stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on Hong Kong legislature now an 'echo chamber', four years after shake-up 1 week 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 !? 1 week 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 !? 1 week 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 2 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 2 weeks ago:
We can remember it for you wholesale?
- Comment on Tesla's Full Self-Driving software under investigation after railroad incidents 4 weeks ago:
Cost, the reason is cost.
- Comment on Britain’s ex-PM Sunak to take up roles at Microsoft, Anthropic 4 weeks 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 ? 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 2 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? 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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? 2 months ago:
So a network version of an acoustic delay line?
- Comment on The Debian project is proud to release Debian 13 "Trixie", a major update that brings new features, updated components, and numerous other improvements 2 months ago:
I daily drive Debian and I switched to Trixie once the tooling freeze kicked in. Now the release is stable I’ll be able to enable backports for the few bits and pieces I like to have the latest packages for. Generally I want a rock solid base and I can always use flatpak/snap for more recent apps.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 2 months ago:
For context watching South park?
- Comment on YouTube to be included in Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 3 months ago:
Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven’t been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we’ll watch with them on the account.
The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren’t comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.