stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on NHS to pay 25% more for innovative drugs after UK–US zero-tariff deal 23 hours ago:
The main thing I got from that is drug pricing is complicated. At least the extra expenditure comes from widening the pool of available drugs rather than just the prices of existing treatments being put up.
- Comment on Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support 1 week ago:
Modern machines have TPM so we can do attested boot and validate a system hasn’t been tampered with. They don’t need third party kernel modules to test that.
- Comment on The important reason why we stopped running our food bank 2 weeks ago:
It’s an interesting model they have moved to (heavily discounted food Vs donations). There is probably more work to do on wages and energy costs as time to cook is the greatest reason people don’t make healthy food.
- Comment on Hong Kong legislature now an 'echo chamber', four years after shake-up 4 weeks ago:
When the transition from colonial rule happened there was a (naive?) belief that China needed Hong Kong’s dynamism in a rapidly globalising world. Time has proved that not to be the case and I guess Hong Kong just withers and is subsumed into the mainland while a brain drain of those that can leave continues.
- Comment on Is the Atari Jaguar worth playing in 2025 !? 4 weeks ago:
Did you ever play with the audio visualiser? I believe it was built in with the CD-ROM drive? What about Tempest 2000?
- Comment on Is the Atari Jaguar worth playing in 2025 !? 4 weeks ago:
I never got a Jaguar despite being a signed up Atari fan boy at the time. The hardware was ridiculously complex which made ports to it a hard sell and Atari just didn’t have the first party exclusive clout needed to sustain a console at launch.
I do wish I’d had a chance to play with some of Jeff Minter’s creations on it though. Apparently there was a nice audio visualiser that built on the trip-a-tron from the ST days as well as some reboots of classic arcade games like Tempest 2000.
- Comment on Just Stop Oil activists who attempted to spray paint Taylor Swift's private jet spared jail 5 weeks ago:
I assume the defendant had mentioned as way of mitigation?
- Comment on If you can’t afford a vacation, an AI app will sell you pictures of one 5 weeks ago:
We can remember it for you wholesale?
- Comment on Tesla's Full Self-Driving software under investigation after railroad incidents 1 month ago:
Cost, the reason is cost.
- Comment on Britain’s ex-PM Sunak to take up roles at Microsoft, Anthropic 1 month ago:
I know people said he would, I didn’t realise he had. When did he move? He’s still an MP.
- Comment on Ethical artificial intelligence ? 1 month ago:
There are certainly open source models trained on public data sets that you can run locally.
- Comment on In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information 1 month ago:
I have paid for Newsblur ever since they cancelled Google Reader. I also use elfeed on various emacs instances for project and update feeds of various types.
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
It’s all relative I guess. I can see why the original GPT’s used the Reddit corpus for training. However I’ve always been a little sceptical about the quality of the training set in any social media given how much it exaggerates the extremes of people’s behaviour.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I don’t need to get through winter, I just need to get from dusk to when the cheap energy is gone. Currently that’s about 4kwh - or a small portion of my car battery before or recharges on the cheap rate.
- Comment on “China keeps the algorithm”: Critics attack Trump’s TikTok deal 2 months ago:
Without algorithmic transparency how can you ensure it’s not a propaganda machine?
That said tilting the algorithm isn’t exclusively a TikTok problem, I would love to know how active the bots have been the last week on all the US owned social media platforms. Is there a push for division? How would we know?
- Comment on Russia targets WhatsApp and pushes new 'super-app' as internet blackouts grow 2 months ago:
I wonder how much this will impact the economy in Russia? It seems they’re is not much point having a smart phone if all you are allowed to access is government controlled services.
Do the major phones get sold in Russia or are they all locally produced?
- Comment on UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action 2 months ago:
Your talking about their discretionary powers and that’s not going to be relevant on a protest enforcement action where their senior officer in command will have laid out exactly what the criteria to arrest is.
- Comment on YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household 2 months ago:
I’m similar - and my kids even more so. As they only watch YouTube on the main TV it’s a pain to get alternate frontends on it I also like the fact there are no ads. I think the creators get a bigger cut per premium view Vs ad views, especially if they get blocked.
- Comment on The Queen was the victim of an attempted indecent assault as a teenager, book claims 2 months ago:
I’m not surprised. My mum would tell me stories about dodging creepy old men on the train when going to school in the 50s. She seemed to accept it as just one of those things and I’m sitting there with my GenX sensibilities thinking yikes!
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 2 months ago:
I would be curious if there have been any pen testing against the police and municipal camera networks in the UK. I wonder how many of the vulnerabilities of the system in the video come from trying to use WiFi to save on costs of hardwired setups.
We’ve had them for a long time. In the London the “ring of steel” was installed as a result of the IRAs mainland bombing campaign in the 80s and of course has expanded as the various congestion and clean air zones have been rolled out. I doubt it would be politically possible to remove them now. While potential leaks are an issue at least public sector organisations have some degree of accountability for the cock ups.
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 2 months ago:
Great video and very illuminating about corporatised data surveillance. I wonder how these practices would fly in European or UK data environments. Big cities certainly have extensive CCTV coverage both law enforcement based and private but I’m not sure you could be selling personally identifying data like that.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 months ago:
I mean I don’t think I could pick right now 😂
- Comment on Is 4chan the Perfect 'Pirate Bay' Poster Child to Justify Wider UK Site-Blocking? 3 months ago:
I don’t know why we couldn’t have what we already have on mobile. My kids phones have isp enforced restrictions that prevent them stumbling onto most adult sites. At home I’ve got their devices fairly locked down but I’m fairly technical so know how it works. I don’t know why households couldn’t just have a setting with their ISP that allows them to opt in/out of blocking non-OSA compliment sites rather than doing a blanket censorship.
I get the reasoning behind the OSA - a lot of parents don’t know how to protect their kids online and defer to the government to sort it out. However the implementation has been a giant flustercuck.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 months ago:
It’s the free VPNs that are the problem. They are privacy nightmares.
- Comment on A UK government program to address obesity gets major funding from Eli Lilly, the maker of weight loss drug Mounjaro 3 months ago:
Looks like 🙂
On the actual topic I know a number of people getting injection privately and swearing by the results. There is a pretty aggressive referral campaign as well which considering the monthly cost is going up you can see why people will sing it’s praises.
- Comment on Flight attendant union leaders ‘ready to go to jail’ as Air Canada strike outlawed 3 months ago:
Are airline staff counted as critical workers? In the UK I think it’s only Police, fire and military who are banned from striking.
- Comment on Famous VPN company Mullvald says it will no longer use OpenVPN 3 months ago:
Because OpenVPN is fiddly to set up and modern Wireguard setups seem to scale well enough.
- Comment on Trump administration accuses UK of failing to uphold human rights 3 months ago:
Not exactly complains about grannies being arrested are they?
- Comment on "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint 3 months ago:
You must make the source available to anyone you distributed the binaries to. Where in Red Hats TOS does it say they will sue you? As far as I understand it the reserve the right to terminate the service you are paying for. But your rights to source for the binaries provided are not affected.
- Comment on Could I just create my own drive format? 3 months ago:
So a network version of an acoustic delay line?