timwa

@timwa@lemmy.snowgoons.ro

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Shutting down comments and banning everyone who calls them out is standard form for that place these days sadly; I deleted a 13 year old account there a few years back when they posted some godawful transphobic opinion peace and then they doubled down in the comments and started banning anyone who complained.

  Shame, it really was once a good site, but the writers who are left are the ones who got high on their own supply years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I worked for Philips Research 30 odd years ago (weeps)… It was a source of great amusement then that we could sell two pieces of equipment that were identical in every way except one had a Marantz label and cost twice as much as the Philips one, and the Marantz would get 5 stars in the audiophile magazines, and the Philips would get 3 or 4.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I just read the manual for the Euro version; basically, they assume you take the power strip/PDU with the computer.

  So, you plug the special UPS into a spare outlet on the PDU; it monitors the power supply, and as soon as power from the PDU drops it jumps in and starts supplying. So plug into an outlet, then unplug the PDU from power, and the UPS takes over. Since at this point the pins on the PDU plug are live, they provide a safety cap to put over the end of the cable. The computer itself is never unplugged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unsealed Court Documents Show Teen Addiction Was Big Tech's "Top Priority"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah damn, I loved that book when I was a kid. I can probably blame it, at least in part, for my career…

  (I was a massive nerd and a FidoNet sysop back in the 80s & 90s, and got my first VMS and Unix experience hopping onto academic networks over dialup and X.25 gateways using, err, “unconventially obtained” credentials… This experience helped me convince my interviewer at Imperial College to overlook my less than stellar academic record to admit me to their Computing peogramme.

  That book - and the movie WarGames - were definitely inspiring, if not life-changing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pro-Russian Narratives Target Wikipedia, Marking a Dangerous Trend for AI Chatbot Data⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Annnnnd that’s why I downloaded a snapshot of Wikipedia a few months ago and host it locally.

  Sad that it’s necessary, but with modern AI tooling, we have everything we need to destroy knowledge on an industrial scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 10's extended support ends in eight months, but users are still rejecting Windows 11, at least in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I gave up with MacOS a couple of years ago (after nearly a lifetime of using them - my first ‘own’ Mac was a Lombard PowerBook G3 - lovely machine,) because it became increasingly apparent that Apple had stopped caring about the desktop operating system and were intent on turning it into a mobile phone with a keyboard and bigger screen.

  Annoying desktop bugs - like constantly (and randomly) forgetting the resolution and position of second displays, not powering up external USB drives properly after sleep, and (as a developer) endlessly having to fight with “why is my build suddenly broken? oh, MacOS decided it doesn’t trust the linker again” type problems just wore me out. Every time they released some pointless new UI fluff but ignored the fact that the Finder had been essentially unusable since Mac OS X (because why should you be using the Finder anyway, you should just trust that your files are stored in Magic Apple Cloud Land…) just reminded me they really didn’t care about desktop users, they just want desktops as accessories to their mobile phones.

  So, I cut the cord and finally switched to Linux on the desktop. Which is a shame, because they do make some really nice hardware…

  (Although now that I’m actively trying to cut all US suppliers out of my life, it’s actually been a blessing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube and other content sharing platforms will block New users in the UK starting next week(February 2)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  China’s VPN blocking is actually very, very effective, and the vast majority of people don’t go around it.

  And that’s kinda the point - the controls don’t have to be 100%, they just have to cover the majority. And for the few that do circumvent - well, that’s just one more easy crime for the authorities to charge you with if they ever feel the need.