Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You are correct.

  A little digging shows that unlike the CE mark in the EU for electronics, “UL certification isn’t mandatory, but may be required when selling electronic items to retailers”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  UL certification is a requirement for an electric or electronic product to be licensed for sale to consumers in the US. This is enforced on US manufacturers of a product and on importers.

  Whilst people buying something from AliExpress for personal use and importing it themselves don’t have to obbey such requirements, those importing them or making them for sale in the US do.

  The CE mark does the same thing in the EU.

  No idea if in the US there are further licensing requirements for things to be connected to the grid that would close the importing for personal use loophole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Finally, an optimal monitor configuration!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And the side of the space for monitors isn’t an integer multiple of the monitor side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨kinky taxonomy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Because “pantanal” means “from the swamp” in at least Portuguese and, probably also Spanish, and these cats are probably native to swampy areas in South America?!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iran includes American tech giants on list of new targets⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In the age of MBA management, the removal of resilience such as fallback systems because “they’re doing nothing” is the norm.

  Nowadays Engineering stuff isn’t done according to Engineering Principles if it conflicts with short term profit maximization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iran includes American tech giants on list of new targets⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Since America and Israel attacked Iranian Economic Interests when they bombed oil producing facilities, it’s entirelly fair for Iran to respond in kind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea."⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There should be no states based on ethnicity, which definitelly means no Jewish State, no White state, no Black state, no Muslim state and so on.

  States having ethnic majorities, sure, state constitutionally giving more rights of to those of specific ethnic groups than others, that’s just Racism baked into the very Foundation of the State.

  Those “Pro-Israel observers” are essentially saying that the idea that there would be no Fundationally Racist state that benefits them is unpleasant for them - that’s very much an open admission that they’re Racists.

  Those who can’t understand how all this is a problem, just read that quote of what they said but replacing the words “Jews” and “Jewish” with “White”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs.

  Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly.

  The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.

  Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.

  I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good yields, very little learning.

  So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Just to add to this:

  • When a senior dev reviews code from a more junior dev and gives feedback the more junior person (generally) learns from it.
  • When a senior dev reviews code from an AI, the AI does not learn from it.

  So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable - Dexerto⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Good thing I use the LibRedirect plugin in Firefox to redirect YouTube link to Invidious.

  In addition to uBlock, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I can tell you that, at least for Europe, they’re doing pretty much the same thing as the US, only it’s higher tariffs rather than blocking the Chinese products.

  The effect of special protectionist tariffs on the competitiveness of local companies might not be as strong as for outright blocking of the competing foreign products, but it’s in the same direction, which is why recently even Tesla (which are shit at the actual building cars part of the business) were wiping the floor on EVs with massive European car making businesses which had enormous expertise in actually making cars and decades to evolve EV tech and failed to do so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Portugal’s New Anti-Corruption Tool: Flagged €110B in Suspicious Contracts⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Corruption is so entrenched in Portugal that unlike pretty much anywhere in the World Libel is an actual CRIME prosecuted by the local version of the Public Prosecution Office, which in practice means that no actual damage has to be proven and only people with the proper political connections (i.e. politicians) get to be “protected” by this Law.

  Oh, and in a country infamous by an extremelly slow Court system, they in practice expedite Libel cases where politicians are the “victim”.

  So even descriptions of systems to detect Corruption have to be very carefully done so as to not even imply that anything caught by them is actually Corruption.

  I’m Portuguese and, having also lived elsewhere in Europe, firmly believe that in the domains of Politics and Law, Portugal is basically South America rather than Europe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft patents system for AI helpers to finish games for you⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly they think that gaming is the same as working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. customs searched a record number of electronic devices last year— Recently revised directive adds flash drives, smart watches to searchable devices⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This shit has been in place and in use since the Patriot Act.

  Part of the reason I’ve avoided the US for vacations or even just changing flights since the early 00s - I’ll just go to Canada instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Burning the future of the company for extra personal upsides in the short term” is pretty much modern management strategy summarized in one sentence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A loss of overall competitiveness of the local companies is actually a well known and studied problem with using tariffs and import restrictions to protects said local companies.

  So any competent government which desires for their local companies to survive and prosper will seek different ways to strengthen then which don’t suffer from that problem. The Chinese government is doing just that, the US government is not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch emulator Eden is surviving life after Nintendo kicked it off GitHub⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  NEVER, ever, ever host your projects in the site of an American company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Espressif ESP32-Powered 4G "Smartphone," Programmed in the Arduino IDE, Packs The Essentials⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The actual problem isn’t at all making a 4G mini-computer: you can literally buy the necessary parts as modules and wire them together with a a half-way decent microcontroller board and an smallish LED display and then make some code for it in something like Arduino IDE (though I would recommend Platform IO + VS Code instead).

  The problem is making it small (especially thin) and capable of running of batteries for days rather than hours.

  For example, if you’re trying to actually solve the hard part of the problem you would be better of using a micro-controller with an ARM core rather than the ESP32 as those things are designed to use less power. Also you wouldn’t be able to use boards as those things usually waste power versus designing your own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I know. Somehow, I've always known.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Motorola confirms GrapheneOS support for a future phone, bringing over features⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well that’s a shame.

  I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

  Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Motorola confirms GrapheneOS support for a future phone, bringing over features⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be.

  If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My point is that forcing age-gates on anything provided via such formal systems incentivizes kids to go around those systems and install themselves an OS that doesn’t do age-gating to evade it, not necessarily at school were they’re unlikely to control the hardware, but at home.

  Even before this, MS and Google have used their money to create a situation were very few of the formal systems for kids to access computers, such as schools, put anything other than their OSes in front of kids, so only kids who are naturally geeks/techies might have tried Linux out on their own - those kids would always end up trying Linux out because they’re driven by curiosity and enjoyment from tinkering with Tech.

  My point is for the other kids, the ones who wouldn’t try out on their computing devices any OS other than the mainstream stuff that they’ve been taught about at school: with this law California might very well just have created a strong incentive for those kids to go around those formal systems and try Linux out on hardware they control, which not all will, but certainly more will that they would if there wasn’t a law in place to limit what they can do when using a mainstream OS - if there’s one thing that is common in all societies and historical times is that teenagers naturally rebel against outside control and try and find ways around it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the market predicts jack shit nothing until the insider trader enter it and the “market signal” due to the insider traders happen just before the actual events being “predicted” happen, making them a useless prediction unless you’re algorithmically gambling on a related domain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Think about it this way: how do people learn enough about it to program for and admin Linux systems as adults?

  Unless things changed a lot since my days (granted it was over 3 decades ago), the path to knowing all about using, administrating and programming software for running under Linux was through being able to play with it for fun as a teenager.

  That said, thinking more about it, this might actually push more teenagers to try Linux out to avoid age-gating since they can just download a distro from anywhere in the World and install it in their own PC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, that does make sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.

  It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Wasn’t the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  LibreOffice can be used to produce and consume Pornographic Content in the form of of erotic stories, so it makes sense (within the “logic” of this law) that it’s age-gated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re confusing GenX with Boomers - the explosion in Tech was in the 90s, not the 70s.

  Even then, most GenX weren’t involved in Tech since when they learned how to use it, it wasn’t yet normalized and widespread, so only really people who found such things interesting went for it, and generally the personality type of those attracted to power over others is almost the opposite of the personality type of those attracted to strict and complex logical structures as used in programming computers.