SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
- Comment on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - ServeTheHome 23 hours ago:
Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good
- Comment on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - ServeTheHome 1 day ago:
Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.
- Comment on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - ServeTheHome 1 day ago:
Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.
- Comment on Airbnb will now show users the total cost of their stay right away 1 day ago:
Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.
- Comment on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move - ServeTheHome 1 day ago:
Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,… Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?
This is seriously ‘how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step’ type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.
If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if a Synology ‘jailbreak’ to load a third party OS comes out.
- Comment on Airbnb will now show users the total cost of their stay right away 1 day ago:
This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.
- Comment on China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ 5 days ago:
It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.
If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.
If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).
But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.
As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.
Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.
- Comment on China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ 5 days ago:
Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.
- Comment on China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ 5 days ago:
For anyone not familiar with thorium…
Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.
There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.
The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.
China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.
Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.
- Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes 3 weeks ago:
Sad but true. And they are taking some good stuff with them.
Squeeze box back in the day was the biggest competitor to Sonos. All open source. Logitech bought them, then just shut it down for no apparent reason. Same thing happened with Harmony. Best user programmable remote on the market, Logitech buys them, then shuts them down for no apparent reason.
I wish someone would scrape together a few million bucks or whatever Logitech would want to sell both brands, buy them, and resurrect them.
- Comment on The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great? 4 weeks ago:
Not at all. In fact Creality seems quite open for a Chinese company. There’s literally an option on the touch screen menu to enable root access. That gives you full SSH access to everything on the board, no hacks or jailbreaks needed.
The firmware is Klipper based, mostly open but there’s a few binary bits. There are some open source firmware forks but the one thing they haven’t got running yet is the bed pressure sensor so you need to add a separate sensor for leveling and z axis zeroing.
However the stock firmware works great and with some open source scripts you can add whatever you want to it like fluidd/mainsail.
My k1 Max has lived its entire life on a private network segment, only internet access it gets is NTP to set the clock. It’s perfectly fine. I have never registered with Creality cloud nor has the machine tried to force me too. I use orca slicer and feed it the g code and it works great.
- Comment on Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year. 4 weeks ago:
Yeah this is why I don’t use Plex.
At one point I installed it on my NAS. It goes through the setup, and then says I need to make a cloud account. Wtf? I am running locally hosted software on locally hosted hardware to access locally hosted files. Why do I need any cloud for this?
I don’t. I uninstalled it.
- Comment on Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April 4 weeks ago:
Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?
I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.
To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.
- Comment on Brother Says It Was Falsely Accused Of Bricking Printers That Use Cheaper Third-Party Ink Cartridges 5 weeks ago:
This is disappointing for Rossman. I like his content a lot and he’s on the right page, but I think he’s big enough that he needs to start adopting some journalistic standards. For example, if he reads that some company is doing something stupid, at least bothered to call them and ask for a comment before he drags them through the mud on his channel.
- Comment on I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better 1 month ago:
Exactly. I would extend that and the article’s premise to say, tech isn’t innately good or bad, it is just a tool that can be applied in good or bad ways. For example at his cafe, a QR code ordering system could have been optional for those who prefer it, and could be easily implemented without collecting any personal data. And that could actually be a positive thing for those who want to reorder without getting up or who have social anxiety. But by forcing all customers into this confusing and privacy invading system, the tech becomes a bad thing.
The villain of that story is not tech. The villains are the online ordering company that decided to make a data grab, and the cafe owner who decided to buy tech so he wouldn’t have to pay servers.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 1 month ago:
I hate this. I think it should be illegal. Or make a building code that there has to be a real extractor hood above the stove in all cases.
- Comment on OpenAI whistleblower’s deemed suicide 2 months ago:
How many times did he shoot himself?
I mean there is a pattern to these things.
If Putin doesn’t like you, you shoot yourself and then jump out of a building.
If the Clintons don’t like you, you shoot yourself twice in the back of the head before driving your car off a cliff.
If you have dirt on powerful people, you hang yourself in prison. - Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 months ago:
That practice was halted and now the vehicle video is under MUCH stricter control with an option to not share any of it at all.
Given the choice, I’d rather have some Tesla employee joking about what I park next to than Tesla Inc selling my driving data to insurance companies like most other automakers do… - Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 months ago:
That was from years ago.
Tesla used to sell cars rated by pack capacity. For example the ‘P85D’ was the performance model, 85 kWh pack, dual motor.
There was also a 40 kWh (cheaper) and 60 kWh version.
After a while they stopped building 40 kWh packs and just software-locked the 60 kWh pack to only have 40 kWh of usable capacity. I think for a while they offered an upgrade where you could pay to unlock the extra capacity.I don’t think they’ve done that in some time. I know when I bought my car (model y long range) they didn’t even advertise the pack capacity nor was any upgrade offered. The only paywall thing I’ve seen with Tesla is FSD and they’re pretty transparent about that. I don’t think they’re awful for paywalling it, because if they build the car without the FSD hardware it won’t have other safety systems like lane departure notification.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 months ago:
I’ve done it. What do you think happens?
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 months ago:
Something to consider…
Elon may be going down a conservative rabbit hole these days, but this is the sort of thing Tesla would never ever ever do. And things like using the telematic system to sell your location and speed to insurance companies. Never happened on a Tesla. You may not like the guy, but the cars are fucking solid.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 2 months ago:
This, exactly this. The fact that they would even consider this rules them out for me forever.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 2 months ago:
Still care about MP3- it’s the bog standard, the thing EVERYthing supports. Like the shitty SBC codec on Bluetooth. I’ve still got tons of MP3s and they aren’t going away anytime soon.
Everything I get new though is high-res FLAC.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 2 months ago:
Then you are serving the needs of people like Trump, Murdoch, and other billionaires / CEOs / shareholders who’d rather have us fighting each other than working together to restore the American dream.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 2 months ago:
There are a lot of moneyed interests who want us all fighting each other. They want that so they can continue to extract the wealth of the nation for themselves. So while you explain why you’ve no need to listen to anybody, you are helping them.
Ever see a magic show? The magician sets up the trick and the cute bikini clad assistant jumps around and flashes her hands to capture your attention so you don’t notice the magician has just palmed your card instead of shuffling it. Elon is the assistant here. Everybody is focused on him and his stupid salute and all of the crazy things people like him say and do, and people are not focused on the real question of how to stop the fact that Americacs people are being bled dry.
I would encourage you to read the story of Daryl Davis, he is a black musician, most famous for becoming friends with a number of KKK members. Those people were used to being hated by black people and vice versa. All Daryl did was talk to them, listen to them, find elements of commonality. I think like 40 or 50 KKK members have left the organization because of him.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 2 months ago:
I realize the American educational system has gone downhill, but surely at some point somebody taught you the concept of nuance? That not everything is black or white, good or evil? That sometimes things are shades of gray? Sometimes good people do bad things, bad people do good things, etc? And that not everything is as it first appears at face value, you have to look deeper to understand?
I for one am very much a student of nuance.
I think we would both agree that of late, Elon has somewhat gone off the rails. But that doesn’t mean everything he has ever done or ever will do is automatically bad. I can dislike his current politics and the way he is approaching this efficiency project, without having to shit on everything he’s ever done.
Thus, I remain a fan of SpaceX and Tesla, for the simple reason that they both lead their respective fields technology-wise. As someone who has owned a Tesla for years (going back to the days when everybody loved Elon), I can confidently say from personal first-hand experience that it is a fantastic car. The fact that I now disagree with many of its founder’s politics doesn’t change the car in my driveway. It was a fantastic car when I bought it and it’s an even more fantastic car now as FSD gets further refined.
I ask, for the good of our nation, please avoid black and white thinking. A population unable to grasp nuance and uninterested in looking deeper for motivations and questions below the surface is easily manipulated with range bait news. Republicans have been doing this for decades. Democrats have just started in the last 4 or 5 years.
- Comment on Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt 2 months ago:
Tesla fan here, this is kind of accurate. I wouldn’t call it terrible, but the aluminum chassis means it has towing limitations, the small battery doesn’t have nearly as much range as most other Tesla’s and it gets worse if you’re towing, plus not everybody wants to drive the Halo truck. Double the range or cut the price by 30% and you have an interesting car, as it is now I look at it as a first generation attempt.
- Comment on There’s No Dancing Around It: Apple’s Vision Pro Was An Ugly Dud 3 months ago:
I tried one in the store. It’s an amazing experience, the augmented reality is done very well.
The problem is I don’t think there’s any content for it. If it could play 3D movies or games or something, that might be a reason to buy it. But for right now as far as I can tell the main reason to have one is to view 3D photos from an iPhone in actual 3D. And I’m sorry but that’s just not worth $3,500.The other issue is the competition. Quest 3 is very close in terms of technology, not quite as good but close, and it’s 7x cheaper with a hell of a lot more content available.
Make it $1500 and release enough content that there’s a reason to buy it, and it’ll sell.
- Comment on UPS and servers : simulated sine wave good? 3 months ago:
I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 3 months ago:
Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday.
You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.