tankplanker

@tankplanker@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google pulls the plug on first and second gen Nest Thermostats⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Except in the UK you can’t as they don’t sell them. They also ended UK support for their smoke detectors as well.

  I switched to opentherm hardware and its now on my HA properly rather than via the cloud.

  I did get a good ten years out the Nest hardware, I consider that reasonable for what it cost. Sure old fashioned controllers last longer, but i want the smart features

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gambling does not cause any ‘social ills’, lobbyist tells incredulous MPs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that’s its pre-watershed for sporting events that are popular with kids makes it even worse

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study Claims 4K/8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Quality of the system is such a massive dependency here, I can well believe that someone watching old reruns from a shitty streaming service that is upscaled to 1080p or 4k by their TV they purchased from the supermarket with coupons collected from their breakfast cereal is going to struggle to tell the difference.

  Likewise if you fed the TVs with a high end 4k blu ray player and any blu ray considered reference such as Interstellar, you are still going to struggle to tell the difference, even with a more midrange TV unless the TVs get comically large for the viewing distance so that the 1080p screen starts to look pixelated.

  I think very few people would expect their old wired apple earphones they got free with their iphone 4 would expect amazing sound from them, yet people seem to be ignoring the same for cheap TVs. I am not advocating for ultra high end audio/videophile nonsense with systems costing 10s of thousands, just that quite large and noticeable gains are available much lower down the scale.

  Depending what you watch and how you watch it, good quality HDR for the right content is an absolute home run for difference between standard 1080p and 4k HDR if your TV can do true black. Shit TVs do HDR shitterly, its just not comparable to a decent TV and source. Its like playing high rez loss less audio on those old apple wired earphones vs. playing low bitrate MP3s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sheffield Wednesday file for administration with 12-point deduction imminent⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason the Premier League was created was for the teams in the Premier League to keep more of the money by sharing less with the lower leagues.

  The Premier League earns so much more money than the lower leagues its impossible to get into and stay in without a rich sugar daddy.

  Even if you do get up with money to spend as Forest found when they got promoted, the cap on your spending is greatly reduced for that first year so you struggle to compete without a points reduction for overspending.

  The rules exist to pull up the ladder as much as possible. One of the main goals for any European super league is to remove relegation and promotion. Its about locking in that revenue stream.

  Having said all that, the punishment is there to stop the club being pillaged or mismanaged as in this case. The threat of a points deduction stops anybody sensible from just borrowing their way up the league without being able to pay for it. We had clubs getting in all sorts of messes and far more often as they tried to buy titles.

  This owner is far from rational, best case was his plan was to sell it to a friend for a pound and wipe off the debt, and thats me being very generous to his ability to plan ahead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Progress⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I did Samsung dex for a while, its ok as long as you don’t want low level access to what you connecting to.

  Now I switched to a gpd micropc 2 and its built in ethernet, sd card, usb a and c sockets and native linux make it so much more useful. No longer do i need dongles or other rubbish.

  Plus it will do multiple monitor support, something dex struggles with. The keyboard is a little small for touch typing but the former factor is worth the trade of for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sad but true⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dumbest person I know also happens to be a super nice, always happy, and also very attractive. She’s never struggled to get work ever, even for her dream job as a teacher when she had to take her foundational English and Math exams three times.

  I would say she has a better life than the majority of people, never had a day of stress ever as everything has always worked out for her.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists 500 times in first year of power, analysis shows⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Would they not also be lobbying for ICE cars/trucks? Or would that be counted differently? At the moment we have had the big positive step of moving the date back to 2030, at the expense of more flexibility around hybrids (which are shit for the environment) and reducing the tapering of ICE sales.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.

  There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.

  That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps.

  I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Boris Johnson hosted Tory peer who funded a lavish refurbishment of his flat for dinner the day after the national coronavirus lockdown came into force, leaked documents show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I am sure this compromat leaking is completely unrelated to the news linking Boris with a comeback at Reform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Job Market Is HellYoung people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is also third party recruiters for specialist positions such as IT, Law, etc. who are often the only entry point into a particular firms open positions.

  At their best you used to be able to actually speak to them and they would go find a job for you. They would help you tailor your CV and cover letter to suit, prep you for the interview, etc. They are typically paid by the hiring company a significant percentage of your salary in installments if you get hired. You can pay for this service now, but getting a good one is hard.

  I used to get direct contacts from them for positions that actually matched what I can do for a salary that would actually match what I am after. They used to have an actual industry knowledge and contacts.

  Now, at their worst they spam people on linkedin with connection requests for positions that are completely unsuitable, AI has made this far far worse now. They often use a ghost position just to farm CVs for future positions, totally counterproductive if you wanted to tailor your CV for a position.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Job Market Is HellYoung people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I am sorry Mario, your job is in another castle

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nigel Farage says Boris Johnson is not welcome in Reform UK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Farage scared of allowing his supporters a free vote between him and Boris shocker.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Big Surprise—Nobody Wants 8K TVs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.

  A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.

  People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.

  The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leaked emails link NHS data privatiser Palantir to Jeffrey Epstein⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Does he put forward his case that he is the anti christ? As he sure comes across as someone who would want that. He has always felt like the sort of motherfucker who would read the Stand and identify with Randall Flagg

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK’s richest set to produce 13 times more transport emissions than poorest by 2035⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Richest 4%? Show us the gap between the richest 1% and the richest 0.1% vs the bottom rather than dragging down the multiplier by deliberate widening the boundaries to imply its not even more lopsided when you look at the rich as people who travel by private jet and super yacht.

  Do the wealthy need to cut their emissions? Of course, but stop pretending that they emit anywhere near the amount of the actual rich.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework unveils a second-generation Framework Laptop 16 with a swappable Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, an industry first, shipping in November 2025⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it pushed me to finally put in an order, got to wait till December now as I’m in the third batch.

  I wanted to wait till we had proof thst the graphics card would be updatable and a better one would be available as their AMD card is a bit too lightweight for me.

  I would rather it had been a better AMD card, I have a 7900 xtx in my desktop, but i will take what I can get at this point, especially as I know I can upgrade later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.

  I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But how do you pay the overseers to enforce it when money is no longer valid? And the overseers are bigger and tougher than your average billionaire?

  Slavery only works when there is money to pay the overseers and a legal system to protect the owner class from being extorted by the overseers.

  ICE is in a similar boat and they have to pay significant amounts to attract people to carry out ICE fascism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents in England skipping meals to afford school uniforms, survey finds⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is the branded tat that schools insist upon such as blazers, jumpers, skirts, etc. Its almost always overpriced compared to the basics from Asda and Tesco.

  Ban the branded shit and you fix at least half the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who is he going to staff it with? There is zero chance he will cook and clean for himself and he will need a substantial army to protect himself from the collapse of the human race.

  If he goes with people how long before the security guards realise they can dump his scrawny ass off a cliff and have a better quality of life as money becomes irrelevant? If he goes with robots how long before they break beyond what they can self repair? If he goes with robots with human engineers, how long before the engineers realise the same thing as the security guards and program the robots to kill Bezos?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Till they come after you for doing so.

  The way it will work is a public crackdown on a couple of the big providers, then a few high profile cases where unlicensed VPN usage will be a tacked on offense with additional penalties for those getting investigated.

  Its the same with the identity checks now, big porn sites and the like have them or will have them very soon, some small scale stuff does not and might get away with not implementing it. Using such small scale sites then becomes grounds for further investigation if you get swept up with it later.

  These things are never about 100% compliance, there will always be those who can work around it. However working around it will in itself become an offense and grounds for further investigation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, do you have a license to use that VPN bruv?

  I have been saying this is the long term aim of this style of legislation for years.

  They knew when they implemented IPA back in 2016 that VPNs would be an ongoing problem and have been chipping away at the perception of them since then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to reform income tax: end the high marginal rate scandal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It gets worse if you compare Jane with Janet and John who both earn say 50k each, as they still get that child benefit despite their combined net income being about double what she earns.

  They simply refuse to look at household income, and treat even married couples as singletons living separately for this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Acquired a sliding mitre saw⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Awesome, should cut it like butter

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Acquired a sliding mitre saw⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you haven’t already checked the alignment in both planes with a good quality square.

  I guess you purchased an aluminium cutting blade for this? Also if you decide to cut fine wood with this get a better blade than stock.

  They are such a useful tool, I’ve cut thousands of floor boards and framing with mine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This with the right controls and rules could actually be a positive thing for people who don’t want or aren’t ready for a relationship with a real person. However as the people who are running things are Elon, Sam, and Mark, there is fuck all chance of that and whatever this ends up as it will be exploitative and will result in deaths.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK inheritance tax clampdown will not spark mass sale of family farms, study shows⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Those who purchased farms to avoid paying IHT such as Clarkson can usually afford to pay for a good accountant to help them plan avoiding as much IHT under the new rules as possible as its quite generous if you have at least seven years (and money for a good accountant) before your kids will inherit.

  Those who are actual multi generational farmers, even if that’s just the parents and the children they want to inherit the farm, there aren’t that many who are over the threshold for a married couple plus the various exceptions if they can go the seven years.

  Its those who lack the time or lack the quality advise that will struggle, its not a huge number, less than 500 farms a year should be dragged into paying more without proper planning at the seven years to implement it due to allowances. I think thats the only bit I do not like, as once again we have allowed a loop hole for those who can and should be paying more tax and the expense of everybody else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Experts discuss plans to save water as dry conditions worsen across England⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Two decades ago we needed the water companies to fix their leaks rather than paying bonuses, dividends, and loan repayments to help the former.

  At least that long ago we needed more reservoirs rather than allowing the cost and nimbies to stop them.

  But right now we need to be cutting back on new data centres and other new projects that can’t afford their water debt. Stop making the problem worse without an actual plan or funding to fix it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Billionaire Elon Musk is threatening to sue Apple and escalating his feud with Sam Altman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hes also exactly the type of person who this would cause a massive hissy fit over and demand immediate changes to Grok that would further stunt its working

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyclist injuries dropped by half after “hated” cycle lane installed, but mayor still claims scrapped lane largely used as “bike run” for drug dealers to “get through traffic"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Its possible that the local businesses have lost business because terminally lazy people can no longer park directly outside their shops and will not walk a short distance to them, this should be extremely easy for the business to prove if its actually true, I have my doubts its a significant amount. I suspect the people most inconvenienced by not being able to park outside the businesses are those that actually work there. This is the only remotely serious suggestion I see from the anti bike lane crowd in this instance.

  My local village center is meant to be no parking on the high street, has had times its been enforced properly and times its been ignored due to pressure by local businesses. Recently they started enforcing it, directing people to the free (under two hours) car parks on the edge of the high street. Car parks were full with people who own and work in the shops, so they prevented them from parking in the car parks all day, so now they park on the residential streets off the high street enforcement area.