AnyOldName3
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 1 day ago:
I’m not sure I’d consider this a total upgrade - I have a Steam Controller and an 8bitdo SN30 Pro, and despite the 8bitdo one being newer and having been used much less, I wore through its original thumbstick rubber and had to replace it much sooner than the Steam Controller’s thumbstick cap, which hasn’t even worn through, it was just flaking.
Either that was a fluke, or the 8bitdo rubber isn’t as durable.
- Comment on When to use exhaust/intake fans? 1 week ago:
It’s worth bearing in mind that those bar charts on the Nevermore repo are showing the ratio of VOCs rather than the quantity, so make particularly nasty materials like ABS appear comparable to much safer ones like PLA. It’s not going to do you any good if you melt several kilos of PLA in a pan then take the lid off and huff the fumes, but running a single 3D printer with PLA in a large room is going to be pretty safe. The main VOCs emitted by PLA aren’t that harmful - some like acetone and acetaldehyde are produced by the human body and found in food (athough turning alcohol to acetaldehyde is what causes hangovers), methyl methacrylate is used to glue in hip replacements, and isobutanol is often a fermentation byproduct that ends up in alcoholic drinks. That doesn’t mean that PLA fumes are completely harmless, but means that it’s not worth worrying about the level of harm as running a printer in a room with the door open for a whole day is probably somewhere around the level of harm as eating cooked food or having a small beer.
- Comment on When to use exhaust/intake fans? 1 week ago:
Exhaust/intake fans generally aren’t too important - materials like PLA that tolerate the air in the printer being replaced have very low emissions of potentially harmful VOCs and particles, and materials like ABS that emit lots of nasty stuff want the chamber air to stay hot, so having a fan replace the hot air with cold air isn’t great.
If you do have nasty stuff in the printer chamber that you want to send out a window, then the exhaust fan is the more important one. Unless your chamber is totally sealed, an intake fan is going to increase the chamber pressure and encourage contaminated air to go out any gaps, whereas an exhaust fan makes the pressure lower inside the chamber, so encourages clean air to come in through the gaps, stopping contamination escaping. Obviously, this is only relevant if you’ve got a vent tube or filter on the extractor, as if it’s just extracting into the room, there’s no difference between it extracting the air and it leaking.
I guess maybe the use case for an intake fan is either if you’ve got a material that wants the coldest air possible, so want to swap the chamber air for outside air as quickly as you can, or if you’ve got the exhaust fan venting into a chamber where you’re filtering the air without letting it cool down much, and the intake draws from that chamber. I don’t think either of these are particularly common situations, though.
I’ve got a non-max SV08, and I just don’t have an extractor or intake fan on my enclosure, and feed the extractor fan wire to my air filter.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 1 week ago:
If you’re the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they’d be banned, so you’d never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn’t any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they’re banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 1 week ago:
Technically Temu doesn’t import anything. They’re allowed to sell toxic or otherwise dangerous goods because the customer’s the one importing them, and there are plenty of things you’re allowed to import for personal use that you wouldn’t be allowed to import for retail. The EU’s working on closing this loophole, but the UK isn’t in the EU anymore.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 1 week ago:
They got lots of consultants in from MindGeek who own Pornhub etc. and several age-verification services. They told the government that the consultants who were raising issues were overreacting, and the government believed them because obviously the world’s largest porn company wouldn’t encourage them to enact a law that would do bad things to the porn industry. They didn’t stop to think that the law as written means there’s now a requirement for smaller compliant porn sites to either spend more than their total revenue implementing an age-verification system or buy in one of the ones MindGeek own.
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 1 week ago:
Unless you’re a Ferengi or Ayn Rand, a free market shouldn’t allow agents within the market to manipulate each other, as that inhibits trades being done solely based on what gives the best value for the least currency, making the market less free. The regulation here isn’t taking away a choice you want to have as supermarkets that run BOGOF offers just set the unit price to the cost of two units, so your choice is between paying for two things and getting two things or paying for two things and only getting one. Effectively, your choice to just buy one thing at a fair price is taken away by supermarkets, and it’s dressed up to make it look like you’re getting a bargain when you pay a fair price for two things and get two things.
A parenthood licence is a really common trope in dystopian fiction because it’s fundamentally the most authoritarian thing a state could do short of mind control. If you don’t trust a government to decide whether or not there should be BOGOF offers on crisps, you absolutely shouldn’t trust them to decide who gets to have children. For most of the twentieth century, the British government was actively trying to suppress minority political opinions like it being acceptable for people to be homosexual or anti-pollution. If they’d been deciding what the requirements were to get a parenthood licence, they’d absolutely have made people agree to teach their children that it wasn’t okay to be gay etc…
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 1 week ago:
Unless you want to do something dystopian like requiring a parenthood licence before people are allowed to have children and then force them to keep it renewed by attending regular parenthood classes, you can’t force people to receive education on how to be better parents. The state doesn’t have many levers to pull that don’t involve taking people’s children away. Making harmful products less appealing by preventing retailers promoting them is a much better balance of good effect against oppression. The kind of deal being restricted here is something supermarkets do because it manipulates people into buying things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s not like every time you see a BOGOF sale in a shop it’s because they’re overstocked and are trying to clear things before they go past their sell-by date. If that’s not happening, then the only rational reason for supermarkets to have these deals is to manipulate their customers, and it’s not oppressive for a government to prevent multi-billion pound companies from manipulating its citizens.
- Comment on 'Buy one, get one free' deals for unhealthy food banned in supermarkets 1 week ago:
You can have loyalty cards from as many shops as you want, so it’s not inherently anti-competitive. They’re not even particularly meant to encourage loyalty, they’re a way to track what individuals buy over multiple trips and then deliver targeted advertising. The non-loyalty-card prices are high to ensure that customers are incentivised to sign away their data.
- Comment on Imgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine 1 week ago:
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
- Comment on Which Core XY printer? 2 weeks ago:
I got it from here. I don’t think anyone else makes one for the SV08.
- Comment on Or the common cold! 3 weeks ago:
The money spent on the Apollo program wasn’t all packed into a suitcase and taken to the moon, it was spent and reinjected into the economy. In particular, some of it went to the wages of some of the most highly-skilled, best-paying jobs that women and black people could get in the fifties and sixties, and that did a lot of good directly, before we even get onto indirect effects like inspiring generations of people to pursue a career in STEM subjects or developing technologies that would be used elsewhere.
- Comment on Which Core XY printer? 3 weeks ago:
It’s also been on a few really good sales on AliExpress over the past few months, and it’s taken a lot of self-control not to buy myself an entirely unnecessary second SV08 given how impressed I’ve been with mine and the sales taking a third off the cost of the printer.
That said, I have replaced the bed on mine with a graphite one because the stock one’s pretty thin and can warp. Particularly annoyingly, after being hot for about 40 minutes, it’d ping from being warped in one direction to being warped in the other direction, so prints either had to be finished before that or wait until after before they started. It’s not strictly necessary, but it was worth upgrading the bed when there was a price cut to save myself some annoyance and let me fit bed fans so printing ABS was less warp-prone.
- Comment on Intel says Arc GPUs will live on after Nvidia deal 3 weeks ago:
AMD’s GPUs were much faster than Intel’s, and making GPUs for this kind of application was something AMD already did. Nvidia didn’t, so would have to design a whole chip from scratch, and didn’t really have a power efficiency advantage (in recent generations where AMD’s desktop cards have run hot, it’s because they’ve been clocked high to keep up with Nvidia’s cards, but the same architecture runs cool when clocked lower for mobile applications, e.g. Vega was notoriously inefficient on the desktop due to being delayed two years and having to compete with a different generation than it was designed to, but was great in laptop APUs). Intel would also have gained experience with chiplets and packaging a fast GPU with a CPU. It let everyone involved make more money than doing it any other way.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 5 weeks ago:
You not mentioning LLMs doesn’t mean the post you were replying to wasn’t talking about LLM-based AGI. If someone responds to an article about the obvious improbability of LLM-based AGI with a comment about the obviously make-believe genie, the only obviously make-believe genie they could be referring to is the one from the article. If they’re referring to something outside the article, there’s nothing more to suggest it’s non-LLM-based AGI than there is Robin Williams’ character from Aladdin.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 5 weeks ago:
AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn’t mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it’s LLMs that investors have bet on. It’s been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren’t getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It’s pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that’s what the article’s discussing.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 1 month ago:
As I said, I fundamentally disagree. Even if you can make a nearly-teenager-proof website (and so far, your example has been something that most of the people I was at school with could have beaten aged thirteen), teenagers can just go to a different website, so the system is only ever as teenager-resistant as it is difficult to find a website that doesn’t care. Most vaguely competent teenagers know how to find pirate sites with illegally-hosted TV, movies and music (even if they’re not techy, one of their friends just has to tell them a URL and they can visit it). Governments have had minimal success stopping online piracy even when aided by multi-billion-dollar copyright-holding companies, so there’s no realistic reason to think they’ll have any more success stopping porn sites with non-compliant age checks.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 1 month ago:
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that’s left outside will release all it’s carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn’t always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that’s where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 1 month ago:
My point is that you can’t build a completely teenager-proof system. Even if most parents uphold the most unimpeachable password discipline, someone’s going to put a password on a post-it note near their computer, and have their child see the piece of paper, or use their dog’s name despite their child having also met the family dog.
The original comment I was replying to was framing the issue as teenagers being allowed to watch porn versus no teenager ever seeing porn and maybe some freedom is sacrificed to do that, which doesn’t match the real-world debate. If freedoms are sacrificed just to make it a hassle for teenagers to see porn, that’s much less compelling whether or not you see it as a worthwhile goal.
As for what a teenager with access to their parents’ bank password would do, if they’re not a moron, they’ll realise that spending their parents’ money will leave lots of evidence (e.g. that they have extra stuff, their parents have less money than expected in their account, and there’s an unexpected purchase from The Lego Group on the bank statement), and so they’re guaranteed to end up in trouble for it. It’s not any different to a child taking banknotes from their parent’s wallet. On the other hand, using it to prove adulthood, if it was truly untraceable like adults would want, wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 1 month ago:
- Teenagers can find out their parents’ passwords (or their friends’ parents’ passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other’s porn usage, they’re anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they’re using their parents’ credentials. 2FA helps, but it’s not like teenagers never see their parents’ phones.
- There’s not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There’s no unified national ID or online government identity. There’s no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You’d have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
- As I said in the post above, if it’s too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there’s very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don’t care about obeying the law or can’t do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn’t be any online piracy.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 1 month ago:
They consulted with MindGeek, who own Pornhub etc… They’re one of the few companies big enough to comply. It was designed to preserve their monopoly, not Meta’s. The politicians voting on it didn’t necessarily understand that, but the law had been approved by children’s charities and (a single representative of) the industry, so there’d be no reason (if you didn’t understand how technology works) to question it.
- Comment on Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws 1 month ago:
There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn’t require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it’s like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn’t anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there’d be enough proof that there wouldn’t be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.
If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else’s ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there’s an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it’s that person who is using it, and that’s both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they’ll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can’t see that you’re not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.
Another big factor is that if there’s a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it’s really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It’s pretty easy for sites that don’t care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that’s happening, there’s no reason to think that it’s only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.
Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn’t go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it’s taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can’t prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn’t been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Those photos are of Shah-era Iran, when the West was propping up (including providing weapons, training and funding to) an unpopular authoritarian that had been installed by the UK and US when the previous democratically-elected government dared to attempt to nationalise the oil industry, which was owned by BP. Under the Shah, traditional Islamic dress was outlawed, which is why everyone’s in 1970s clothes. If you disagreed with the Shah, the secret police would take you away and kill you.
Eventually, a coalition of leftists and religious leaders overthrew the Shah. The religious faction then assassinated all the prominent leftists and switched the secular authoritarian dictatorship for a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship. Under the Ayatollah, traditional Islamic dress was mandatory, which is why women in contemporary photos from Iran always have some kind of headscarf unless it’s in a news report about a protest that someone got executed for. If you disagree with the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard will take you away and kill you.
So Iran’s had laws forcing women to wear only the clothes approved by a dictator both with and without help from the West.
- Comment on What are the most useful things you've printed? 1 month ago:
They’re AAAA cells, not AAA cells, which is why you’re finding they’re too short and narrow.
- Comment on when ur higher than sagan 1 month ago:
Willow bark contains salicin. Things made from willow bark have been used for a very long time as herbal remedies. In the early 1800s, people figured out how to isolate it and also break it down and oxidise it to make salicylic acid. They tried using what they’d extracted as medicine as they knew it had an effect on the body, and that was the height of the bar back then. It generally did much more harm than good, but eventually some things were discovered that it genuinely helped treat. In the late 1800s, people had figured out that if you tried subjecting known bioactive compounds to chemical reactions, sometimes you ended up with a new bioactive compound - that was how diamorphine (heroin) was first synthesised from morphine, for example. Someone tried an esterification reaction with salicylic acid, and got acetylsalicylic acid, and eventually Bayer managed to purify and manufacture it at scale and start selling it as Aspirin once they’d fed it to people and determined it worked as a painkiller.
It’s a pretty standard 1800s try extracting compounds from herbal remedies, then kill some people with them, then apply basic chemical reactions to create novel compounds, then get lucky and produce a real medicine story. It doesn’t happen anymore because we’ve run out of things to try and you can’t just create new compounds and feed them to people and see what happens anymore - you’ve got to demonstrate that there’s a plausible mode of action against a specific condition before starting human trials.
- Comment on when ur higher than sagan 1 month ago:
Big pharma absolutely can patent drugs extracted from herbs. The reason you don’t see lots of them is that lots of them didn’t work very well and the ones that did were all isolated and turned into medicine decades ago, so the patents have expired, and they’re generally sold under medicine-sounding names rather than the names of the plant them came from. E.g. Aspirin was originally made from modified willow extract, and was discovered because willow was a known natural remedy and so was a good candidate for further investigation. Also, the requirement that a newly discovered drug needs to be proven to be effective to be licensed is a big hurdle lots of natural remedies don’t manage to clear.
Even despite that, though, big pharma does sell natural remedies. The difference is that they don’t claim they’re medicine. If they only claim they’re a food supplement or something else that’s only medicine-adjacent, there’s no requirement to prove efficacy.
- Comment on Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those? 1 month ago:
A cheap record player or a cheap CD player were always better than a high-end cassette player. Cassettes were designed to be small at the expense of quality at a time when technology didn’t allow things to be both small and high quality, and the constraints of the medium are well within the bounds of what most people can easily hear. Once CDs and their players became cheap, tape was entirely obsolete, and didn’t have the I don’t understand Nyquist Sampling Theorem or acknowledge the existence of dust excuse that vinyl had.
- Comment on Remember to dry your filament kids 1 month ago:
You can weigh it before you start drying it and weigh it again every few hours until it stops getting lighter.
- Comment on UK government suggests deleting files to save water 1 month ago:
In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it’s difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it’s described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don’t need to care about whether it’s viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.
- Comment on Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed? 1 month ago:
That doesn’t stop Americans signing up with the instance and then dominating all discussion there.