COASTER1921

@COASTER1921@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can’t pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone’s hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It’s super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.

  Interesting video on the subject: youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed that’s the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side’s votes.

  See Utah’s districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is a real machine in Romania. Do 20 squats in front of it, and it prints you a free bus ticket.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately I suspect that the people who it would reduce costs for most wouldn’t consider taking the bus in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What options are there for pirating music? I felt Lidarr was not particularly useful due to the lack of indexers. Unless you like mainstream music it’s quite difficult to find many tracks online (and I’m too picky to be okay with YouTube rips).

  Considering music streaming isn’t fragmented in the same way video streaming is, it’s still well worth paying for a music streaming service as part of a family plan imo. There’s no other hassle free solution to instantly listen to anything I want and be recommended new tracks based on my listening preferences.

  I don’t think there’s any particularly “ethical” option, until now I’ve just used Spotify knowing that they’re losing money anyway. But it turns out they posted their first profitable year last year so who knows what the move is now. Qobuz claims to be ethical and high quality, but I don’t know how good the library is and like with any company they can become evil later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How active is too active while being on lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The total amount of active content on Lemmy is nowhere near the amount on Reddit, for limiting the time you spend in app this is actually quite good. And unlike Reddit there are third party apps available for mobile.

  The quality of content on average is significantly higher, but many local niches don’t exist here that do on Reddit. Depending on how you use Reddit this may make it hard to switch - unless your niche is Linux or open source software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The USB type C connector itself is amazing. I’ve never broken the physical connector, the problem is electrical only. The connector is capable of delivering a very high 240W of power, but the device/charger negotiate the power and voltage requirements to find the highest both can support.

  But there are actually four parts of the system limiting the negotiated power:

  • The maximum power the charger can deliver
  • The maximum power the charging device can receive
  • The maximum current the cable can deliver
  • The signaling protocol used to negotiate the highest supported power across the link

  The problem ultimately comes from the negotiation as many devices don’t use USB-PD (the theoretical “standard” for this) to save cost or allow different electrical configurations. This can lead to chargers incorrectly identifying devices as capable of accepting higher voltages than they can. Or devices can incorrectly identify themselves as capable of accepting higher voltage than they actually can.

  If you’re using reputable decides from reputable companies using the included charger/cables, this will never be an issue. It’s only problematic when you want one charger for all your USB type C devices, as it now needs to support multiple communication protocols and voltage standards, hoping that no device identifies itself incorrectly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PC lacks portability and battery life. The many generic ARM Linux game consoles fix both of those problems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah a generic “K36” game system I bought for just under $20 in China. It played everything up to PS1 games flawlessly with a beautiful IPS LCD which was extremely impressive for the price. It even did one full recharge from a dumb charger without issue before I tried using my normal USB-PD capable charger on it and releasing the magic smoke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep I recently had this happen to me for the first time with a generic handheld gaming system and was shocked when the device let out smoke. I opened it up and sure enough the buck converter for the battery charging circuit was burnt, likely because the non-compliant device had somehow requested more than 5V from the charger… The charger was USB-PD and works fine with my phone/laptop/headphones so I’m pretty sure it’s not the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, USB-C is plagued by non-standard electrical configurations, non-standard charging protocols, and non-compliant cables. Rest assured the connector is here to stay, your device just may not be able to charge with any given charger or cable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A sovereign Microsoft 365 alternative: Nextcloud and IONOS join forces - Nextcloud⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s wrong with IONOS? Their VPS prices are some of the best out there and reliability has never been an issue for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How? I’ve been noticing buffering the last few days with 1080p60 videos and up even using the suggested app version in Revanced.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one good thing about all this⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  His “math” for calculating each is surprisingly simple and not based on anything “reciprocal” youtu.be/j04IAbWCszg

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm leaving the US for good, anything I should do before I leave?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Has anyone seen customs ever actually search an electronic device before? I travel internationally nearly every month and have never seen this before, even in China.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Undocumented 'Backdoor' Found In Chinese Bluetooth Chip Used By a Billion Devices.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seriously this. Every single IC which has digital logic contains some number of undocumented test commands used to ensure it meets all the required specifications during production. They’re not intended to be used for normal operation and almost never included in datasheets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta tells Brazil it's only axing fact checkers in USA⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It probably also saves them a bit of money so from their perspective it’s a win-win good business decision.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restart of Three Mile Island tests US appetite for nuclear revival⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  FT asking $75/mo for digital access is insane. I’m happy to pay for quality journalism but that’s simply out of reach for most Americans. I’d love to know how their management determined this was an appropriate price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know what’s up with the algorithm pushing these lately. If it’s a video with 4 views from a channel with no subscribers I’m probably not interested in it. Sometimes they have a good thumbnail/title so I give them a chance but 9/10 times it’s terrible. Also often extremely right wing for whatever reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought that without blocking cookies the tracking is still active, even if you’re not being served ads from them. In those same LinkedIn privacy settings you’re automatically opted into having your data used to train AI models.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LinkedIn fined $335 million in EU for tracking ads privacy breaches⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  LinkedIn has some of the most obfuscated and complex ad targeting settings I’ve encountered. There needs to be a retirement to have a one click solution to disable ad personalization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Web browsers don’t integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you’re always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There’s also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won’t work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there’s browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn’t Chrome/Safari.

  If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn’t feel the need to make their own device specific apps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even the best websites don’t feel as smooth as native UI elements, and somehow browser compatibility is still a very common issue. Signing in with Google and using gpay for checkout is kind of close, but each website has different design elements complicating the experience while giving up the same amount of your personal data as if using an everything app.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switzerland authorizes removable PV plant on railway track⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And you can repair them without needing to shut down a whole railway. All these projects to put solar panels in novel places are totally pointless and solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you’ve never visited the business before. There’s never any special account creation or entering of payment information.