arc99

@arc99@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes ears are different. And eyes. And preconceptions. That is subjectivity. If you want to know what is actually better you need to eliminate those biases. e.g. in audio the standard is an A/B test where the test plays audio from 2 sources at the same volume through the same headset and the recipient has to choose which is best without knowing anything else. Done properly you’ll know if there is a measurable, objective difference between the two sources. Double blind is even better.

  The issue for audiophiles is that this is not the way things are done. More often they’re sold snake oil - hyper expensive audio cables, beech wood knobs, concrete turn table bases etc. Things that do precisely do fuck all to improve audio quality except in their imaginations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. Open source is fine when it suits them but not fine when it doesn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Tangy pickle yes. Branston, piccalilli. Or pickled onions, relish, or somesuch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The pickle is probably the new aspect. Farm workers have obviously been eating cheese, bread, pasties, cold meats etc. since forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, just a pint of beer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The way audiophiles tell sound quality is 99.99% subjectivity and 0.01% objectivity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Try a ploughmans meal - bread, cheese and pickle. Awesome as a lunch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A succulent meal⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A lazy supermarket special - a roast chicken in a bag and a baguette roll picked up on the way to the checkout. We’ve all been there and I’m sure it makes a passable meal, but cooking is a skill everyone should endeavour to be proficient in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rent is theft⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can agree with some arguments about the rental market, or laws about rent protection / rights. But rent in itself is not theft. Somebody wanting to live in somebody else’s property whether it’s for the night, a week or a year has to pay for it, or go buy their own place to stay in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world is trying to log off U.S. tech⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not everywhere can wean itself off, but the “big three” cloud compute companies arent the only shows in town. And of course there is a multitude of free and open source replacements for commercial software with companies willing to provide support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would not be surprised at all if they’d have a backdoor way to filch data, or the key with which to decrypt backed up data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes renting from the cloud is a perfectly acceptable solution. However companies leap to using AWS and similar cloud solutions WAY more than necessary or advisable. It is easy to rack up thousands in bills outstripping the costs of buying some hardware and slapping the software onto it. The cloud can scale and do a bunch of cool things but much of the time companies don’t need it, or the complexity it brings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I still think the web would have been better off if certificates were signed and part of a web of trust like in GPG/PGP. It wouldn’t stop sites from using trusted CAs to increase their trust levels with browsers, but it would mean that tiny websites wouldn’t need to go through layers of mandatory bullshit and inconvenience. Also means that key signers could have meaningful business relationships rather than being some random CA that nobody has a clue about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a pity other platforms, especially social media / video platforms don’t require full disclosure of use of AI. It might allow a lot of AI slop and misinformation to be eradicated, downvoted, or at least call itself out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck Microsoft⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck every company that does this. I don’t like YouTube shorts. Can I disable YouTube shorts? No. Instead I can choose to “Show less often” which means absolutely nothing since they reappear in no time. Dark patterns are called that for a reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is nothing worse than playing multiplayer and having somebody who is cheating. Viable and promising games have been ruined by people cheating.

  But I don’t see an easy way around the issue but these are the usual solutions:

  1. Reporting mechanism and admins able to observe cheaters and impose heavy penalties / permabans
  2. Add anticheat on server side that detect for cheating (e.g. measuring % hit rates / headshots)
  3. Anti cheat software on client that looks for common cheat hacks
  4. Stream everything. It’s all hosted on the server, nobody installs anything, limiting ways to cheat.
  5. Disincentivize cheating by not acknowledging people doing it in any way - no rare loot, no leaderboards, no material gain
  6. Make it a 3rd party problem - release the server or sell hosting and make it somebody else’s problem to police the servers (e.g. Rust / Minecraft servers)

  Personally I’d prefer that multiplayer games obtain consent to install anti cheat and should certify through auditing that the anticheat software is inactive and nonintrusive when the game is not running. Perhaps operating systems could even provide hooks and hard guarantees that this is the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uh oh: Ubisoft postpones its quarterly financial report at the last minute and halts stock trading⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most likely they fucked up their report and they’re using the rules of the exchange to suspend trading until they fix the mistake. But Ubisoft has been running on fumes for some time now, shitting out the same 3 or 4 games over and over again so I doubt their financials are that great.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple is reportedly getting ready to introduce ads to its Maps app⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So much for the “Apple is all about privacy whereas Google monetizes you” schtick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If the code doesn’t compile, or is badly mangled, or uses the wrong APIs / imports or forgets something really important then it’s broken. I can use AI to inform my opinion and sometimes makes use of what it outputs but critically I know how to program and I know how to spot good and bad code.

  I can’t speak for how you use it, but if you don’t have any real programmers and you’re iterating until something works then you could be producing junk and not know it. Maybe it doesn’t matter in your case if its a bunch for throwaway scripts and helpers but if you have actual code in production where money, lives, reputation, safety or security are at risk then it absolutely does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have not seen an AI generated code which is correct. Not once. I’ve certainly seen it broadly correct and used it for the gist of something. But normally it fucks something up - imports, dependencies, logic, API calls, or a combination of all them.

  I sure as hell wouldn’t trust to use it without reviewing it thoroughly. And anyone stupid enough to use it blindly through “vibe” programming deserves everything they get. And most likely that will be a massive bill and code which is horribly broken in some serious and subtle way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure declining viewers has nothing to do with the various controversies such as auctioning off prototypes, rushed reviews with misleading or false conclusions, mistreating staff etc. Channels like Gamers Nexus really laid into him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Code signing offers slight protection from malware but not as you might think. If a company signs an installer, or executable then it tells you it came from them but not what it does. It could still be malicious, or it could be inadvertently bundled with malware in DLLs or scripts and you wouldn’t know. You’re just hoping the company has done its due diligence and you trust them to run.

  Microsoft does have an antivirus system on top and fingerprints downloads too and applies some kind of trust score that is better if an exe is signed. There is probably no single mitigation that stops malware infection but apply lots of smaller mitigations in in depth and most people will be safe.

  The irony is Microsoft still lets people run files ending with .scr way too easily. Much of the malware on torrent websites is a file ending with .scr knowing the OS will hide the extension, e.g. movie.mp4.scr appears as movie.mp4 in File Explorer and people click through and get infected.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It really should be a 3 level setting, disallow/allow & check/allow. Where the latter option is available but users are strongly advised to apply common sense. Because I would not be surprised if a lot of sideloaded content comes from warez sites and is infested with malware so allowing & checking is still protecting people to some extent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Their lawsuit will fail for the simple reason they only have to age verify UK citizens, not everyone. But it does go to show how stupid this law actually is. If the UK wanted to block 4chan (for example) to under 18s, then ISPs should provide optional filtering software with every account that can be enabled per device to do it. It would be far more effective than expecting websites around the world to police the UK’s own laws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.

  This was a Toyota RAV 4 IIRC and despite the vehicle having no subscription to this thing, it occupied the right hand side of the infotainment system and was prominent in the menus too. I had the car for nearly a month and I played around in the settings but saw no way of getting rid of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Popup Ads in Your Pickup Truck? RAM Trucks Now Feature Scammy Ads on the Center Display⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t live in the US but the last time I rented a car there the UI was festooned with icons for Sirius XM that couldn’t be removed or hidden. Not small icons, but big fucking chunks of the screen. I find this kind of thing intolerable. It’s one thing to plug a service but if people don’t want it, then hide it away and don’t nag them about it ever again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meet the AI vegans: They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I’m sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, YOU don’t understand end to end encryption, and you don’t understand browsers. You say you could “write down a base64 encoded binary blob on a website”. Yes you could and how do you decrypt it? The asnwer is with a key (asymmetric or symmetric) that the recipient must have in memory of the receiving software - the browser that the filter has already intercepted and compromised. So “moar layers” is not protection since the filter could inject any JS it likes to reveal the inner key and/or conversation. It could do this ad nauseum and the only protection is how determined the filter is.

  But this is also a nonsense argument just on a practical level. The problem is kids connecting to adult websites, or websites with some adult content. The government thinks it reasonable that every single website that potentially hosts adult content should capture proof of identity of adults. I contend that really the issue is kids having access to those websites at all, and that proxies can and would be a far more effective way to control the issue without imposing on adults. No solution is perfect, but a filter is a far more effective way than entrusting some random website with personal information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft suddenly bans LibreOffice developer's email account, blocks appeal⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

  That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don’t want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.