stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with a PC game 'repacker' 10 minutes ago:
So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).
Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.
Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.
- Comment on Microsoft Copilot falls Atari 2600 Video Chess 1 day ago:
I thought CoPilot was just a rebagged ChatGPT anyway?
It’s a silly experiment anyway, there are very good AI chess grandmasters but they were actually trained to play chess, not predict the next word in a text.
- Comment on BBC is Getting a Paywall. 1 week ago:
Seems fair enough, these things cost money and the #BBC is in a race to diversify it’s income in preparation for the license fee going away. The dynamic description sounds like they want to preserve the casual visitors experience of an open site.
I get ads on my BBC podcasts when I’m abroad. I assume that’s all part of it.
- Comment on Majority of children will be overweight or obese in nine areas of England by 2035, study shows 1 week ago:
My eldest understands the need for good diet and exercise. They exercise at home doing various aerobic exercises and crunches to keep in shape. They hate sports at school and there doesn’t seem to be any effort to find the a sport they might enjoy or even just focus on improving their personal exercise regime.
I get teaching time is limited but the impression I get is the kids that want to be in the school teams get the most out of sport and the rest just go through the motions because it’s a compulsory subject.
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 1 week ago:
You don’t think having a full genome and medical history of everyone who’d been in contact with the NHS would be useful to researchers?
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 1 week ago:
One of the things we did during the pandemic was significantly scale up or ability to sequence genomes. We were literally watching the virus evolve near real-time because a large chunk of samples could be sequenced and processed.
While they’re are obviously data privacy concerns, for which the UK has a fairly long history of legislating for, having a full sequence for every newborn could allow for all sorts of cheaper early interventions. I’m sure the dataset would also be very useful for researchers as well.
- Comment on Philippines ex-leader Duterte seeks interim release from ICC 3 weeks ago:
I remember when this guy came to power and the allegations of extra-judicial executions as part of his war on drugs. I didn’t realise the ICC had caught up with him.
- Comment on Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom – Purism 3 weeks ago:
The article says it only applied to apps requesting certain permissions. I agree I’m an ideal world it would be nice to get f-droid directly from the Play store but at least according to the article the ability to install it isn’t being blocked here.
- Comment on Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom – Purism 3 weeks ago:
From the article it sounds like the limitations come for some app types downloaded directly from a browser. I think this doesn’t affect alternate app stores like f-droid where you are effectively delegating approval to their process.
I have come across the other limitations mentioned with the Home Assistant companion app which I could only get matter registration to work with the version downloaded from the Play store.
- Comment on how do I stop being a sucker for alcoholic stuff on sale? 5 weeks ago:
I can second the alcohol free beers. The modern ones have excellent taste and hit the refreshing hoppy spot for me and are much better than juice or sodas when it comes to calories. I’m not totally dry, I drink 2-3 units a week, but I’m certainly feeling better for not having alcohol every day.
- Comment on Industrial Light & Magic's Chief Creative Promotes AI Slop During His TED Talk 1 month ago:
There were some AI pictures in the talks I saw last week. But they where put in to illustrates a point - I doubt otherwise the engineer would hire an artist for some bespoke art for their talk. It’s probably better than just copy and pasting off the internet without much attribution.
- Comment on Industrial Light & Magic's Chief Creative Promotes AI Slop During His TED Talk 1 month ago:
I used to when they first came out. There are some genuinely good talks in the archives. However there is definitely a trend and style to them.
- Comment on Houthi rebels shoot down 7 US military Reaper drones worth $334m, in recent weeks 2 months ago:
You would have thought for $33mil a pop they would have some countermeasures. I guess they are still several orders of magnitude cheaper than a jet with an expensive pilot so are more disposable?
- Comment on Houthi rebels shoot down 7 US military Reaper drones worth $334m, in recent weeks 2 months ago:
I assume you need fairly sophisticated SAM systems to take out these drones. Are they all coming from Iran? Is this a step up in their missile capability?
- Comment on Keir Starmer does not believe trans women are women, No 10 says 2 months ago:
It’s probably cowardice.
I totally get why people are upset but the real question is what to do next. You can try lobbying the government with the massive majority by accusing them all of being bigots or form a new party (or join an existing one) with this reform at the top of their agenda.
Sadly while there may or no may not be a majority in the country who have sympathy with the plight of trans people I doubt there are enough where it is the top off their priorities when deciding who to vote for.
- Comment on Trans women should use toilets based on biological sex, Phillipson says 2 months ago:
Urinals. Most restaurants and cafes have unisex cubicles. When you get to pubs and nightclubs you can get more pee draining space per square foot with a urinal.
As far as I understand it nothing stops an establishment just declaring all their toilets as unisex. I’ve certainly been in a number of drinking establishments where this has been the case.
- Comment on Keir Starmer does not believe trans women are women, No 10 says 2 months ago:
“when looking at the Equality Act” is the key missing part off the quote. Would you expect an ex-barrister to contradict the ruling of the supreme court?
What’s actually needed is new clear primary legislation to address all these issues. Parliament still had primacy here but good luck getting MPs wading into such a toxic debate?
- Comment on Synology restricts choice of hard disks for new Plus NAS 2 months ago:
Does anyone know what the underlying filesystem is on DSM? The ability to easily replace disks with a degree of redundancy across the 4 bays is the biggest plus point for Synology although I have no doubt all the bits underneath are the Linux storage stack.
- Comment on Synology restricts choice of hard disks for new Plus NAS 2 months ago:
It’s a shame because I really like the point and click nature of DSM. Although I’m a happy Linux hacker I don’t want another Linux box to suck up my limited admin time just to store files.
- Comment on YouTube considers a daily timer for users looking to cut back on Shorts 2 months ago:
I migrated away from the mobile app to PipePipe just to avoid shorts and I pay for premium.
- Comment on Webb telescope documents alien planet's death plunge into a star 2 months ago:
Bold of you to assume we’ll make it that far. I’m not convinced that our current networked CO2 phase isn’t another great filter event.
- Comment on China’s push for chip independence continues with its first RISC-V server CPU 2 months ago:
Android gets a leg up from being built on a FLOSS base but I don’t think it was the community that pushed Android to where it is today. That’s taken a lot of money and resources from Google and it’s phone partners investing in the slightly more open platform than Apple.
- Comment on China’s push for chip independence continues with its first RISC-V server CPU 2 months ago:
That’s not really true. Yes avoiding complex instructions makes the front end easier to pipeline but there are lots of smarts in the backend to do prediction and scheduling to keep the execution units fed. The ISA might be free to use but no one is sharing their highly optimised server silicon architecture designs.
RISC-V’s challenge is can they standardise the software ecosystem enough that things just work across a multitude of chip providers or does everything devolve into specialist distributions taking advantage of each manufacturers “special sauce” custom instructions.
Gaining design wins over Arm’s microcontrollers for bespoke hardware was the easy bit. Replacing stuff in the server space is much harder and something that took Arm decades to make inroads into.
- Comment on Google To Allow Double Serving Ads. 2 months ago:
I pay for it so the TV and web experience is ad free. I use PipePipe on my phone because the native client won’t stop pushing shorts at you.
- Comment on Does Google scan yt videos to know what products appear in them? 2 months ago:
Do you think there is information YouTube wouldn’t collect about you even if they could be better at selling ads to people based on it?
Do you live somewhere with data protection laws? If so you could request a dump of all personally identifying data they hold on you.
- Comment on Google will develop the Android OS fully in private; Will continue open source releases. 3 months ago:
It’s not like Android is especially open to drive-by contributions anyway. I don’t think really changes much for the downstream consumers of the releases.
- Comment on DOJ renews call for Google to sell Chrome, and Android could be next 3 months ago:
We’ll go from Google sucking up all our data to another entity sucking up all our data and selling it to other people. How much funding does it take to keep Chrome running?
- Comment on What are some slow acting poisons? 3 months ago:
It used to slowly drive haters insane, hence mad haters. There was a theory Napoleon was exposed to excess levels of Arsenic over time although that might have well been background exposure. Nevertheless over time it’s not good for you. Neither is lead.
- Comment on Microsoft has pulled back on over a gigawatt of planned data center capacity, suggesting that they do not think there is a growth future in generative AI 3 months ago:
Context is king which is why even the biggest models get tied in knots when I try them on my niche coding problems. I’ve been playing a bit with NotebookLM which promises to be interesting with enough reference material but unfortunately when I tried to add the Vulcan specs it complained it couldn’t accept them (copyright maybe?).
We have recently been given clearance to use the Gemini Pro tools with Google office at work. While we are still not using them for code generation I have found the transcription and meeting summary tools very useful and certainly a time saver.
- Comment on What ever happened to QAnon? 3 months ago:
I don’t doubt the a MAGA crowd leant into the Q conspiracy and were happy to co-opt it’s adherents into it’s electoral base. However is there any evidence that links its genesis to the like of Banon? Most of what I heard (from across the pond, indirectly) was more traditional wedge issues like anti-DEI and anti-trans rhetoric.