skullgiver

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people delete their posts?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

  Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

  There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It exists, if just isn’t a solid replacement for normal plastic. It’ll crumble to dust and dissolve before you can actually get any use out of the material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also a balance to be struck with single use plastics. Many products don’t last nearly as long without single use wrappers. For luxury products like cookies that doesn’t matter as much, but for certain vegetables getting a plastic wrapping early on can give them much longer shelf lives. There are only so many cucumbers you can consume between harvest and consumption, and ditching plastic wrappings would reduce food availability and probably cause more food to go bad and get wasted.

  The worst part is probably that rich countries getting rid of shelf-life-extending plastic will solve the problem by just importing food products from elsewhere when local harvest season is done and the supplies run out. Poorer countries with less purchasing power will find themselves with more aggressive competition. Even though rich countries have an abundance of food, reducing the accessible food supply will still have an impact on the world.

  As for bringing your own containers: that may work for some places, but not all. No grocery store will let you show up with your ceramic container to carry one of those ready-made salads to the till. The risk of getting into trouble for food safety and the general theft risk is just too great. We can get rid of those single use plastics, but it’d also mean getting rid of pre-packaged meals like that. As for cookies, I don’t get them from my bakery, those cookies are twice as expensive and last half as long. The closest bakery offers mostly-paper bags (though probably covered in PFAS) already.

  Speaking of, for loads of single-use plastics, there aren’t many good alternatives without spreading more PFAS around. Paper isn’t all that great for storing anything that isn’t dry (and it’s still terrible when it rains). Glass can be an alternative, but making and recycling glass requires enough heat to melt it, adding to the CO2 problem. You also can’t store carbonated beverages like soda above a certain volume in glass containers, or you’ll end up with the glass grenades that made the world switch away from glass decades ago.

  Here, plastic bags are still everywhere, but by law they now cost money. Certainly saves on plastic bag usage, but doesn’t eliminate them either. That said, plastic bags aren’t necessarily single use, you can just stuff them into your pocket and reuse them next time you go to the store unless they’re made from especially terrible plastic.

  Of course you don’t need prepackaged individual slices of banana to have their own plastic wrappers, but a surprising amount of single use plastics is better than the alternative when taking other environmental factors into account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fediverse for teens⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a parent (and I’m glad I don’t have to think about this problem myself). However, I’ve worked at a company that specialised in filtering internet services with many parents using it to protect their kids. I’ve also talked to plenty of people whose parents used to deny them whatever app the kids were on at the time. I can tell you that many kids will install apps and create accounts eventually, whether you permit them or not. I’ve seen the ingenious workarounds kids will come up with (using the browser app built into Windows Help to get around parental controls, combining web proxies and VPNs into an unholy homebrew Tor, or just using a burner phone outside the house), and while I appreciate the hacker culture that can develop around hiding apps from your parents, I don’t think it’ll be good for the relationship between you and your kids if you’re too strict about this stuff.

  Snapchat is popular because other kids are on there. It’s mostly a stupid looking chat app. Every other chat app out there has cloned its most important features. Your kids won’t be missing out on anything on there, except for the network of friends and social activities that are there. That means you won’t find a Fediverse app like that, because most teenagers aren’t on the Fediverse. The other kids aren’t going to replace Snapchat with an app just to chat with your kids, especially not if it sends a copy of their conversations to their parents. Best case scenario, they install the app and share most of the stuff your kids are missing out on on there.

  As for the point your daughter made, notifications can be silenced. If your kids are worried about phone addiction or getting interrupted by notifications, help them with whatever digital wellness tools their devices come with. Every major OS, desktop and mobile, now comes with tools to limit notifications during focus time, bed time, and the ability to silence notifications for certain chats or events. I find it hard to believe that Snapchat would solve that problem and feel like it’s more likely she’s using an unrelated valid concern to help her case for your permission to use Snapchat.

  I don’t know how old your daughters are and what guidance they need, but if they’re creating PowerPoints to get their desires across (bravo), I think they’d be better served with guidance than with alternatives. Instead of rejecting them, consider permitting apps like Snapchat under certain conditions (time limits, no publicly posting pictures, no strangers, etc.). It’s probably also best to make the rules are clear and consistent (which means not taking away Snapchat time as punishment for arbitrary things), because that kind of stuff can cause trust issues that will still have them go behind your back. For this to work, they need to trust that you will honour the “deal”. I’m not saying you should let 12 year olds go ham on social media, but letting 16 year olds on Snapchat an hour a day isn’t going to kill them.

  The biggest risk with these things is that kids will find a way to install these apps without you noticing, something bad happens (their online friend turns out to be a grown man, a classmate starts sending weird messages), and they’re afraid of talking to you about it because they might get in trouble for having a banned app on their phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are roundabouts made?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I always thought these markings were made by machines, until I saw some people draw them by hand. Turns out, you can make near perfect road markings with a movable can of paint. If you use GPS to trace out your track, you can just fill them by hand.

  As for construction, here’s a timelapse of making one using stone tiles: youtu.be/gXiOt-9WCag

  Here’s one made of asphalt: youtu.be/DORBEGYVgYE Note the pre-poured blocks of concrete in the center, which likely help the round shape.

  In this video you can see the imperfect temporary road markings for a short moment: youtu.be/SV2vSL_hiA0

  This video showcases a different style of roundabout that makes two-lane roundabouts a bit easier. Note the two round, concentric lanes separated by concrete barriers: youtu.be/iRclLOgN-xw

  This video showcases the manual driving work done to make the round roads: youtu.be/KCQv24BkI6Y This is a four lane roundabout. The video also shows how the line markings are applied (by a spout, in a car).

  This video shows a prefab concrete roundabout installed over a weekend. All they needed to do was prepare the soil, lay down the blocks and paint the lines: youtu.be/J-BZWfbygkc

  This video shows how the center concrete slabs can be laid on location using a specialised machine: youtu.be/J2g0JZzqbAs

  I’m not sure if this tech is applied, but farmers use millimeter precision GPS to efficiently farm their soil. The GPS receiver itself costs a couple of grand, but making a car in a closed-off road drive in a perfect circle is hardly a technical challenge these days. That said, these people can probably do it by hand and you wouldn’t notice the difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to fix discord connection while streaming a game?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like a QoS thing, unless your connection is really bad. Assuming your network has the available capacity to game and chat, there’s probably something fucky going on with packet ordering.

  There are tons of different Gamer ™ software packages that could be the culprit, but anything preinstalled by Lenovo would be my first suspect. Also check for anything labeled “Killer” in Device Manager under network or Bluetooth. Killer WiFi (and I think they have an ethernet thing as well?) is sold as a feature on some gaming devices but in my experience its name only rings true in that it’ll kill your gameplay experience.

  Routers can also do QoS fuckery. If you’re on a connection with low upload (DSL, cable) check if your router does network prioritisation/Quality of Service/QoS things. If you have more than enough upload capacity, you could still check and disable the setting to see if that’s the cause.

  Note that while Discord uses barely any network traffic to do voice, it’s very sensitive to latency issues. If you’re capping out the connection to your router (quite easy to do over WiFi or in P2P video calls) you could be transmitting at dozens of megabits a second with more to spare, but your VoIP connection could suck terribly because of latency and jitter.

  Also worth trying: rebooting, if you haven’t already. Clicking “shut down” and then turning your PC on does not reboot it in Windows! It’s stupid but manually clicking reboot in the start menu twice sometimes fixes weird issues like these.

  Lastly, as Discord is peer to peer as far as I know, your bandwidth with some other locations may just not be very good. A gigabit of upload to speedtest.net doesn’t mean you can exchange traffic with your friends directly that fast. You can try to use one of those piracy VPNs to avoid your ISPs network edge and see if that improves things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK You can browse, upvote, reply, uplvote, follow and post on Lemmy using a Mastodon account. Short guide.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  WordPress now doesn’t need a plugin anymore, ActivityPub has beek built into the main product. As for the rest, I think the *Key software went through three or four popular forks, but everything in the pic is open source and can still be run if you’d like to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK You can browse, upvote, reply, uplvote, follow and post on Lemmy using a Mastodon account. Short guide.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can create anything that abides by the spec and it should somewhat work. However, Lemmy won’t know what to do with a stream of Location objects and Mastodon won’t know how to deal with replies on a calendar event. Most of the Fediverse maps their functionality onto a subset of the protocol that’s implemented by most other servers.

  There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from creating a Fediverse LinkedIn that can work together with the rest of the Fediverse. Same with a federated 4chan or a federated review website. The spec is quite open ended. The challenge is finding enough people willing to join your server, and moderating the initial servers. That last part is mostly unsolved because only a sliver of the population wants to moderate and with no clear direction from above, having a solid moderation policy is effectively impossible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, that wasn’t a dig at you! I just find it entertaining how the same technology with the same risks and impact on the future web are treated completely differently based on what company puts their name on the blog post.

  FWIW both use cases seem good to me, Kagi’s for using the privacy enhancing properties and Cloudflare’s for decreasing the need for their CAPTCHA/bot blocking software to be cranked up to the level it’s at now. For now only Safari and Kagi’s addons are using the tech (Cloudflare turned off their experiment) so there’s no reason to be bothered at the moment anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doing continuing business with Yandex at all is bad enough for me. I’m having enough trouble cutting off Russia-supporting products and services already, I’m not taking on new ones if I can avoid it.

  Kagi is a great concept for a search engine, but looking at the forum posts by their CEO, their priorities clearly won’t ever align with mine. I hope they get similar competition as Google crumbles further and further, because their business model is how search engines should be making money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they’re based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.

  Kagi defends itself by saying it’s “only used 2% of the time” which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There’s also the “but we’ve always done it like this” defence and something about “providing the best results” but neither are great arguments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whoops, brainfart. In my defence, I’ve only ever used yards in video games :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whoops, brainfart. In my defence, I’ve only ever used yards in video games :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Welcome to Europe! I hope you’ll have fun over here. Lots of things can or will be different, but not necessarily in a bad way.

  Laws are different. Sounds kind of obvious, until you learn that some countries have serious sentences for things like littering or chewing gum in public. Read up on the basics just in case. Knowing things like the fact that several EU countries demand that anyone can show ID at all times, so carrying an ID card or passport is mandatory, can save you from an awkward fine. Your foreign drivers license is NOT valid ID!

  The legal system may work differently. The “you have the right to remain silent” thing may not apply. Lawyers may work differently. The country you’re relocating to may not have juries as part of the legal system. You’re probably not going to need that information, but you’re better off reading up on the basics just in case, you don’t want to get surprised.

  Police violence and racism still exist in Europe, though it usually manifests in a different way. The difference will probably depend on your background and where exactly you’re coming from, but there’s no direct need to be nervous around police officers. Most of them don’t have guns, and if they do, pulling them out at something as banal as a traffic stop will get them in trouble. However, if you’re awfully nervous for no reason, they may start to get suspicious.

  Some countries offer some social benefits to only their citizens, not to legal migrants. Make sure you know what you are and aren’t entitled to so you don’t find yourself footing a massive medical bill. Also check for any mandatory insurances that may not apply to you now.

  Not every American credit card is widely accepted. They’ll work in things like hotels, but maybe not for parking infrastructure. In some countries, credit cards barely work in grocery stores, for instance, especially in debit card-first countries. Taking out money abroad also costs quite a lot, so look into if you need to get a local banking account.

  Your driver’s license is likely valid, but needs to be converted to an international driver’s license for it to be recognized as such.

  If you get a mobile phone subscription from an EU country, mobile roaming charges are basically non-existent. However, if you’re traveling, make sure you remember what countries are EU or not. Unexpected Swiss data charges from driving along the border can ruin your week.

  If you’re between 18 and 21: the drinking age is lower. Please don’t drink yourself into a coma. Additional alcohol laws may apply: some countries only allow selling alcohol at government run facilities, for instance.

  Smoking rules and practices differ per country and region. Some countries ban smoking in public outright, others still very much smoke everywhere.

  Some things will be a lot cheaper (healthcare), others will be a lot more expensive (alcohol, cigarettes, fuel). If you’ve planned ahead on your finances, make sure to use local prices.

  Many American brands have identical packaging for differently flavored products. We have coke and Fanta and Pepsi, but they may not taste like you expect. Same goes for a lot of food: many foodstuffs are still filled with sugar, but from what I’ve heard American food is even more sugary somehow, so food may taste a bit bland when you first get here. If you have a healthy diet, that should correct itself in a few weeks.

  I’ve never seen those mythical free soda refills mentioned in American movies in Europe. An expensive four euro glass of soda probably doesn’t come with a free refill.

  Housing may work differently. Every country has their own rules for social housing and who can apply under what conditions. There are huge businesses out there that make money off scamming rich expats because of this. Make sure you’re informed of the local housing situation ahead of moving, unless your company arranges (temporary) living arrangements for you. Some expats in cities like Amsterdam find themselves struggling for months to get a basic apartment, wasting a lot of money on hotels despite their lavish income.

  I’d recommend learning the local language, even if everyone you interact with at work will speak English. Quite a lot of expats find themselves socially isolated because the local populace doesn’t want to speak English when hanging out with friends. Europeans, especially the younger half, generally understand English to the point where you can make yourself clear, so you have time, but if you want to make friends, you need to integrate.

  As you’ve probably heard, tipping is different. Tipping differs from “optional, but very welcome” to “insulting because of associations with bribes” depending on where you go. Read up on local customs if you’re not going out with locals.

  Advertised pricing is almost always including tax. Don’t add the 19-21% VAT in your head like you would with some American taxes, expect to pay the price as advertised. There are some exceptions (bottle deposits, for instance, but you can get that money back by handing in bottles at the right places) which will differ per country, but those shouldn’t break the bank.

  Some countries are moving towards becoming cashless in practice. I use cash about five times a year, plus about a third of the times I visit Germany. Some stores may not accept cash. If you combine that with the “not all stores accept American credit cards”, you may find yourself in a pickle. Luckily, things like Google Pay and Apple Pay use a universal protocol of sorts, so you can try setting that up as a backup.

  Check out how public transport works. Some countries let you travel for free, others will require paper tickets, and there are countries where your credit card can act like a travel pass. Some places sell tickets inside trains, others will demand you buy a ticket before entering.

  Traffic will work differently. Traffic signs are usually quite universal (stop signs even say STOP in France, unlike in French Canada!) but there are additional traffic indicators that probably work differently. Think painted lines on the ground to indicate right of way, special asphalt colours to indicate bicycle paths, but also traffic light placement. A quick read up before venturing into traffic would be wise. Some countries have a system where traffic coming from the right in an unmarked, unprioritised intersection will have right of way. If you’re driving or taking a bike, better check up on when you need to stop! Also, crossing the road is generally not illegal (“jaywalking”), but use common sense when to use that freedom.

  Lastly, the tax thing: unless you earn serious bank, you’re probably not paying extra taxes in the US. However, you are obligated to fill out tax forms. How the tax situation works depends on the country you move to. Some will have you pay American taxes and subtract them from local taxes, others will work the other way around. Either way, you’re probably not paying extra; despite what some people claim, tax pressure within the EU and America is actually quite similar. You will end up with extra paperwork, though. Speaking of, check the pension situation for the job you’re working for. If you don’t check, you may end up paying into a foreign pension plan you won’t have easy access to when you retire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is shadowbanning a thing on lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Instances can ban you without others being affected. Your comments could be visible on one instance and not on another, so there’s a level of shadow banning going on.

  Real shadow banning isn’t implemented in Lemmy. It could be, but it’d only work for accounts on the same server. It’d also be pretty easy to detect, although the same also goes for other places that do effectively use shadow banning to fight trolls and bots. The people shadow banning works against aren’t smart enough to verify that they haven’t been caught in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[PSA] Lemmy account deletion is a mess⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a Rust program I wrote that runs on my Lemmy server, but in theory it should work with any Lemmy server.

  I’ve thrown the code and a compiled version of the binaries on Github if you’re interested: source binary downloads

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?!⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That screenshot again proves that this person is extremely cringe, presumably a troll, but there’s still no threat. At worst that’s racism against Americans. Should obviously be removed by moderators from any normal online service that wants to encourage pleasant conversation, but that’s not necessarily illegal.

  As for the PDF, that’s not a legal definition by any kind, it’s a quick explainer for a law that only applies to hosting providers receiving complaints from European authorities. So yes, if the Belgian police sent a takedown notice regarding terroristic content then it does apply.

  However, that regulation is mere instruction to EU states to draft compliant laws. It’s not actionable legislation in itself (similar to the GDPR).

  The full text of the Regulation does include this instruction for EU countries, which I haven’t seen before:

  In order to provide clarity about the actions that both hosting service providers and competent authorities are to take to address the dissemination of terrorist content online, this Regulation should establish a definition of ‘terrorist content’ for preventative purposes, consistent with the definitions of relevant offences under Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council (6). Given the need to address the most harmful terrorist propaganda online, that definition should cover material that incites or solicits someone to commit, or to contribute to the commission of, terrorist offences, solicits someone to participate in activities of a terrorist group, or glorifies terrorist activities including by disseminating material depicting a terrorist attack. The definition should also include material that provides instruction on the making or use of explosives, firearms or other weapons or noxious or hazardous substances, as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) substances, or on other specific methods or techniques, including the selection of targets, for the purpose of committing or contributing to the commission of terrorist offences. Such material includes text, images, sound recordings and videos, as well as live transmissions of terrorist offences, that cause a danger of further such offences being committed. When assessing whether material constitutes terrorist content within the meaning of this Regulation, competent authorities and hosting service providers should take into account factors such as the nature and wording of statements, the context in which the statements were made and their potential to lead to harmful consequences in respect of the security and safety of persons. The fact that the material was produced by, is attributable to or is disseminated on behalf of a person, group or entity included in the Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts and subject to restrictive measures should constitute an important factor in the assessment.

  However, the Regulation also refers to human rights such as freedom of expression. One can be of the opinion that it’s better for the USA to stop existing without any plans or support for actual genocide. Someone expressing hate for your country isn’t immediately a terrorist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?!⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you have a copy of the actual threat? Because “you are a settler” is stupid but not an actual threat.

  I don’t know where you got that picture from, I can’t find the legal definition for a terroristic threat within the EU. The best I could find is:

  For the purposes of this Convention, “public provocation to commit a terorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of a terrorist offence, where such conduct, whether or not directly committed.

  That’s just a convention, though, not direct law. The definition by the convention does require proof of intent, which I haven’t found about the cringe hexbear user.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?!⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Shouting non-credible threats (that, based on the screenshot, I can only assume are ironic in the first place) into the internet void isn’t making “terroristic threats”. Feeding the trolls and name calling isn’t conductive either.

  Most of the internet is kids and people with nothing better to do with their lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 42 year old new hire at your job confesses to you that he has had 48 different jobs in his life. What is your opinion on that?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Could be gig jobs as well. With seasonal work you can easily get four jobs or more in a year without even doing anything unusual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Phonebooks⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This was much less of an issue back when you couldn’t open a bank account in someone’s name from halfway across the world. Phishing and identity theft were impossible to pull off until companies started trusting phone services and later the internet. You needed to show up in person with a realistic fake ID to do anything malicious.

  Now that nobody meets face to face for stuff like cashing a cheque or even ordering a large quantity of groceries anymore, the few bits of personal information we can use to prove our identity are the only things protecting us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the pros and cons to buying a smart watch from temu?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All the terrible quality and human rights violations also apply to any other Chinese shop as well as Amazon or whatever your local Amazon equivalent is. I’ve found the exact same shit sold on Temu in physical store shelves for those cost-saving stores. The entire supply chain is fucked.

  I do order shit directly from China, but only if I need something specific like phone parts or electronics that I see “local” shops carry with the exact same photos, descriptions, and pictures, for twice or triple the price. I’ve fallen for that trick too many times, I’ll go straight to the source now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Must EU banks provide basic service via internet?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.

  My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .

  Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Must EU banks provide basic service via internet?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.

  I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the pros and cons to buying a smart watch from temu?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pro: it’ll probably work well enough to get your notifications and maybe even your heart rate and stuff.

  Con: it probably won’t arrive. If it does, it probably won’t look like in the pictures if it does, it probably won’t work like described. If it does, it probably has done kind of cheep, toxic chemicals it’ll leave in your arm. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably come with an app that drains your battery. If it doesn’t, it probably sells your live location and notifications to data brokers. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably never receive software updates. If it does, it’ll probably be broken by the end of the year.

  There are actually a few relatively cheap smart watches that some people like to reprogram with open source firmware. You can get a Colmi P8 or a Kenboro K9 for less than $30 and flash WaspOS onto it. You have to get lucky and buy the right hardware revision but flashing new firmware onto those things can be as simple as downloading an app and loading a file into it. These devices are underpowered and software availability is limited, but at least with the open source stuff you can rest easy about your data not being sold.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An out-of-warranty battery almost left this paralyzed man’s exoskeleton useless⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?

  In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An out-of-warranty battery almost left this paralyzed man’s exoskeleton useless⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that’s what the article implicates is the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An out-of-warranty battery almost left this paralyzed man’s exoskeleton useless⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.

  From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An out-of-warranty battery almost left this paralyzed man’s exoskeleton useless⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.

  A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.

  It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.

  This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.

  In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.

  However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.