jqubed
@jqubed@lemmy.world
- Comment on Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire risks 1 week ago:
I haven’t paid much attention, but I had some myCharge units I bought at Costco last year get recalled. I suspect a lot of these have cheap batteries from suppliers that don’t put much effort into consistent quality. That’s “okay” with alkaline batteries where the worst that happens is they leak and maybe ruin the device they were in. Have poor quality with a lithium battery and you get a fire or even explosion. I suspect with Anker or some of the other brand names at least you’ll actually get a recall if there’s a problem. A lot of the other no-name, fly-by-night brands on Amazon or elsewhere probably don’t even give you that.
- Comment on xkcd #3100: Alert Sound 2 weeks ago:
They were bought and basically no longer exist. Hot Topic was going to buy them but then GameStop came in with a higher offer. For a while they launched ThinkGeek retail stores in shopping malls but eventually shut them all down and now they basically only exist as some tchotchkes in GameStop stores. Even the website just seems to redirect to the main GameStop page now, not their “store” within the GameStop webstore.
- Comment on Hello, non-Americans, do you have any Chinese language classes in your education system? 2 weeks ago:
My school offered (from most popular to least popular):
- Spanish
- French
- Chinese (I think Mandarin)
- German
I think my child’s high school offers the same, although I don’t know the relative popularities. I’m confident Spanish is still most popular, and judging by the number of posters around the school from German classes trying to convince kids to take German, I’m thinking German is still not very popular.
- Comment on The world would be a better place if rain completely washed away bird poop 2 weeks ago:
I have been in some heavy downpours that have done just that.
- Comment on Zynga shuts down Torchlight 3 developer four years after its acquisition 2 weeks ago:
TIL Zynga still exists
- Comment on How does HTML actually run on a computer? 2 weeks ago:
If it was pre-compiled that could also cause issues not just across operating systems but also the architectures, right? Like x86 on desktop versus the ARM architecture most mobile devices use?
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 3 weeks ago:
I always have a case. Basically every phone I’ve tried has felt too slippery without one to me, so I get one that’s a little more grippy
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 3 weeks ago:
I’ve had a Kindle for a long time and considered upgrading to a non-Kindle device but was concerned that they don’t seem to get manufacturer updates for very long. This could make that more attractive!
- Comment on European Commission fines Delivery Hero and Glovo €329 million for participation in online food delivery cartel 3 weeks ago:
All the abovementioned practices were facilitated by Delivery Hero’s minority shareholding in Glovo. Owning a stake in a competitor is not in itself illegal, but in this specific case it enabled anti-competitive contacts between the two rival companies at several levels. It also allowed Delivery Hero to obtain access to commercially sensitive information and to influence decision-making processes in Glovo, and ultimately to align the two companies’ respective business strategies. This shows that horizontal cross-ownership between competitors may raise antitrust risks and should be handled carefully.
I suppose it can work if they still face robust external competition, like how Hyundai and Kia own stakes in each other and use their combined efforts to compete on the global market, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if even that has anticompetitive implications in their home market of South Korea, both for consumers and workers.
- Comment on OpenAI sees human interaction as a competitor to ChatGPT's super assistant ambitions 3 weeks ago:
I read an article a while back highlighting how many “tech bro” products seem to be about eliminating human interaction, like grocery or meal deliveries, or self-checkout in stores. There is a convenience factor for these things at times, of course, but with the way many of these executives seem to be pushing exclusively using their services and having zero direct interactions with other humans it starts to raise questions about perhaps their own interpersonal skills and why they want to eliminate the human interaction. This feels like more of the same.
- Comment on YSK that the Australian Prime Minister said CEOs of multinational corporations conspired to undermine his elected government 3 weeks ago:
Thank you for the explanation!
- Comment on YSK that the Australian Prime Minister said CEOs of multinational corporations conspired to undermine his elected government 3 weeks ago:
“white-anting”?
- Comment on No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera 3 weeks ago:
As it got dark they began the arduous procedure of aiming the laser and something very quickly dawned on everyone: While considerable attention had been made in the design and alignment of the laser’s optics and in achieving good sensitivity of the optical receiver, no-one had really thought too seriously about the practical difficulties of aiming a very narrow beam over a distance of 118+ miles! Using a number of improvised techniques, the laser crew managed to get the beam “close”, setting the elevation with various shims and other pieces onhand, but getting both azimuth (horizontal) and elevation (vertical) dialed in proved to be a hair-pulling task.
After a bit of fussing, the receive site crew was tantalized by the occasional brief, bright flash from the distant laser but it seemed as though the transmit site crew could never repeat the maneuver - plus the necessary corrections - to get the laser back and on-point! When the receive site crew queried the Grassy Hollow folks about this on the radio it turned out that they were using two primitive tools to adjust the aiming of the laser: A large rock tapped at the end of the metal channel in which the laser was mounted for coarse adjustments and a much smaller rock for fine-tuning!
- Comment on No time to explain, grab a milk and look at the camera 3 weeks ago:
I haven’t finished but this is a very interesting read
- Comment on WTF is a rural town in the USA? 3 weeks ago:
The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.
My understanding is that in Virginia the city/town that serves as the county seat is explicitly not a part of the county it’s located in!
- Comment on EV Tax Credit Ending Dec. 31, Effectively Increasing Prices Up to 28%. See How Popular EVs are Impacted. 4 weeks ago:
It’s hard to imagine any way this doesn’t throw a huge wrench into the adoption of sustainable car technology for the USA.
I think that’s goal
- Comment on Why are American animations more expensive than Asian animations? 4 weeks ago:
It’s why a lot of American cartoons like The Simpsons or Futurama are animated in Asia, usually Japan or Korea. They might have American animators do the key frames and then pay Asian animators to do the tedious in-between frames, or just send it all to Asia.
This also puts a downward pressure on American wages, with the threat effectively being, “take a pay cut or lose the work entirely.” Seems to be what Hollywood is hoping to do with “AI” also.
- Comment on Shats 4 weeks ago:
!nominativedeterminism@feddit.uk
- Comment on Shats 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million 4 weeks ago:
I couldn’t find specs skimming through the article, but it doesn’t look like it would fit in any normal parking space. Driving around might be as unwieldy as a motorhome or box truck, without the height advantage when you inevitably drive over a curb while turning. Doing that might also make it un-airworthy.
- Comment on The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million 4 weeks ago:
This looks to me like yet another in a surprisingly long line of airplanes that are also designed to be driven on roads in someway, but they’re basically all noticeably worse at either task than vehicles designed specifically for one of those tasks. It also invariably ends up more expensive than two specialized vehicles, so there’s never really any reason to build these.
- Comment on The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million 4 weeks ago:
Way more expensive than most private aircraft, though.
- Comment on I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option? 5 weeks ago:
Sorry for the slow reply; just remembered to ask her. For bookkeeping you don’t need anything. It could be valuable to get a certification in QuickBooks, but not required. It just seems to be the most common software.
- Comment on Best tool for creating a basic business website 5 weeks ago:
If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.
If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.
- Comment on Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back 5 weeks ago:
The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.
A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”
As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”
Also, just want to recognize this gem:
Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.
Robot Chicken clip of Lando Calrissian saying “This deal is getting worse all the time!”
- Comment on I’m very good at math and would like health insurance. What is the easiest option? 1 month ago:
Have you considered accounting/bookkeeping? My wife has done it before and it’s not necessarily the most exciting work but typically pays pretty decent. She says it can be interesting trying to track down what is preventing the books from balancing.
- Comment on Lemmy seems to have an LLM issue 1 month ago:
Maybe the kind of people/organizations who do karma farming on Reddit haven’t figured out that’s meaningless here
- Comment on Will all these multiplayer games being released without support for LAN or hosting our own servers no longer be multiplayer when the company shuts down the servers? 1 month ago:
Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 1 month ago:
I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.
- Comment on If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica 1 month ago:
I did see something a few months ago about a company making large color e-Ink displays for applications like that and outdoor advertising at bus stops and the like
