JohnEdwa

@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is Android's new 'advanced flow' for sideloading apps without verification, includes one-day waiting period⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a term few decades old, and means transferring files between local devices.

  You download the app on your pc, you sideload it to your local device (your phone) using ‘adb sideload file.apk’, and you use that installed app to upload pictures of your mom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably quite a few of the roughly 3.8 billion people still running Chrome in this day an age, I’d imagine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Search referrals to the web have plummeted, AI links are 'less than 1%' of traffic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. Also combined with:

  1. replace all entry level jobs with AI
  2. run out of experienced people because nobody new can learn the skills required
  3. ???
  4. profit

  But you see, for a brief moment, we made the shareholders very rich, and that was a beautiful moment totally worth everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck: Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  No no, you see, humans don’t have buttons or levers, so cars don’t need them either.

  businessinsider.com/elon-musk-demanded-cameras-ov…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 49MB Web Page⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They seem to be for goatcounter, an “Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data.” and cloudflare insights.

  And the entire blog post is still just 600kB in total.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dynamic pricing could be coming to your local supermarket⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The solution of which is that you change the tag before you change the actual price if it’s an increase, and the price before the tag if it’s a discount, with a long enough delay. That’s what they do with gas pumps and the advertisements here in Finland.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ask chat GPT to come up with a nice message explaining why direct copy pastes of LLM outputs is bad. Copy paste it to her directly.
  Maybe she will understand it better that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Social Insecurity: Billions of Social Security Number and Passwords⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They used to be geocoded, and Florida did run out of their original set of numbers at one point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BMW’s Newest “Innovation” is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  neither the bit nor the screw head can withstand the torque of a standard Torx or Hex fastener

  Which “standard” Torx head? Maximum torque of 0.43Nm of a T5? Or maybe 10.5Nm of a T20? 132Nm of a T50? T60 is rated for 437Nm.

  If you need a bolt that can handle 50Nm, you put a head that’s sized to that on the bolt.
  If it’s a Torx, you put a T40. If it’s Hex, you put an 8mm on it. And if it’s a stupid BMW one, you pick the size that can handle 50Nm. The shape doesn’t matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Though Reddit is a publicly traded company now, so they currently own only 30%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The new Microsoft copilot key is impossible to properly remap.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Though any competent manufacturer, especially when talking about laptops, would still have the application key under FN (as is shown in that example image), and give the ability for users to select which one is the default function in the BIOS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The new Microsoft copilot key is impossible to properly remap.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When was the last time you on purpose used the application key on your keyboard to open the right-click context menu so you could navigate it using the arrow keys? Because that is the key it replaced - Microsoft has demanded for the last 32 years that the two spaces CTRL and ALT on Windows compatible keyboards are used for the Windows key, and the Application Key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The new Microsoft copilot key is impossible to properly remap.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They (Microsoft) did actually also originally implement it, the application key was added to Microsoft keyboards in 1994 along with the Windows key. It’s a key meant to give compatibility to the Windows user interface when your PC had a mouse with only one button.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Consumer hardware is no longer a priority for manufacturers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We also partly ended up with the 5k 5090 because it’s just the TITAN RTX of the 50xx generation - the absolute top of the line a card where you pay 200% extra for that last +10% performance.
  nVidia just realized few generations back that naming those cards the xx90 gets a bunch of more people to buy them, because they always desperately need to have the shiniest newest xx90 cards, no matter the cost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This legendary Nokia phone is being brought back to life in 2026⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve been thinking about doing that here in Finland too, but so much non-phone stuff is using the older networks that while 3G is mostly gone, 2G for calls and texts is still going to be supported to at least 2029.

  Systems like the EU mandatory eCall car emergency call thingy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Tool Searches the Epstein Files For Your LinkedIn Contacts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Defamation requires the claim to be both a lie, and made publicly. The tool needs to be run locally, and specifically tells you that it’s searching by name and that others with the same name will be found in the results, and that’s why it gives the context and lists where in the files it came up.

  So the tool itself isn’t defamatory, but anyone that uses is better be damn sure that they have the correct person if they start publicly talking or writing about what it finds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world is trying to log off U.S. tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d think the few global AWS and Cloudflare outages would have worked as a warning, but most people just went from “nah it couldn’t ever happen” to “well, it did happen, but surely it wouldn’t ever last all too long”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world is trying to log off U.S. tech⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have over 200, but most of them are to forums that have been dead for a decade.

  The internet used to be quite a different place back in the day, people had separated communities and everything wasn’t just on a handful of massive platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle – Dmitry Brant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Many did. One common thing is to store some important data on a dongle. A game called DJ Max Trilogy stores your entire save data on it, so even if you bypass the dongle check to get the game to boot, you have to rewrite the entire save/load system too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Come run it in Finland during the summer months, we have too much wind generation and electricity is often free or even goes negative every once in a while.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My country's police just busted a dangerous 3d printed weapons manufacturer.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Spring assisted switchblades are illegal in quite a few countries, so I imagine they are in Italy as well. Still completely ridiculous, as they are plastic toy replicas, and not actual knives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android won't kill sideloading after all, but new verification rules will make it harder⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is still the same installation method, directly installing the .apk file, from way back when the term for Android usage was defined.
  So, kinda?

  Android doesn’t use ROMs any more either, because the filesystems are now writable. But Lineage etc are still called custom ROMs, because the process hasn’t changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android won't kill sideloading after all, but new verification rules will make it harder⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a “bullshit new term”, it’s three decades old and means transferring files locally from one device to another, instead of directly downloading or uploading from/to an external server.

  The most common sideloading people did was downloading music to their PC using services like iTunes, and transferring them to their mp3 players. As they did often with early PDA and smartphone apps, where the term for Android comes from - get the .app on your computer, transfer it to your phone, and install it.
  Sideloading.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X down – latest: Twitter and Grok not working in another major outage⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Artists I follow post mostly either on X or Instagram, which I don’t find to be any better. All that have mastodon or bluesky accounts I’ve switched over, but many do not.

  But I haven’t actually tweeted anything for something over a decade now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows users keep losing files to OneDrive, and many don't know why⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, such nostalgia. I used a complex password until they forced monthly resets on us and I forgot mine a few times. After that, “FuckingPassword1”, “FuckingPassword2”, FuckingPassword3" etc with a mysterious post-it note on my table with a single number. Very memorable, still remember it well after a decade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Worst in Show' CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Traditionally, convection ovens have a fan at the back that pushes air over the food and around the oven, while air friers have a fan on top that draws the air through the food from the bottom. But for majority of the use cases, the results are very similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How we get to 1 nanometer chips and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Open any wikipedia article about “x nm process” and one of the first paragraphs will be something like this:

  The term “2 nanometer”, or alternatively “20 angstrom” (a term used by Intel), has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a “2.1 nm node range label” is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 45 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 20 nanometers.[1]

  It used to be that the “60nm process” was called that simply because the transistor gate was 60nm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electric motorcycles with solid-state batteries seem to be coming soon.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because it isn’t? I’m comparing it to other hubless designs, stuff like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell brings back XPS laptops — ditches the capacitive touch bar, adds 1Hz display option, and upgrades 14 and 16-inch models⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Top tip, buy a used enterprise laptop. You can get one hell of a deal when big companies throw their entire lineup out after a few years and flood the market. Some have a few scuffs here and there, but others are mint after sitting plugged to a dock for the last three years in a row.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electric motorcycles with solid-state batteries seem to be coming soon.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At least it being a fully integrated hub(less) motor makes it a much more sensible of a solution than many other tries with all kinds of belt drives and gears and cogs and stuff.