knowledge? It’s literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means “the people’s car” and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.
- Comment on Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times 6 months ago:
I agree with you, prices will still be market driven. However I was replying to a comment about a hypothetical scenario, which I think is useful to explore however unlikely it might be.
- Comment on Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times 6 months ago:
Thinking of the hypothetical scenario where in a short timeframe energy would become near unlimited and almost free:
On the positive side: with no energy limitations, Direct Air Capture technology could be scaled massively. That’s one really promising technology that can take carbon off the air and use it for other things (like sustainable air fuels) or removing it altogether.
Also this would accelerate the transition to electric cars and well, electric everything: why pay for fuel for your car, your stove or boiler, when they can be almost free? That has a potential for good effects on the environment too.
On the negative side: this opens the door for more, cheap transport. If people don’t have to pay for fuel, they’d be more willing to take the car everywhere. This would mean more roads, more infrastructure, more destruction of ecosystems, less space for pedestrians… A trend that is already too difficult to reverse in a world of expensive fuels.
In terms of economics, I could see this accelerating the gap between countries. Those who could benefit from semi-free energy first would have an immense competitive advantage and also lower their manufacturing costs, leaving worse-off countries in a position where they can’t compete because of technology nor because of cheap labour.
- Comment on Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software 6 months ago:
Oh no, stop the presses! They missed a C! ⚠️ Their whole argument is invalid!
- Comment on ChatGPT, how do I use OCR in Word? 7 months ago:
Yeah is this linked with dall-e?
- Comment on Sony’s PlayStation Portal gives a confusing first impression 7 months ago:
I’m trying to defend here a product I don’t really believe in, so bear with me.
The portal lets you play PS5 games, in PS5-ish quality (-ish because it’s obviously not the same as a 4k TV). The best the switch can do is 7-year-old No Man’s Sky, with no multiplayer. Recent Pokémon and Zelda (first party Nintendo games) can’t even reach a constant 30 FPS in the whole of the game.
I don’t think graphics are THAT important, but I know there are people who think that. And in that case, the PS5+Portal is going to beat a standalone steam deck or a switch. If you have a beefy PC maybe a steam deck can stream in better quality, but if you’re in the PS5 ecosystem it’s the best quality handheld gaming you can achieve.
Would I buy it? Absolutely not. 80% of the fun with my steam deck is taking it places. The airport, the plane, a hotel on a business trip, my partner’s place, the dentist waiting room, the bus/train… All that’s missing with the Portal, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see a (niche) market for it.
- Comment on Could Cruise be the Theranos of AI? And is there a dark secret at the core of the entire driverless car industry? 7 months ago:
I firmly believe the solution is autonomous shuttles, not cars. Imagine having bus routes that can dynamically change and adapt to demand. Say we replace every bus with 2 smaller shuttles: during normal service the route could have the same capacity, but if there is an extraordinary event (sports event for example) you could divert them from the low-demand areas to the extraordinary-demand zone.
During lower demand times, you can also have more routes at no extra cost. If you’re clever and make an app to call the shuttle (think Uber but through pre-established routes) the demand can be determined in real time to ensure you don’t have empty shuttles.
And because they’re bigger than passenger cars you’re still increasing the ratio of passengers per vehicle, unlike robotaxis which merely replace private cars, with mostly 1- or 2-passenger trips.
- Comment on YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers 7 months ago:
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
- Comment on YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers 7 months ago:
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
- Comment on Apple officially unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max: 3 nanometer, Dynamic Caching GPU, more 7 months ago:
Genuine question: and are these slated to have full-fledged Linux compatibility? Because I’ve had to give up on Windows on Arm because of silliness like Google refusing to make Google Drive, or apps like Affinity/Blender/Fusion360 not having hardware acceleration thanks to Qualcomm’s subpar drivers.
- Comment on Japan’s automakers are keeping sports cars alive in the EV era 7 months ago:
Absolutely not. Fast yes, but so is the Saleen F-150 and it is not a sports car either by any stretch of imagination. Or an Audi Q7 V12 TDI, or even a Civic Type R.
A sports car has different qualities than being fast, namely feeling fast. That’s how the MX-5 has always managed to be called a sports car despite not being a fast car really.
- Comment on So long, small phones 8 months ago:
No, I agree with his point. Features do take space. Maybe we can make space for a headphone jack (🙄), but consumers demand more cameras, with a larger sensor, faster and more power hungry processors, bigger batteries. With any space limitation (even the Pro Max comes with a space limitation because it can’t become an iPad…) there are feature tradeoffs, and obviously a smaller phone will fit fewer cameras, less cooling, a smaller battery, etc.
- Comment on So long, small phones 8 months ago:
God, the small phone crowd are so exhausting. The iPhone Mini. We get it, some people do like tiny phones, but as an example, for iPhone buyers that seems to be <3% of buyers. There is simply not a large enough market for them.
- Comment on Apple may reduce the performance of the 3nm A17 Pro processor due to massive overheating of the iPhone 15 Pro 8 months ago:
It’s not the same phone, because it has USB-C. I wouldn’t have paid 600€ for an iPhone 14, but this one looks somewhat compelling to me.