AnyOldName3

@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

  The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hope you weren’t planning to play PhysX games on Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal that I get wet water all over myself when taking a shower?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Wet water is the water with added wetting agent used for firefighting. That stuff shouldn’t be coming out of your household plumbing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yo, Duplo, what you doing on the 24th?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Once I worked out that Lego work to the same tolerances as the transistors in a Pentium II CPU. It’s probably a better example than NASA as NASA makes huge things that don’t require submillimetre tolerances and tiny precise instruments that couldn’t have been made a couple of decades ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USB-C cable CT scan reveals sinister active electronics — O.MG cable contains a hidden antenna and another die embedded in the microcontroller⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The intended use for this kind of product is that you hire a company to break into your company, and then tell you how they did it so that criminals (or, if you’re someone like a defence contractor, foreign spies) can’t do the same thing later. Sometimes they’re also used by journalists to prove that the government or a company isn’t taking necessary precautions or by hobbyists at events where everyone’s aware that everyone else will try to break into their stuff. There’s typically vetting of anyone buying non-hobbyist quantities of anything, and it’s all equipment within theoretical reach of organised crime or state actors, so pentesters need to have access, too, or they can’t reasonably assess the real-world threat that’s posed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨flouride⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Real men make chlorine pentafluoride anyway. We have no use for pathetic hypergolic oxidisers with only three fluorine atoms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Fennec Android browser is currently behind on Firefox security updates, deemed unsafe by F-droid⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Upstream Firefox doesn’t comply with FDroid’s rules (thanks to the ‘proprietary bits and telemetry’ Handles mentioned), so is only available from the Play Store or as a loose APK that won’t auto-update.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A plumber or a sparky doesn’t just maintain one house, and if they’re just doing maintenance, probably work on hundreds of houses a year. Maintaining your own house takes a fraction of the time and effort of working a housing-related trade full time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m referring to arguments I’ve had in person against native English speakers. If they were online arguments, the ability to use mobile data to show someone a citation wouldn’t be a new development.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨House Centipedes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have seen one of these in my life. I found it in my hair. I’m glad if already seen pictures of them on the Internet as the experience was already unpleasant enough when I could recognise what if found and knew it was harmless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had an unreasonable number of arguments against people who seemed to think animal was a synonym for mammal. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where you can look it up and show them now mobile data is cheap, so it’s become a winnable argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn’t have to count against the right to repair one, as if you’ve got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn’t mean you’re legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I’ve got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I’m not legally forced to do so.

  I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don’t actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there’re still ways to keep things working. It doesn’t mean unqualified end users can’t use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you’ve got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’ve got a broken insulin pump, assuming you’re in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

  If you don’t have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you’d have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it’s not safe, but also not something you’d die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

  If you’ve got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That’d be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don’t have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That’s much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

  Prosthetic legs don’t have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can’t make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Three Mile Island nuclear plant set for restart on Microsoft AI power deal⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nuclear is even less killy than hydroelectric (dams sometimes burst and drown a bunch of people downriver) and wind (sometimes technicians fall off when fixing a turbine) per kilowatt hour, despite the potential for really scary failures, largely because it generates so much power when it’s working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity cancels the stupid Runtime Fee⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It also doesn’t help that once you’ve paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn’t actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn’t help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn’t fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer’s looked at it).

  Anyway, I’m glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do any "thickening" products actually work to prevent hair loss/thinning?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I use topical Minoxidil. It’s clearly made some difference, replacing a bald patch with a thin patch, and making my scalp noticeably warmer to the touch due to the extra bloodflow. It wasn’t the brilliant instantaneous wonderdrug some people told me it would be, nor totally ineffectual like others said, so I guess it’s something whose efficacy varies from person to person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google dropping ublock origin represents a flawless David vs Goliath victory for its developer⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Those forks aren’t maintaining Firefox itself, just their own modifications. If a bug is found in Firefox, the LibreWolf team don’t have to fix it themselves, they can wait for Mozilla to do it, and incorporate the fix once it materialises. There are forks that diverge further, but they either get quickly abandoned after their creator realises how much of a headache maintenance will be, or they’re left with gaping security holes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google dropping ublock origin represents a flawless David vs Goliath victory for its developer⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren’t thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn’t mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world’s first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just as a heads up, AutoDesk will start deleting your Fusion Files if you don't login once a year⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  UX isn’t universal. What intuitively clicks for one person might be unusable for someone else. Good UX is adequate for as many people as possible, but it can’t be perfect for everyone at once when some people work best with large labelled buttons with big, clear icons that have to go into submenus to fit on the screen, and other people prefer lots of small buttons whose purpose and location they’ve memorised which all fit on screen at once to save them needing to click into submenus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google dropping ublock origin represents a flawless David vs Goliath victory for its developer⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maintaining a web browser in the 2020s is an expensive thing to do. You need full time employees who specialise in all the systems that make up a browser, and can’t leave security-critical parts like ensuring the integrity of the JavaScript sandbox to volunteer hobbyists. It’s far from the only thing Mozilla spend money on, so if they need to mage cost savings, it won’t necessarily stop them being able to maintain Firefox, but another organisation picking it up if they do stop isn’t likely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is enabling BitLocker device encryption by default on Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re doing things properly, you’ll know your Microsoft account password or have it in a password manager (and maybe have other account recovery options available like getting a password reset email etc.), and have a separate password for the PC you’re locked out of, which would be the thing you’d forgotten. If someone isn’t computer-literate, it’s totally plausible that they’d forget both passwords, have no password manager, and not have set up a recovery email address, and they’d lose all their data if they couldn’t get into their machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you give a chip more voltage, its transistors will switch faster, but they’ll degrade faster. Ideally, you want just barely enough voltage that everything’s reliably finished switching and all signals have propagated before it’s time for the next clock cycle, as that makes everything work and last as long as possible. When the degradation happens, at first it means things need more voltage to reach the same speed, and then they totally stop working. A little degradation over time is normal, but it’s not unreasonable to hope that it’ll take ten or twenty years to build up enough that a chip stops working at its default voltage.

  The microcode bug they’ve identified and are fixing applies too much voltage to part of the chip under specific circumstances, so if an individual chip hasn’t experienced those circumstances very often, it could well have built up some degradation, but not enough that it’s stopped working reliably yet. That could range from having burned through a couple of days of lifetime, which won’t get noticed, to having a chip that’s in the condition you’d expect it to be in if it was twenty years old, which still could pass tests, but might keel over and die at any moment.

  If they’re not doing a mass recall, and can’t come up with a test that says how affected an individual CPU has been without needing to be so damaged that it’s no longer reliable, then they’re betting that most people’s chips aren’t damaged enough to die until the after warranty expires. There’s still a big difference between the three years of their warranty and the ten to twenty years that people expect a CPU to function for, and customers whose parts die after thirty-seven months will lose out compared to what they thought they were buying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AMD delays its Ryzen 9000 launch due to unspecified quality issue — new launch in August; chipmaker pulls back all units shipped globally for quality checks⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It wasn’t me who you replied to originally - I agree that it’s most likely AMD are just being super cautious given historically how many times bad news for their competitors has been falsely equated by the press as equivalent to a minor issue they’ve had, and the delay moving things after the microcode update and therefore making launch-day benchmarking more favourable is just a bonus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AMD delays its Ryzen 9000 launch due to unspecified quality issue — new launch in August; chipmaker pulls back all units shipped globally for quality checks⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve misunderstood. The original release date was set, then Intel announced the microcode update, which was after the original release date, then AMD announced that they’d be delaying the release date, and that new release date is after the microcode update.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wood smells like we should be able to eat it, but we can't.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Coal, not oil, but it’s still an interesting fact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s at least common on forums as bots love making accounts with non-megacorp email addresses on PhpBB and MyBB forums. Typically, there aren’t people signing up the same services with business emails as personal ones, so if ones expecting not to be used by businesses want to fight spam, it’s generally pretty effective and consequence-free to block email providers not known to have effective anti-bot measures built in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threat actors exploited Windows 0-day for more than a year before Microsoft fixed it⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That would be annoying for people who work on files with a double extension for legitimate reasons, e.g. .tar.gz, and (this can’t be stressed strongly enough) Windows users do not pay attention to warning popups, so it wouldn’t actually help. Despite it being eighteen years since Windows Vista released, and therefore vanishing unlikely that any given software was written assuming that Windows didn’t have a permissions system, it’s still most people’s first troubleshooting step to try and run things as admin, and you still get loads of people (including ones who should know better, e.g. ones who also use Linux and would never log in as root) who disable UAC as one of the first things they do when setting up a windows install, and end up running everything as the equivalent of root just to suppress the mildly annoying pop-up when something asks for elevated permissions.

  So, your proposed popup:

  • would be annoying including for legitimate uses
  • wouldn’t help as anyone who already ignores the smart screen popup that shows up when running a dodgy application will ignore the new popup, too
  • would be disabled by huge swathes of users anyway
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

  If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OneDrive automatically backups folders in Windows 11 without users' permissions⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been the default since 2015 when Windows 10 launched, although there was an obvious button to opt out during first-time setup back then which was then respected permanently. It’s got gradually less prominent over time, and maybe the article’s just doing a really bad job of explaining that it’s no longer something where your initial preference is permanent and it’ll change back to the default every so often.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a silly flag to use as it only works when running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows, and if you’re compiling from source, you should also have the option to just build a 64-bit binary in the first place. It made a degree of sense years ago when people actually used 32-bit Windows sometimes (which was usually just down to OEMs installing the wrong version on prebuilt PCs could have supported 64-bit) if you really wanted to only have one binary or you consumed a precompiled third party library and had to match its architecture.