a1studmuffin
@a1studmuffin@aussie.zone
- Comment on The loyalty tax shoppers willingly pay despite push for supermarket competition 1 week ago:
Most people who shop at ALDI also shop at Coles/Woolies to get the items they can’t get at ALDI. It’s not a brand thing, it’s that they don’t sell the type of item you’re after at all. As an example, try finding canned mackerel fillets or vegetarian fake meat products at ALDI. They don’t stock them.
- Comment on The loyalty tax shoppers willingly pay despite push for supermarket competition 1 week ago:
The argument that consumers are paying a “loyalty tax” in a cost of living crisis is absurd. From the article, this is the only reason:
Aldi stocks about 1,800 products compared to the 25,000 sold by its big competitors.
To say ALDI is a competitor to Colesworth is misleading. It’s a supplementary option at best, just like going to a grocer or market is. The range just isn’t there.
- Comment on Woolworths and Coles are emphasising the threat of Aldi — is it really a competitive force to be reckoned with? 5 weeks ago:
Wow, they even acknowledged that customers will go to ALDI then go to Colesworth afterwards because ALDI didn’t have everything they needed. Sounds like real serious competition to me! About as threatening as a local market or butcher.
- Comment on Who was our worst Prime Minister and why? Any notable state leaders we need to add? 1 month ago:
I agree his economic policies were garbage, but Howard deserves some pretty serious street cred for gun law reform in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. It was a pivotal moment for the nation, and looking at the USA, I’m very grateful for his influence.
- Comment on South Australia’s upper house narrowly rejects ‘Trumpian’ bill to wind back abortion care 2 months ago:
It’s one of the worst feelings when you realise that social progress isn’t guaranteed, and regressions happen frequently throughout history.
- Comment on ‘I’m pretty smoked, mate’: Lachlan Morton completes epic 14,200km ride around Australia in record time 2 months ago:
Thanks for the words of encouragement! That’s exactly what I’ve done and recently just hit my first half century ride, but oh boy did I feel it! What a great feeling to be getting fitter though, I’m just sorry I didn’t do it sooner. Bikes are awesome.
- Comment on ‘I’m pretty smoked, mate’: Lachlan Morton completes epic 14,200km ride around Australia in record time 2 months ago:
Good god, averaging over 450km/day for 30 days straight! I’d be chuffed if I averaged a tenth of that per day for a month straight.
- Comment on Microsoft releases a new Windows app called Windows App for running Windows apps 3 months ago:
Windows App Series X Ultimate Pro for Enterprise Edition Service Pack 2
- Comment on When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself | As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. 4 months ago:
This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
- Comment on Microsoft finally officially confirms it's killing Windows Control Panel sometime soon 4 months ago:
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the “new” Metro-style Settings, then just kind of… gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can’t believe they’ve left it this long to address, it’s a truly awful user experience.
- Comment on I just wanted to take a moment to enjoy how clean the web can be 4 months ago:
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
- Comment on CrowdStrike’s faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft 5 months ago:
God, even if they didn’t have QA test it, they should have had continuous integration running to test all new channel updates against all versions of their program, considering the update will affect all of them. What an epic process failure.
- Comment on The federal government has given an online age verification pilot the green light. Here's what we know about it 7 months ago:
Responding to eSafety’s roadmap last year, the government set a few tests that any age verification scheme would have to meet. They included confidence it can’t be circumvented, can be easily applied to companies based abroad, and don’t risk the privacy of adults looking to legally access porn.
This is going absolutely nowhere then. All three of those bullet points are impossible problems on their own. What a waste of money.
- Comment on Nerd Update 20/4/24 8 months ago:
Thanks for sharing! That sawtooth pattern on the memory graph is pretty crazy, it’s leaking like a sieve.
How are you going for server costs? Shout out if you need more donations, I think many of us have realised this is a viable platform for the long-term.
- Comment on Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’ 10 months ago:
We should see an improvement in game quality for the platform once last-gen sales drop off enough that developers only need to target current-gen.
Right now any game that comes out for both PS4+5 is bottlenecked by PS4 memory and performance, with only easy wins taken for PS5 like higher quality assets and faster IO/FPS.
Designing a game for current-gen platforms from the ground up is when we’ll start to see some more impressive features, but there’s still money on the table for PS4 so it’ll be a few years (IMHO) before we see PS5 exclusives as the norm.
- Comment on Police Departments Are Turning to AI to Sift Through Millions of Hours of Unreviewed Body-Cam Footage 10 months ago:
We don’t even need to choose! Just use hours, months, years, decades! But no, Barbie movies.
- Comment on VS Code | January 2024 Release | 1.86 10 months ago:
A programmer sitting in front of a text-based IDE with millions of keyboard shortcuts at their disposal has to be the least necessary use case for a voice assistant I’ve ever heard of.
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 10 months ago:
Glass arrived on the scene in 2013. Since then recording in public has become much more normalised… smartphone camera use, cars with dashcams and CCTV/face recognition have all increased in popularity. YouTubers, live streamers, creators etc. If it were released again today, I’m not sure it would achieve the same hatred it did back then, at least on the “creepy camera in public” point.
- Comment on A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years 11 months ago:
Here’s what I was referring to with the lightbulb thing and capitalism:
- Comment on A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years 11 months ago:
Remember when light bulbs used to last decades? A phone battery that lasts that long is incompatible with capitalism.
- Comment on Screens keep getting faster. Can you even tell? | CES saw the launch of several 360Hz and even 480Hz OLED monitors. Are manufacturers stuck in a questionable spec war, or are we one day going to wo... 11 months ago:
I’d much rather they invest efforts into supporting customisable phones. Instead of just releasing a few flavours of the same hardware each year, give us a dozen features we can opt into or not. Pick a base size, then pick your specs. Want a headphone jack, SD card, FM radio, upgraded graphics performance? No problems, that’ll cost a bit extra. Phones are boring now - at least find a way to meet the needs of all consumers.
- Comment on How many of you actually use the headphone jack on your phone? 1 year ago:
I use it a few times a month. I’ve got fantastic Bluetooth earbuds, but occasionally in zoom calls I’ll switch from my PC to my phone on the fly, and the wired PC headset comes with me since it’s got a nice microphone and noise cancelling. I can’t imagine trying to switch quickly like this with Bluetooth!
I also tend to use wired headphones when commuting in busy areas (city train stations etc.) as Bluetooth falls apart in these conditions… dropouts piss me off. I listen to offline MP3s for the same reason.
I’ve gone without before - my last phone didn’t have a headphone jack and I never bothered with the USBC dongle because it was a pain - but having the flexibility is more convenient.
I only upgrade every 4-5 years, so it makes it easier to find a newish phone that has a headphone jack. It frustrates me that new laptops still include headphone jacks, but most new phones don’t. It’s a stupid inconsistency.
- Comment on After I’m Gone Backup Solution 1 year ago:
Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.
- Comment on Elon Musk on X antisemitism controversy: “Don’t advertise. Go f*** yourself” 1 year ago:
Yep. Can’t put my finger on what’s happening there exactly, but there’s some kind of mental health crisis going on and it’s very public.
- Comment on New York intends to have electric air taxis by 2025 1 year ago:
Remember Uber Air? Still waiting…
- Comment on Uber is testing a service that lets you hire drivers for chores 1 year ago:
Cleaning gutters or windows up high or cutting back large trees both seem dangerous enough, but I’m sure people will volunteer for it if they need the money.
- Comment on Typing is not a programming bottleneck 1 year ago:
I discovered this very quickly after breaking a finger. One-finger typing didn’t slow me down at all. Turns out my brain was the bottleneck.
- Comment on ChatGPT's Scary Good at Getting People to Click Phishing Emails, IBM Finds 1 year ago:
A targeted phishing email is usually pretty sophisticated and requires days or weeks of research. For example, you might send an email pretending to be from someone’s IT department regarding a hardware audit, and ask a user to report back with the barcode sticker on their laptop, providing them with a photo of an example tag in similar format. You’ll pretend to be a specific individual at the company, or a contractor the company actually uses, and show knowledge of the internal software and hardware, and refer to other real employees by name/email to establish trust. Most of this data will be scraped from publicly available sources like LinkedIn profiles, job listings, and photos shared on social media by employees. This process is called OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and it’s a fascinating rabbithole to read about. Targeted phishing attempts are much, much more sophisticated than the ones you’ll see in spam email.
- Comment on Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish 1 year ago:
I’m surprised they don’t gift YouTube Premium to Google One subscribers. The same way Amazon does with their streaming service and Prime.
- Comment on Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec 1 year ago:
It’s the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I’m hopeful they’ll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you’re on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.