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@pulsewidth@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify vs. Anna's Archive⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode.

  Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

  Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The judge would never make a legal argument that “religious propaganda had reduced a person’s legal capacity” as it would have wide-ranging implications and would be challenged (and overruled) in short order due to freedom of religion laws.

  The hospitals legal team appealed for an order because the kid was effectively killing themselves and they have a duty to do no harm.

  This prompted the health board to go to the Court of Session to seek an order which would allow its doctors to administer the blood transfusion up to two weeks following the child’s procedure.

  Its legal team told Lady Tait that such an order was necessary because blood loss was an “inevitable consequence” of the operation.

  The judge deemed that weighing the child’s personal beliefs and medical risk it was in their best interest to allow the order. That is their justification and it follows other case law examined, there is no legal need for them to deem the kid incapable of making the decision. It’s only made the news because religious people making dumb decisions about their health is a common public interest story.

  Lady Tait also wrote about cases examined by English courts, before concluding that in the context of the case brought before the court, it would be in the best interests of the child that the order be granted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teenage Jehovah's Witness can receive blood transfusion, judge rules⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. Just because a judge has carefully weighed that this is in the 14 year olds best interest now, does not at all mean more dire decisions against personal rights will be made in future.

  I’ll worry if the courts ever start making decisions that go against the childs best interest.

  The judge said they’re ordering this because there would not be time to solicit the court for an order if a transfusion does become necessary, and risk of death would be significant.

  I’m fine with letting adult religious zealots bleed out if they’re too god-brained to accept help, but for a 14yo I think it’s pretty reasonable to save them from themselves so they can live to have a fully-developed brain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI broke the smart home in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.

  HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.

  I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI broke the smart home in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.

  Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.

  Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI broke the smart home in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don’t think AI has changed much.

  Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they’re open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they’ve finally begun appearing in big manufacturer’s line-ups such as IKEA.

  Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won’t have to do the ‘ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or… you know what, fuck this’. It’ll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Backing up Spotify⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, since this archive says it contains the original ogg @160kbps for all artists with a popularity >0, it’ll be in this collection. Your wait may be over soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recommendation for Android File Manager⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I use Fossify FM for most on-device stuff, thumbs up from me too.

  If I need to copy/move files between my phone and my NAS I use Ghost Commander as it has SMB support and the dual-panels make moving between devices easier to grapple with visually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Host Weekly #150: Watchtower No More⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve used it several months and can recommend it. No issues so far and seems to get regular updates for bugfixes and minor new features.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What DDNS providers you guys recommend?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah DuckDNS gave me many false positive outages where its resolution failed, for multiple half-days every year I used it (5yrs+).

  I moved to the afraid.org and its been solid, if anyone’s looking for another free service - only cost is you have to log in once every six months to validate your account is not dormant. They have a paid tier which gives more features (that most home users will never need), and that allows the guy running it to fund a very reliable service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What DDNS providers you guys recommend?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m surprised the amount of people saying they have had no issues with DucksDNS. I’ve used it for about five years and had issues on and off with it being unresponsive many times.

  Gave up and moved to afraid.org about a year back and that’s been a very solid service ever since.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is absolutely predefined - if you make the same moves it will give you the same results, every time. Same as playing ChessMaster 2000 from 1986.

  It may narrowly fit into the broad definition of ‘AI’ (like, since the 70s) but that’s not what’s being discussed in this thread.

  Believe what you like though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree it’s great at writing and frame-working parts of code and selecting libraries - it definitely has value for coding. $1500 bil value though, I doubt.

  My main concern there lies in the next gen of programmers. The work that ChatGPT (and Claude etc) outputs requires some significant programming prior-experience to allow them to make sense of the output and adjust (or correct) it to suit their scope and requirements of the project. In additions it’s taking away the entry-level work that junior devs usually do and have cleaned up for prod by senior devs - and that’s not theory, the job market is dying now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When people say “I fucking hate AI”, 99% of the time they mean “I fucking hate AI™©®”. They don’t mean the technology behind it.

  To add to your good points, I’m a CS grad that studied neural networks and machine learning years back, and every time I read some idiot claiming something like “this scientific breakthrough has got scientists wondering if we’re on the cusp of creating a new species of superintelligence” or “90% of jobs will be obsolete in five years” it annoys me because its not real, and it’s always someone selling something. Today’s AI is the same tech they’ve been working on for 30+ years and incrementally building upon, but as Moore’s Law has marched on we now have storage pools and computing power to run very advanced models and networks. There is no magic breakthrough, just hype.

  The recent advancements are all driven by the $1500 billion spent on grabbing as many resources they could - all because some idiots convinced them it’s the next gold rush. What has that $1500 bil got us? Machines that can answer general questions correctly around 40% of the time, plagiarize art for memes, create shallow corporate content that nobody wants, and write some half-decent code cobbled together from StackOverflow and public GitHub repos.

  What a fucking waste of resources.

  What’s real is the social impacts, the educational impacts, the environmental impacts, the effect on artists and others who have had their work stolen for training, the useability of the Internet (search is fucked now), and what will be very real soon is the global recession/depression it causes as businesses realize more and more that it’s not worth the cost to implement or maintain (in all but very few scenarios).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know you’re meming, but in Civilization (as in most games), you’re playing against predefined scripts and algorithmic rules that the computer opponent has, as well as having cheaper costs for resources than the user at higher difficulty levels - because it cannot compete with a skilled human player at that level (it literally cheats).

  No LLM, no neural network, no deep learning… not ‘AI’ in the modern sense that’s being discussed here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do you hate AI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  … And NVMe SSDs, and large HDDs.

  I bought a Crucial P310 MVMe 2TB card barely three weeks ago for the already-inflated price of $132.58 (not on sale).

  The exact same card from the exact same retailer is now $225.13.

  70% increase in 21 days.

  That’s the average amount of inflation we’d have in eighteen years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Victorian premier delivers formal apology to Australia’s First Peoples for ‘rapid and violent’ colonisation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  LNP increasing… Greens and ALP both decreasing.

  Fuck Aussie’s are poorly-informed voters. We’ll be back to LNP and right-wing coalition govt in no time, with the last 15 years of problems blamed on the 4 years of Labor rule because ‘they touched it last’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨builder.ai has been tricking customers and investors for eight years – selling an advanced code-writing AI that, it turns out, is actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But now instead of blaming a junior dev they can instead hit you with the, “Our apologies for this issue - we are modifying the prompts for the model and re-running in-unit AI tests, will revert back to you”, and charge slightly more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Disagree, Wikipedia is a pretty reliable bastion of facts due to its editorial demands for citations and rigorous style guides etc.

  Can you point out any of these personal fiefdoms so we can see what you’re referring to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI finds errors in 90% of Wikipedia's best articles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And the featured articles are usually quite large. As an example, today’s featured article is on a type of crab - the article is over 3,700 words with 129 references and 30-something books in the bibliography.

  Ita not particularly unreasonable or unsurprising to be able to find a single error amongst articles that complex.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix kills casting from phones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah you can turn the phone off once the video has started. I only know this because my kids have regularly failed to charge the ‘phone that we only use for Chromecast to the tv’ and it sometimes dies while they’re watching something. Keeps playing until the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix kills casting from phones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need the phone for any controls issued to the Chromecast like volume, subs, pause, seek, etc… But you don’t strictly need it once the video has started playing, presuming you’re not using any control commands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mmm... tastes like chimkin⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. The other person said they were “carnivorous” though. Giant tortoises are not carnivorous.

  Horses are also not carnivorous even though they do eat meat on rare occasions to survive.

  Words mean things.

  You’re also wrong about horses. Put a steak on the ground in field of plentiful grass, horses will ignore it until it’s rotted away to nothing. They do not just eat stuff outside of their regular died because its risk free and easily obtained.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tattoo Ink Moves Through the Body, Killing Immune Cells and Weakening Vaccine Response⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What you’re missing is that the ingredients of tattoo ink have changed dramatically in the last 100 or so years.

  Prior to then tattoo inks were made mostly with soot or black ash mixed with plant oils.

  Nowadays the inks are almost entirely synthetic, sourced from the same companies that make industrial paint, and have been tested and some found to contain carbon black nanoparticles, Texanol, BHT, 2-phenoxyethanol, and various other things that are confirmed (or reasonably suspected) to be toxic and which definitely wouldn’t be in historical inks.

  The proof should be entirely on the suppliers and administrators (tattooists) to confirm their ink and tattoos are safe, not the users. Yet their regulations are very lax in most countries, requiring no pharmaceutical testing even though they are injected into people’s skin.

  Some refs: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25833640/
  pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38387033/
  theconversation.com/whats-in-tattoo-ink-my-teams-…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tattoo Ink Moves Through the Body, Killing Immune Cells and Weakening Vaccine Response⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a biologist but I believe the latter. If the ink could be broken down by the macrophages in your lymph nodes it would likely be broken down in its intended location in your skin too, as their are lyphatic capillaries and vessels throughout our skin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mmm... tastes like chimkin⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Carniverous? All living giant tortoise species are herbivores.

  Now who’s stupid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or… They ban VPNs and overnight the VPN providers start offering cheap VPS services that can run a self-managed VPN over them, or proxies, or tor exit nodes, or Wireguard/Tailscale exit nodes, or… <The list goes on indefinitely and will be added to as needed by users>.

  You can’t ban people running private servers and routing encrypted data through them unless you want to shut down 90% of the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pebble Time 2 has screws⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its corner-cutting to save assembly costs. Plastic tabs take sub-seconds to whack into place vs screws which take 20+ seconds each.

  Theyre saving ~$100 on your car assembly process and the end result is you have a vastly more annoying car to work on and repair for its entire lifetime. Its beyond annoying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wanna say you’re wrong, because AI is absolutely not an essential service - like say a water or power company failing would be (or arguably banks). But knowing how deeply the AI tech bros have sucked up to and supported Trump I have to sigh and agree with you that they will probably be rescued from their own stupidity by the taxpayer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anti-zionism v antisemitism. Bondi Beach "F*** Israel" t-shirt man in court battle for freedom of speech - Michael West⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Zionist is an explicit term with an explicit meaning, not a euphemism or dogwhistle.

  Zionism is an organised ethnocultural nationalist movement for the creation of a Jewish state through the complete colonization of the Palestinian state. The term “Zionist” was explicitly created by Jews - not anyone anti-Judeic or anti-Semitic. See for example the First Zionist Congress created by Theodor Herzl.

  Zionism is a political movement, not a religious or race.

  Nobody cares much nowadays for hearing the lie that to be anti-Zionist is the same as being anti-Semitic, because it’s a lie told to deflect any criticism of Zionist politicians and the Israeli government.