JohnEdwa

@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony Music Among Parties Pushing To Cut Off Internet for Pirating Customers — Supreme Court Asked To Intervene⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Death penalty is an ineffective deterrent mostly because people tend to commit the crimes it’s used as a punishment for while not thinking, or caring, about the consequences at all.

  Now, forget cutting off the internet, if you’d get the death penalty for getting caught pirating music, it would prove to be a very effective deterrent at stopping it. I guarantee, zero piracy after a few years.
  A lot smaller population left to buy the legal media too, though, but hey, no pesky pirates!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Oscars officially don’t care if films use AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Also AI isn’t only LLMs and image generation, it’s a massive field that’s been used in different things for decades. “No AI” would mean “back to snipping movies using practical effects together from spools of film”, as basically every CGI and editing software uses something “AI” in it these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss to launch ‘free speech’ social media platform⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They do for the freedom of expression, as do most EU (and ex-EU) countries:

  Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

  The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  7.4 billion, which is around 0.7% of GDP. 0.66% of GNI.

  For comparison, the US might win out on pure billions, but compared to the size of the economy, it uses a whopping 0.24% of the GNI on foreign aid, a figure that is almost certainly going to drop in the near future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And why, for the love of god, does it have a separate numbering scheme?!

  Because they want the ability to reference other vulnerability sources - like JVN - and not just CVE.

  The EUVD service builds upon the CVE system and vulnerabilities in the scope of the CVE numbering service receive a CVE. In addition, the EUVD data aggregates and enriches the vulnerability information and lists an EUVD ID on top of the CVE when new vulnerability entries are created. To allow further cross referencing, the CVE identifier and additional vulnerability identifiers are listed when available. -https://euvd.enisa.europa.eu/faq

  And because, you know, standards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android phones will soon reboot if they’re locked for a few days⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. You have to bring up the power menu and then use either virtual keyboard commands or the AutoInput plugin to tap the reboot button.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla (TSLA) has to replace computer in ~4 million cars or compensate their owners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly it, he knows what it means - all. L5 is easy like that.

  He’s delusional thinking that he could ever actually achieve that, but that’s why L5 is so much simpler of a concept than L4, as with L4 you can argue about semantics and details about what exactly it has to be able to do to qualify. Level 5 has no exceptions, it has to be completely autonomous with zero human interaction required other than telling it where you want to get to. If it can’t do it, it isn’t L5.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla (TSLA) has to replace computer in ~4 million cars or compensate their owners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Level 5 is easy to understand even for musk, it’s a fully autonomous robot that requires no human supervision or intervention yet is capable of navigating every single possible traffic situation.

  And as long as he insists that the only sensors a tesla has are cameras, that goal is simply impossible, with cars driving under semi-truck trailer and through walls with pictures of the road behind it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  snap "it’s illegal. "

  -But… But nothing changed?

  Since when has the Trump administration cared about following the law?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In a few years most of the world won’t even be able to. It took Chinese cars decades to come to the worldwide and especially the EU market because nobody in China was developing and manufacturing cars that would pass western safety regulations.

  If the only way for Tesla to stay competitive is to loosen the US regulations, they’ll end up with an ecosystem that can only be sold and used in the US. For example, the Cybertruck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo delays Switch 2 preorders over tariff concerns⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nordic prices are high because of Bergsala, the monopoly importer, and not Nintendo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GenAI website goes dark after explicit fakes exposed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pictures of clothed children and naked adults.

  Nobody trained them on what things made out of spaghetti look like, but they can generate them because smushing multiple things together is precisely what they do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or you could just winamp it.

  Oh, wait, that’s a terrible idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t. But nevertheless, the progress they’ve made in a year is very impressive.

  The question left to be seen is how it’ll look in a year or two: hardly any improvement, or a beaten elite four?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s weird, it isn’t for me.
  Try archive.ph/iULP4 or web.archive.org/…/the-inside-story-behind-pebbles…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Pebble app was removed from the App store, so you have to manually sideload it every 7 days.

  And:

  Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone:

  • There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
  • You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
  • It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble. Basically iOS does not have the concept of ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like on Android. What we did before was publish an SDK that other apps (like Strava) could integrate to make their own BLE connection to Pebble. It was a clunky quasi-solution that other apps didn’t like, because it was hard to test (among other things)
  • If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet
  • Impossible for watch to detect if you are using your phone, so your watch will buzz and display a notification even if you are staring at your iPhone
  • You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.
  • Because of iOS Appstore rules, it would be hard for us to enable 3rd party watchface/app developers to charge for their work (ie we can’t easily make an appstore within our app)
  • Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS — creating a compiler inside the Pebble iPhone app that in itself needed to be written in (cross-compiled to) JS to work with Apple’s restriction on downloadable code can only be JS
  • As a Pebble watch/app developer, using the iOS app as relay to the watch sucks since the “developer mode” terminates every few minutes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There was/is a companion app called PebbleNav/NavMe that worked okay-ish, as long as you could survive with “Turn left in 100 metres” type instructions with no map view (not really something you can do with 144x168 pixels).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yet they are also the same - E Ink is an e-paper display. Electronic paper is a category for any low energy display tech that looks kinda like paper, E Ink is a very specific technology from E Ink Corporation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much the only thing Pebble that Google owns any more is the trademark itself, which is why these aren’t called Pebbles, they are Cores.
  The watches have nothing to do with Google whatsoever, with the exception that Google is the who open sourced the old Pebble software so it could be used again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.

  Though the experience is miserable on iOS thanks to Apple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.

  Due to Pebble going bankrupt, and managing to sell its software assets to Fitbit to gain just enough money to refund the kickstarter pledges and pay off it’s biggest debts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No More Parts Guesswork With iFixit’s Device Compatibility Checker⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That would require starting a database with the purpose of cataloguing every single part number in every single device that exists, which while technically possible, is rather unfeasible without extensive manufacturer cooperation.
  What iFixit is doing is the other way around, they are telling what device a certain part number they carry fits in - as in their example, what Lenovo laptop that specific battery is compatible with.

  In a perfect world though that information would be available in the repair manual and schematic that came with your device, as they usually did a few decades back. Alas, that’s something that’s never going to happen again because it hurts profit margins.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pinterest changes user terms so it can train AI on user data and photos, regardless of when they were posted⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  IANAL, but the way the federation by necessity copies your posts and information to every instance there is and to be able to do that it all needs to be under a licence that allows it to happen, those blurbs almost certainly are legally entirely meaningless. The only thing I can think of is claiming a non-commercial use violations, but that could put every instance that runs on donations under fire as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Disk rot usually happens when air gets in contact with the reflective coating and oxidises it. With CD’s, it’s actually the top side you need to be worried about, as it’s right there under a thin lacquer coating. Any ding to that can expose the layer or just literally chip off a chunk of data.

  At least on DVD’s it’s sandwiched inside the disk, so usually the only reason is a manufacturing error, and not really something the user can cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brazilian court gives Apple 90 days to allow sideloading on iOS.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sideloading (is supposed to) mean just transferring files between local devices, as in, you aren’t uploading or downloading them, you are going sideways. E.g you download a song to your pc, then sideload it to your mp3 player.

  That’s also where it comes to installing phone apps, as you transfer the app to the phone yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  English is my third language, it’s hard to remember which parts of it belong to a fourth one and shouldn’t be translated (because “en masse” is literally French for “in mass”)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you cross-post, that sub gets it’s own up/downvote count. You would have to open the link and go to the original post to see and affect them, so it already discourages brigading

  NP is when I link you directly to somewhere, e.g np.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/…/barbie_doll/ won’t have voting even if you are logged in, not on the post or the comments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When one community goes in mass to affect the votes in another. E.g someone is doing a poll/vote, and you link that to somewhere else with the hope, or sometimes direct instructions to go vote on it in a certain way.

  That’s why reddit has cross-posts and the np (no participation, disables voting in the linked content) subdomain that try to keep the votes separated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn a 5-star safety rating in Europe | Euro NCAP will introduce new testing rules in 2026 requiring physical controls for the highest safety score⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Only if mandatory rear lights come back as well. Having them animate in the direction they are going to turn are very helpful when the car has no other rear lights whatsoever.